Transcript of Episode 669: Anton LaVey Part IV - Old Wizards Die Hard

There's no place to escape to.

This is the last—

Hot gas. On the left.

00:00:06

That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that?

00:00:15

All righty.

We'll load you up, bro.

Before we begin today's episode, I wanna warn you about the level of nerdiness we're about to enter into. Eddie was not ready.

Well.

He was not prepared as we were talking in the preamble about the things that we wanted to bring up in today's episode. He was actually, I could kind of feel his disappointment, but also, I mean—

I didn't see disappointment. I felt indifference.

Yeah, yeah. See, I think what's good about the nerdiness in these episodes is I was able to lose my respect for both of you. And it really helps me as an employee.

Great.

Yeah.

It allows you to make braver choices.

It happens with all of them. Congratulations. Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name's Marcus Parks. I'm here with the scholarly Henry Zabrowski.

I'm gonna end this whole show with a sort of allegorical rundown of how I'm gonna apply Gandalf's entire life traveling moment, all the things he learned, to the story of Anton LaVey.

But that is at the end, so there's gonna be plenty of fun until then.

We have—

Spoilers!

We have the man that's bringing us the fun, Zedd Larsen.

That's right, man. I know what I did today. I wanted to bring up the cool. I got my George Clinton shirt on.

Yeah, dig it. Hell yeah.

Everyone knew that at least one of us is kinda cool.

I brought it back down with my Neil Adams Batman t-shirt.

Oh, actually, I think I destroy everything with my 2-volume set of the history of the Church of Satan written by Michael Aquino. 700 pages of total correspondence mayhem. 700 pages each? No, 350 pages each, and one of the books is just the appendices for the first one.

Yeah, man. Very much smack of of copy paper.

Oh yeah, this is great. This come, you gonna honestly, I'm really happy. A lot of you can run these at work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great.

Yeah.

It's a, your satanic sacrifice was getting laid again.

Hey, she won't read it. Also, you wanna see naked pictures of Susan Atkins? Who's Susan Atkins?

Susan Atkins, the Manson girl.

There's naked pictures in here.

It's awesome. Oh, okay.

Dude, you fucking don't know how cool shit can be once you get books.

You know, you ever hear, you know, they have the internet.

No, man. This is how I like to masturbate.

I like to masturbate with gigantic, like, little plate sections and appendices.

Look at that. Look at these bananas. There's some hot '70s babes in this shit, man.

Henry uses stage blood as fucking body lotion when he jerks off.

I'm central.

Well, we're not gonna get into the nerdy just yet. We're still in the cool. We're still in the story of Sammy Davis Jr.

Oh, fuck yeah.

When we last left the story of Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan, we were right in the middle of telling the tale of how one of their most unlikely adherents, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., became friends with Anton and the rest of the Church of Satan crew. Now, when Sammy Davis Jr.'s TV movie "Poor Devil" aired on NBC with obvious references to real Satanism, like Sammy's oft-repeated flashing of the devil horns—

Yeah, baby. Yeah, baby, baby. I love 'em!

Yeah, the program caught the attention of the upper echelons of the Church of Satan. Diane Hegarty, co-founder of the Church of Satan, some might say the entire brains behind the entirety of the Church of Satan, She said that she was flabbergasted when she— Henry, I like how you grabbed your book and then decided to put it back down.

It's in this book. It's in this book. Honestly, this entire book shows that Anton LaVey, uh, he didn't do anything.

Thank you. But isn't this the other guy? Isn't this the Kino shit?

Long story. We'll get to it. He just wants to make him look bad. We know, we know.

Well, Diane Higarty said that she was flabbergasted when she saw a lovable, funny, harmless demon being depicted on TV by no less than Sammy Davis Jr., who in 1972 was one of our more harmless celebrities. She was also excited because if people began seeing Satanists as something closer to Sammy Davis Jr. and further away from, say, Charles Manson, then the church could really get cooking on membership. Michael Aquino, who was still Anton LaVey's right-hand man in 1973, he surprisingly agreed. In his letter to Diane Hegarty, in which he called Poor Devil a magnificent commercial for the church, he added that the show's message was not far afield from what Satanists believed. And in this, I actually agree with Michael Aquino. I noticed it as I was watching Poor Devil. In Poor Devil, the accountant played by Jack Klugman wants revenge on his boss, played by Batman's Adam West, in his usual style of acting in which he sounds like he's constantly on the verge of a painful orgasm he doesn't actually want.

Hey, won't you go get me some milk? It's gonna be— A long time before you get another day off, Klugman! Another day!

But Adam West's character is constantly taking advantage of Klugman's character and generally makes Klugman's character's life miserable, which made Adam West's character a perfect target for revenge. Klugman's character, however, balks at revenge and takes it all back when he sees that his plan is going to hurt a lot more people besides just his boss. His whole plan is he's gonna empty out the department store where they both work on December 24th, and Adam West is gonna look like a dickhead. But then he realizes that it's gonna ruin Christmas for a lot of people, and a lot of the people who work at the store are also gonna get hurt. So he says, "Bring it all back.

Bring it all back in." Wow, even Satanists wanna save Christmas.

Well, if you listen to a lot of Satanists, truly Satanism— how do you put it? Christmas is one of the— a goth's like favorite side holidays that isn't Halloween.

Yeah.

Because Christmas is also just as filled with dark magic and all these kind of crazy dumb shit as anything else. Santa's a fucking home breaker and he's a fucking thief in the night.

Well, yeah.

He breaks in your house magically.

He's like Satan.

He punishes you if you're wrong.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Well, and also just at a very base level, Satanism is very materialistic and what's more materialistic than Christmas? American Christmas.

Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing in the world. But even though it seems like Klugman's backtrack is going to leave him right back where he started, the mere act of focusing his energies on revenge, that results in his boss losing his mind and his job to Klugman himself. So with the help of Sammy Davis Jr.'s cartoonish Satanism, Klugman still gets his revenge. He still gets his greatest wish, but he does so without hurting anyone except the one who deserves it. So Aquino is correct. It was actually quite satanic.

It was. And the guys, Dave Willis and Casper Kelly, that made Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell, I didn't understand that they had held a screening of Poor Devil with Dana from Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell.

Yeah, Master Shake.

Master Shake. They kind of went and they did a viewing of it and they had a great time.

Yeah. Now, Anton LaVey didn't even see Poor Devil, but after talking to Hogarty and Aquino, he also saw the potential here, and the three of them began hatching plans and plots. See, Poor Devil was a TV movie running about 70 minutes, but it had the potential to go to series. So, Anton initially aimed to get screen time in future episodes, and perhaps even swing a location shoot at the Church of Satan's Black House. Again, it sounds like it's for the church, but really, it's more about getting Anton into Hollywood.

That's all it is, or at least getting Hollywood close to Anton. Mm-hmm.

And that sweet location fee.

No, I mean—

Hey!

Very good location fee. Michael Aquino, meanwhile, was focused on church business. Business as always. He suggested that Anton give Sammy Davis Jr. an honorary magical position, and it's said that Hagarty openly wondered what Sammy Davis Jr. would think about being offered the opportunity to be the world's first Black Jewish Satanic warlock.

Yeah! That's the fucking goal, dude!

Man, that's a fucking resume.

Yeah, man. And writer.

And singer.

And actor.

The Candyman.

I mean, yeah. I mean, isn't he the one who wrote Candyman for Willy Wonka.

Oh, well, no, he got— well, no, Candyman was originally in the musical. He— it's kind of funny. He famously hated that song. He said it was his biggest hit, though. He started singing it and then he has to go do it everywhere. But he did not write the Candyman. He covered the Candyman.

Covered the Candyman. Okay. All right. Well, as it turned out, nothing in this world could have made Sammy Davis Jr. happier than being the first Black Jewish satanic warlock.

I may be getting his eye back. It seemed like it really bummed him out for a while.

Well, the Church of Satan sent a letter offering the honorary warlock position, and just a month later, Davis sent a letter back saying he was all in. Now, after accepting their membership, Davis sweetly said that he was pleased that no one at the Church of Satan was offended by poor Devil.

We fully understood Satanists can't get offended. No. That's kind of the whole thing.

What are you talking about? Satanists get offended all the time.

Yeah, I mean, not by stuff like— not by attention.

No.

Davis then gave the Church of Satan his upcoming performance dates in the Bay Area so they could present him with his honorary warlock degree in person.

Oh my God. So many angry Italians.

And LaVey was quite pleased to find that one of Sammy's local concerts just happened to fall on Friday the 13th. Oh, hell yeah. Furthermore, the theater where Sammy was performing was called the Circle Star Theater. A circle and a star is of course a pentagram. —so the coincidences urging them all to move forward just kept coming. And so, on the night of the performance, just before Sammy Davis Jr. went out in front of an audience of almost 4,000, he received his Warlock Ordainment Certificate and his official Baphomet medallion, although Anton LaVey did not present it himself. In a letter to Michael Aquino, LaVey wrote that they should all just "play it cool," elaborating further that The less they push, the better Sammy's opinion of the church would be.

Anton LaVey. So Michael Aquino writes this letter to Anton LaVey, how proud he is. And the first time he got to meet Sammy Davis Jr., he was like, "Not only was Sammy absolutely impressed with my theological breakdowns of all the differences between what we believe and do not believe, but also so was his PR people and his manager. So I gave them both the Satanic Bible, and I gave them all—" And Anton LaVey said, truly one of the great— a great piece of show business advice, never talk to the PR guy if you could talk to the celebrity. He's like, stop talking to the PR guy right now. Don't give him anything. The PR guy's not your friend. Fuck the PR guy. Sammy's your friend. You talk to Sammy. If you want Sammy and you want to talk to Sammy, you call fucking Sammy because guess what? You give the PR guy the Satanic Bible, guess who we're never gonna see again?

Yeah.

Sammy. So you just gotta fucking just talk to Sammy. So Anton LaVey is good advice. That's great advice. Anton LaVey is constantly constantly fighting this idea of open and an underground Satanism, which we'll get into.

And so after the backstage ceremony, Sammy Davis Jr. went out with Baphomet displayed prominently on his chest, and he performed one hell of a show, then closed his performance with an anthem that might as well be the Church of Satan's theme song. Henry, if you would.

Whether I'm right Whether I'm wrong, whether I find a place in this world or never belong, I gotta be me.

Me!

Oh, I've gotta be me. What else can I be but what I am? I gotta be me. I gotta be me is such a good obnoxious karaoke song. It is such a good, like, just like That's Life.

Cat's Hive. I forgot about that fucking song and I jammed that whole album when we're listening to this. Sammy is like, I think he's my favorite rap backer now.

Easily. He's my number 2. Obviously I like Frank. I like his voice. I love Frank's voice and stuff, but he's my number 2.

See, Dean was my guy and he took over for that. So Frank's down to number 3 for me.

Damn.

Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, his last name is Bishop, so he's out. Bishop sucks.

Fuck off, Joey. Now Anton, Hagarty, and Aquino spent the next few months weirdly hovering around Sammy Davis Jr.'s house without actually knocking on the door or letting Sammy know that they were even in the neighborhood. 'Cause as I said before, certain elements of Hollywood tended to intimidate Anton LaVey. He could give great advice to Michael Aquino, but when it came time to do it himself, he was, he could get a little pee shy.

He was not— He didn't know he was there with his giant gold helmet.

Yeah, it was like he was sitting outside in the bushes. Everybody sit back, everybody. Hey, play cool. Play cool, don't worry, no, no, no. Play cool, no, it just is, he's facing us with his dead eye. He's cool, no, he can't see us. No, he has no idea that we're driving the hearse. No idea.

I mean, you can't blame him.

You gotta remember that at heart, Anton LaVey was still just a carny trying to level up in the world of entertainment. And while it's all show business, there's a wide gulf between carnival folk like the former Tony Levy and Hollywood stars like Sammy Davis Jr.

Oh, there is miles apart. I'd actually kind of even say that Sammy Davis Jr. is a more powerful magician than Anton LaVey.

Sure. Yeah, 'cause he's successful.

He's successful. I'm not even joking.

But perhaps keeping their distance was the right move, because a few months after the concert at the Circle Star Theater, Sammy Davis Jr. invited Anton and Diane, but not Michael Aquino.

I thought I made such a good impression. I thought everybody was gonna get me. Look at my eyebrows. Aren't they diabolical?

He invited Anton and Diane to a small gathering at his home. Reportedly, when Davis opened the door, he hugged Anton and Diane as if they were all old friends. But besides Anton and Diane, Davis had also invited a pair of young witches. Presumably Davis was hoping to explore the sexually experimental side of Satanic indulgence with the heads of the church themselves. Because after all, who's gonna be freakier than the head freaks? That's what you think! That's what you think! But what Davis didn't know was that despite the fact that LaVey continually encouraged others to indulge in their most carnal yet consensual urges, LaVey and Hagarty were not swingers. Orgies weren't their thing. They liked piss.

Oh, they liked piss.

Yeah. Yeah.

A great deal, so much, is this the time?

To talk about piss?

Yeah. Sure. So one of the fun things that is revealed in these books by Michael Aquino is the fact that they heavily sanitized the rituals in the Satanic Bible, which is kind of funny that they did. They hid the real stuff. So in the original Satanic Mass, not only did they put a little thing, the wafer, the Christian wafer inside the hoo-ha of the naked lady altar, right? Once they put it in the choocha, Then her job was to masturbate to completion on top of it with it in her side, inside her, right? Then he pops it out of the slot after she's come. He puts it in a cup of pee pee till it dissolves. Everybody drinks the pee pee because a woman dressed as a nun has pissed into a bowl before then and everyone drinks that pee pee. And then at the end of that, after everybody's had all the piss and that lady cum filled wafer, Anton LaVey stands in front of everybody, jerks off to completion, and then that's the end. And that happened multiple times.

Did he jerk off to completion in the thing that everyone drank?

No, after the fact, he would cum into a cup and then they would put it on the altar and it was like, that's like a—

But no one drank his cum?

No, I don't think so.

Just the lady cum and the piss and the Catholic cookie.

Yeah, they're not monsters.

Yeah, yeah, they're not disgusting. Not naked gay.

Yeah, I do love those Catholic cookies. I just see a big pack of 'em just wrapped up in brioche. Yeah, I put, you know, pop 'em, I flip 'em in the air like I'm an old-timey gangster, catch it in my mouth, have a good time. Like, this one's for you, old man.

Put one in a pussy, see how it goes. I'll see, I'll talk, I'll have a little talk about it. Ask Julie.

We'll have a little talk about it.

The point is, all that's ritual stuff.

Yes.

You know, and it's all very controlled. It's not a part of their daily lives.

No, and right after, they literally had coffee and cake.

Yeah. So, on the nights that Davis hung out with LaVey and Haggarty, These ended up being Sammy Davis Jr.'s tame nights. Anton and Diane were his sober friends who were more likely to bring over a German silent film to watch than a fat sack of drugs to snort.

Fucking nerds, man. They're just fucking nerds.

It's honestly like when fans finally get the chance to hang out with us, it's like oddly boring. Yeah, yeah.

It's just like, sorry, guys.

Real normal shit. Real normal.

You like the pool?

Yeah. Honestly, pool is great.

See, besides sex, Sammy Davis Jr. also had a taste for substances. He was a whiskey man with a nose for cocaine. But when Anton and Diane settled in during that very first hang, Davis's silver cocaine bowl got pushed behind the bar with his whiskey. Instead of dabbling in indulgence, LaVey and Davis spent hours discussing the tenets of Satanism. And while LaVey was disappointed to hear that NBC hadn't picked up Poor Devil, he was damn near euphoric to hear that Davis was both experienced with Satanism and informed of its finer, more subtle points.

See, I always thought that if I'm gonna discuss the tenets of Satanism, cocaine would help.

You know, you'd think. You'd really think that they'd be wanting to have more fun.

Yeah, what is it? I can't remember what Robert Evans said about cocaine. You know, it ruins the boner, but it turns up the verbosity. Something like that, yeah.

Rise from your grave.

Now, over the next several years throughout the mid-'70s, Anton LaVey and Diane Hagarty became Sammy's regular guests at intimate dinners, big parties, live shows, and visits to Sammy's second home near Lake Tahoe.

You gotta remember, Anton and Diane, fabulous dinner guests.

Great dinner guests. At Lake Tahoe, LaVey was flattered to see that Davis had displayed the Baphomet necklace presented by the Church of Satan in a prominent place in his master bedroom because Sammy Davis Jr. was, according to many girlfriends, an almost too frequent practitioner of sex magic.

Fuck yeah, dude.

Sometimes you just wanna fuck.

Yeah, dude. But Sammy just— Why do we gotta do the whole prayer? Why are we doing the candles?

He was all about the rigamarole.

Yeah, I've heard of foreplay, but not 666-play.

Hey, that's good. Write it down. That's really good. Write it down. I've gotta write it down. It's gone now.

But while Sammy Davis Jr. would flirt with Diane Hegarty on occasion, it was not his fairly innocent comments about Diane that would eventually inflame Lavey's jealousy. Instead, Anton Lavey was more jealous of one of Sammy Davis Jr.'s other friendships. See, from what I can tell, Anton Lavey wanted to be Sammy's only spooky friend.

I don't understand.

I thought I was your spooky friend. Oh, she brings somebody else? But it's fine. Oh, that's fine. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure they're super spooky. I thought I was a spooky guy.

How often do we have to hang out with Billy Crystal? Yeah.

Now he's spooky. He's spooky. He scares me. He could be anybody. Muhammad Ali, anybody Black. He could be you. I can't believe it.

When Sammy put together a dinner party, he invited both Anton LaVey and Christopher Lee, Sammy's co-star on Poor Devil. Jealousy was inflamed, and eventually Anton went on the attack.

'Cause Christopher Lee is himself, he believes himself to be like an occult master.

Sure.

Right, so on his own—

He's killed people too.

He's killed people. He knew J.R.R. Tolkien. He is Saruman. Like, he is that guy. He was fully into the occult. But what Anton LaVey and Sammy Davis Jr. didn't know is that he was on the other side of the occult. He's like a witchfinder general. He's like one of those guys that believe, he's like, The power of Christ does beat the power of evil. And the reason why I do my films is to show the folly of evil. Like it's his whole thing. And he didn't understand that he was walking into one of those.

Yeah. And also like if you just put Christopher Lee, if you stack up Christopher Lee next to Anton LaVey as a man, Anton LaVey's a pissant.

Oh, Christopher Lee could literally beat him to death.

No, he's giant, right?

Well, no, I mean, I'm talking about just, I'm talking about more character-wise.

Oh yeah, Christopher Lee's a fucking incredible artist.

Yeah, Anton LaVey was actually pretty big. He was over 6 foot tall.

Oh shit, I didn't actually really think about that. Christopher Lee was 6'5".

Yeah, he was 6'5". Yeah, exactly. Woo!

But he also, he had time in the war.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Davis thought that LaVey and Christopher Lee would get along great.

Sure.

I mean, come on, you're the Church of Satan, you're Dracula. It's gonna be awesome.

Yeah.

But it was soon obvious that LaVey was both insecure with how close Lee and Davis were, and he was also said to have been annoyed by Christopher Lee his quote, "priggish manner." Yeah, you don't like my priggish manner?

Well, I don't like your facial hair that looks like the trimmed bush of an old woman. I hate your goatee so much I want to put a bayonet in it.

It was such a bad choice by Anton LaVey. If he would've buttered him up, if he would've kissed his ass a little bit, imagine what getting Dracula would do for the Church of Satan.

Well, don't you think that Anton LaVey, he, it just was, He really was too bitter for his own good.

He really was.

He couldn't see the forest for the trees. 'Cause it's like with Christopher Lee, you get in with Christopher Lee—

Oh, that's Bill Holden.

The world of B movies opens up for— Oh, my God. He's the, at this point, he is the king of the B movie.

He would've been a movie star, Anton LaVey.

Might've been. But eventually everything came to a head when LaVey started an argument over who was the best Dracula, Lee himself, who had played Dracula 10 times, or the original, Bela Lugosi. Lavey, of course, was—

Why would you do this? Who is doing—

who thought this was a good fucking idea?

It's such an antagonistic dickhead. They thought, Dracula, he's pretty good. He's no Bela Lugosi, but if you want to—

Yeah, fucking piece of shit. I will smite the witch.

Bella Lugosi number 1, Blacula number 2, and then I think you're probably 3. I think. I thought about it.

Let me ask you, have you thought about being Black?

Well, Lavey, of course, was adamant that Christopher Lee was dog shit as Dracula compared to Bella. And after Lavey baited Lee a little too much, Sammy Davis Jr. had to step in just before Lee and Lavey got into an actual fistfight. But considering how Sammy Davis Jr. Bruce Lee was 5'4" and Christopher Lee was 6'5". I think the so-called fight was more for show than anything. I think they just kind of bowed out.

"What'd you say to me? What'd you fucking say to me?" I curse you. Hey, you don't think I curse you?

I curse you. Hey, listen, you guys gotta calm down, see?

Yeah, you crazy cats. Why are we doing this? Girls, your girls are getting cold.

Oof!

Even though the spooky boys' dinner party went badly, Lavey and Davis's friendship continued to grow for reasons beyond just a good hang. See, Lavey accepted Davis for everything that he was, including the fact that Sammy Davis Jr. was also bisexual, or at the very least, highly fluid when it came to sexual relations. And so, Lavey and Davis were friends throughout the 1970s. '70s. LaVey would send books on the occult to Davis with the sign-off, "Infernally yours," while the two developed a shared nickname for Satan. They called him by the archaic term "Old Slewfoot," which Davis loved because he was an accomplished tap and soft shoe performer.

Well, that was so funny because they keep— they always call him in their letters, they always call him the man downstairs. It was like, "Check with the man downstairs." Like, it's this whole thing that he does where it's like, "Yeah, I checked in with the man downstairs." It's not gonna fly. It's really funny the way He just felt like, "God, he's so cool." It is.

Yeah. Now, throughout his friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., it seems like Lavey was finally getting everything he wanted. Davis brought Anton into his inner circle of show business connections. And at Davis's parties, Anton Lavey finally felt like he belonged. He was holding his own with Hollywood stars and music industry professionals alike. You know, Christopher Lee, of course, aside. But there was one man that Anton Lavey forgot all about. Out. A man that still had a lot of pull with Sammy Davis Jr., even though he had always treated him as little more than a prop. That man was none other than the leader of the Rat Pack himself, old blue eyes, Frank Sinatra.

Yeah.

God, you know, he was obviously an asshole.

He was such a prick. He was the worst. He was involved with the mob and all that shit.

But like fake too, you know what I mean?

Yeah, he really was.

He was. He got— he put himself in the mob. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. No, but I will say, I mean, like, That's where the money is.

Oh yeah.

That's where Sammy's got everything.

Yo, yo.

That's where it all is.

I'm trying to, like the Frank Sinatra like accent's also so good being like, there was a story Don Rickles was saying about how one night him and Frank were out drinking until like 3 o'clock in the morning. And he said there was this lightning storm outside the bar and then the lightning would flash, the lightning would flash.

And Frank Sinatra eventually was like, "Someone go tell those photographers just knock that shit off." Well, as the '70s turned into the '80s, Sammy Davis Jr.'s social life was getting a little too groovy for the famously square Frank Sinatra. Now granted, Davis was definitely partying way too hard, but from what it seems like, it was Davis' close association with Satanists like Anton LaVey that really got Sinatra's goat. So sometime in the late '70s, Sinatra told Davis to get his shit together and cool it with the drugs and the booze, but above all, Stop hanging out with all these godforsaken Satanists.

Italians do not like Satanism. No, they're not a fan. No.

Which is very interesting. 'Cause you figured they would love it.

Yeah. You think so? They're certainly a fan of nun porn, which is pretty close to Satanism if you ask me.

Yeah. They just are, they're big priest fans over there.

Yeah.

Big old, big priest fans. They really believe in the church.

They do. But Sinatra's comment about Satanists was highly ironic. When you consider that the time Davis spent with Satanists were always his most sober and sexless nights.

Yeah, that was when he was learning.

Yeah, he's like, Sinatra should have said, yeah, those Satanists, good influence. Keep hanging out with them.

Yeah, stop hanging out with the old whores. Send them to me. Send them old Frankie boy.

But Sinatra was the connection, all the money, all the producers.

Oh yes.

The fucking mob. No one likes this shit.

Yeah. Now we don't know for sure if Sinatra's tut-tutting is really what caused Davis to pull back on his friendship with Anton LaVey. But after the conversation, little by little the frequent hangouts turned into occasional phone calls, and Anton and Sammy drifted apart by the end of the decade. It also could've been that Sammy Davis Jr., or someone close to him, saw what was coming on the horizon in the 1980s. See an excerpt from one of Davis' many memoirs, 1980s Hollywood in a Suitcase. It ran in the New York Daily News as a preview under the subtitle: titled "A Touch of Satanism and Lessons in Love." Those fucking bastards. In this excerpt, Davis wrote that he joined the Church of Satan and still had many friends within the organization, flat out writing, "I became a Satanist." But when the book was actually released, all mentions of the Church of Satan had been wiped away because the Satanic Panic had finally arrived.

This is where the temperature changes for this whole fucking thing.

1980.

As you start to see, They had an issue in the grottos, right? So the grottos were obviously was the main problem because the grottos became— was a constant fight since the beginning of the church.

And the grottos, just to remind you, were the kind of satellites of the Church of Satan, which people would kind of grow their own satanic organization within their community.

Yeah, it was like the—

That had to report back to the Church of Satan in San Francisco.

They did. There was the Lilith one, the Yugoth, there was Babylon, there was Stegen, all these like kind of different names. And each one of them kind of had a pro— they had a constant issue with what do— how do we manage these? How tightly are we supposed to be running these? How much are we supposed to be micromanaging these grottos? Michael Aquino was like, total freedom. Every one of them needs to do whatever they want. Caused constant fucking problems. And the main— one of the main problems is being out or being in as a Satanist, which means either being a public Satanist or being a what Anton LaVey liked to call his underground clergy. His underground clergy were his— was his favorite, which is people that had regular jobs that did not want the world in general to know that they were Satanists, but they showed up to the rituals. The main problem the Grottos were having was, yeah, people were signing up, but no one was coming to the ritual. No one was doing stuff because some were, some of the Grottos were out. Some of the Grottos meant like, oh, we have public rosters.

You could know that who is here. And there were people that were like, they were constantly fighting back and forth. How do you figure this out? And the Satanic Panic was one of those things that accelerated all of it. Yeah. Because one Grotto was like, we're mainly undercover people. People. Are we— what are we supposed to do? And it was this entire scandal, a local, uh, uh, same thing that kind of always happens. A teacher molested a bunch of kids. They like did a whole thing about satanic cults and all this kind of shit. A lot of heat was growing around this one grotto, and they were like, what the fuck are we supposed to do? How do we save ourselves from all this heat? And Anton LaVey wrote a scathing letter being like, you're supposed to stand up for the Church of Satan and go write about how we don't do this. You're supposed to stand up, identify yourselves, and do this, and it created this massive fucking problem. It was like one of the first things where they were like, no, you're, you're, you're like now micromanaging us after telling us we could do whatever the hell we want.

And it caused a big fucking issue, destroyed that grotto.

Yeah. Now, even though Sammy Davis Jr. was no longer public with his Satanism, he never stopped practicing, and he was known to cautiously gauge interest in Satanism with other celebrities if he got a feeling that the other celebrity might be hip. I fucking I love this one. This is good. When a tribute show was being put together for Sammy Davis Jr. in 1989, after he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, Eddie Murphy was chosen as the emcee. And reportedly during a dinner between Eddie Murphy and Sammy Davis Jr., Sammy lightly said, you know, Satan's as powerful as God.

That's fucking awesome. That's so fucking cool.

Just dropping it in there.

Sammy Davis Jr.'s the only real Satanism. He's like, he's so close to being the top person of Satanism. He was so close.

He's just dropping it into a conversation with fucking Eddie Murphy in 1989 when Eddie Murphy is like the most famous man on earth.

Oh yeah. 22 years old.

Hottest fucking year. Red hot star.

Well, the famously close-minded Eddie Murphy just responded with, what the fuck are you talking about?

I don't know. I don't know.

I'm just talking, you know, Sammy, Sammy, just talking. So Davis dropped the subject as soon as it was brought up. But according to friends and girlfriends, Davis practiced Satanism and ritual magic well into his dying days. One girlfriend said that she had to stop seeing Sammy because of his interest in sex magic in particular, but not because he did anything bad. Lovemaking, she said, became a ritual tied into the worship of the occult in ways that she didn't want to understand. But it must be said that Sammy's practice did get quite dark at times. With everyone's consent, Davis was fond of drawing blood with sharp objects like broken bottles, often from genital areas, but always like— so I just can imagine Sammy Davis like, you mind if I bring the bottle into it?

And then what, just Billy Crystal like watching from the cuck chair? Just being like, I have this amazing idea about a play about Mickey Mantle. Like, is that all he's doing?

But to his credit, it must be mentioned that his aforementioned wife, Alta Viz, stayed with Sammy from 1970 until his death 19 years later. In fact, the information about sex magic comes comes from letters written to Altovise in which a shared associate was seemingly just keeping Sammy's wife up to date on what her husband was doing. [LAUGHTER] But when Sammy Davis Jr.'s big sendoff at the end of his life was televised in 1989, Anton LaVey was not invited. Instead, he watched it at home on TV with everyone else, probably cursing Frank Sinatra for having a hand in dashing Lavey's obvious dreams of establishing himself in the world of entertainment. A chance like that would never come again.

Yeah, CBS doesn't want his fucking ass there.

No, they really don't, man. 'Cause you know, I do think a lot of it has to do with how kind of unsure and bashful he was. I think that Anton Lavey—

Who, Sammy or Anton Lavey?

I think Anton Lavey would—

Oh, by '89, he hadn't talked to Sammy Davis Jr. in a decade.

And he'd already becoming a rotter. Written pumpkin of himself.

Yeah.

Anyway. Also, as a show, Anton LaVey would ruin the vibe.

He really would.

He would ruin the whole vibe of the whole tribute show.

Nobody knows—

You can't have him there.

And that's the, and to be honest, that's Anton LaVey's eternal sadness. And we see that in the letters, his eternal sadness of the fact that coining himself as the Pope of Evil, pushed everyone away.

Yeah.

And he could never get— it made him and destroyed him. And he could never get into a community of people he liked again.

See, he put all his cards into Sammy Davis Jr. He should have been going to Jimmy Page.

Well, he was doing a— he was sending out feelers. He was. And there— but the problem is, is that Jimmy Page was into fucking Lord of the Rings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that Anton LaVey famously hated rock music. Music. I think he really disliked it. Like he was a fucking calliope player. And you also remember he's an old man.

He was.

He's not, he is not a young, he was born in the '20s.

That's true.

You know, like he's not into Led Zeppelin. You know, he doesn't care about all that shit. He thinks it's all noise. He wants calliope, he wants organ, he wants, you know, ring-a-ding-ding.

He wants big bands. 'Cause his belief is that Satanism had left the earth. Like he's kind of had this belief a little bit of there aren't, like you can't just become a Satanist. Satanist. You just are one or are not. So he is one of those where he couldn't— he thought more people would show up. He thought more people would— cool people would show up.

And he didn't like who showed up.

Yeah. Also, it's interesting because Frank Sinatra, he kind of lost his juju when he started— even when he went against rock and roll.

Yeah.

He would have fucking went into rock and roll a little bit. I mean, he did his Mrs.

Robinson cover. But this is a part of what I'm saying, my overarching interesting idea of the reason why old wizards die hard is because they refuse to die first while they're alive. Gandalf the Gray had to die to become Gandalf the White in order to save everyone. And that requires self-sacrifice and that requires getting rid of the old you and growing into a third phase, which he never did.

You know who did? Liam Neeson.

Yeah, he did!

Yeah, he did!

Yeah, he did! He got to see Pam Meliandros' vagina once!

Yeah.

That's huge!

And Sinatra also came back back in 1980 with New York, New York.

Yes.

Yeah, that's the thing. No one realizes that he didn't do that until 1980.

What?

Yeah.

New York, New York is from 1980?

It's from a musical. Yeah, it's from, I can't remember what the musical was called, but yeah, it was from, I think the musical New York, New York.

Get out of my face, you idiot.

Yeah.

And so now that we've told the tale of Sammy Davis Jr. and the Church of Satan, let's turn back the narrative clock to the early 1970s. 1970s, where we return our focus to the inner workings of the Church of Satan itself. See, in the early to mid-'70s, that's when Anton LaVey started turning his eye more towards Hollywood. And LaVey's right-hand man and head nerd, Michael Aquino, had been just as excited as Anton and Diane about the possibilities of Poor Devil. But within just 2 years of those heady days, the schism between Aquino, the academic, and LaVey, the showman, would grow too wide to fix when Aquino disagreed with one of Lavey's new church policies. See, Aquino— and this is very important— Aquino actually believed that Satan was real. Satan is a dude that you can talk to and ask to do things for you. Anton Lavey was an atheist. This, of course, is a problem when two guys with these mindsets are trying to run a church together.

Well, also, there is a difference between the inner group group and then the outer group. So in Anton LaVey's inner group, he's way more willing to expand his consciousness.

Mm-hmm.

In the inner group, he's way more willing to be, okay, we will do these ritual activities. 'Cause according to Michael Aquino, this is what he means. This is what it means by Satan is real, is that what he's saying is that for Anton LaVey, when they were doing the Satanic Mass, he, Anton LaVey is saying, this This is a dramatic representation. It can lead you to things or not, but largely this is just kind of a group building activity. We're doing this. But according to Michael Aquino, when they were all together, he knows that there was something else in the room that every single time they did one of these things, that's where it started, that there was something else in the room and that they all acknowledged it. But then all of them would become too cool to acknowledge it later on because they did not want to face what they were doing. But what they were— what was happening was, is that accidentally Michael Michael Aquino is just making Christianity again. He's just making it again. Like, and so that's the problem. He's just replacing it with another thing.

Yeah, he's actually making Protestantism. We'll get into here in a sec.

Yeah, LaVey is like the show promoter and Aquino's like the historian.

Yes. Sure. Now, for Michael Aquino, the final insult came when he saw a draft for an article that LaVey was planning to publish in the church's internal publication, The Cloven Hoof. See, Aquino was already miffed at LaVey for dismantling the Grotto system.

Which did not go smoothly, and it did not go like Oh, it's over. No, no, no, no, no. It was just, it was just total kakamehameha horseshit.

Yeah, Aquino kind of fucked that one up.

They all fucked that up.

LaVey's focus on materialism had always rankled Aquino's spiritual standards. But regardless of the purity that Aquino was wanting and expecting in the fucking Church of Satan, a man's gotta eat. And money was tight within the organization by 1975. So LaVey decided that he was gonna simply sell initiatory ranks within the church. Which ironically could be compared to the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the 16th century. Michael Aquino, playing the Martin Luther role in this situation, believed that simply selling ranks was dishonorable and corrupt because what was the point of doing the reading if someone could just buy their way into a magic circle? But even though Michael Aquino offered alternatives, LaVey refused to back down on the plan. So Michael Aquino left the Church of Satan along with a fair number of other Satanists who were also becoming disillusioned with LaVey to start their own movement called the Temple of Set. Being more focused on magical ritual and practice, Setianism has been described as more esoteric Satanism as opposed to LaVey's rational flavor.

Anton LaVey served in the great legacy of other magical teachers simplifying the lessons, right? According to Anton LaVey in the Satanic Rituals, what he has already done is served like, kind of like put together, summarize all of the various esoteric schools into one book according to their belief system. And so that's, he thought we're done. We've done this. Now this is the set of rituals we go. Michael Aquino is trying to say we're not going far enough.

Yes.

Because Anton LaVey is saying, no, the whole point of this is to unleash your personal power, lesser magic. Yes, there is greater magic, which is the idea of changing the world and becoming one with the Godhead and doing all this stuff. But he even said that's for fucking later, that's for your private time, that's for your own belief system, blah, blah, blah. This whole thing is to release the lesser magic, the things that you can actually control and manipulate in a one-to-one, carny level. And Michael Aquino just refused to believe that because he had this idea that no, there is this like burning thing inside us all that will purify us.

Yeah, so Aquino is like actually crazy.

Well, if you read this— Thank you for the man from the street perspective. —The Temple of Set book is—

I would say Michael Aquino is no crazier than a priest.

No, no, none. Yeah, well, they're crazy. Exactly.

The Temple of Set books, the reason why I don't bring those in is because those are the most boring things you've ever written. Even more boring than this, because the thing about this book, The Church of Satan by Michael Aquino, Volume 1, is that it's every single subreddit meltdown you've ever written, but they had to write letters instead of instant messages. So they literally had to spend weeks back and forth forth doing a mod breakdown in a Reddit group.

Oh no, the Grotto system falling apart, it's just mod drama.

Oh my God. That's all it is. Oh my God, is it mod drama? And honestly, in every single thing, the squeakiest wheel gets the fucking grease. Every single thing is the least important Grotto and the least important people are the ones causing the most important problems.

Always, always, always, always. That is always the rule.

Yes.

Now, within a year of his breakup with Léveille, Aquino wrote a new manifesto claiming that it was born entirely through automatic writing, just like Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law. But Aquino was a nerd who didn't have a sense of humor, so he was not prepared for all the ejaculate jokes that would no doubt be made when he named the foundational text for his new satanic religion. He named it the Book of Coming Forth by Night.

Hey man, I just hate being behind those first 3 dudes.

It's like, listen, um, your book is just like, it's your book's title. Like, what, what is it? It's just Coming Forth by Night.

The Book of Coming forth by night, yeah.

Yeah, no, that's fine. Yeah, yeah.

I don't get it. Where do you want it to be? It happened at night. That's not the problem, Mike.

I came.

I came at night. I came forth at night.

At night.

Well, so—

And this is the Book of Coming Forth.

It's like—

Well, you know what it is?

At night.

You know what it is?

What?

It's a take on the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which is in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Sure.

He just stole the name of the book.

No, of course he stole it, but it's, you just, you gotta look at it and think like, okay, no, I can't do that because people are just gonna make a bunch of cum jokes.

Of course.

Also, like, Setteism is way dumber than Satanism.

Super dumb. It doesn't roll off the tongue. There's no zip to it.

'Cause they were already mad at—

The Temple of Set sounds cool, but that's it. That's where it ends.

Yeah, Settean is dumb. And also the idea of, 'cause that was the idea, is that the devil appeared to him.

They should call called himself Sedish.

Sedish is, oh, the Sedish.

The Sedish, yeah.

I thought I forgot his second name. But according to Michael Aquino, the devil appeared to him and said, "I want you to stop calling me by my Jewish name." Yeah. And then, 'cause that's the whole thing is we, yes, we kind of like glossed over a lot of stuff, but in the Jewish idea of like Satan, the word Satan is the adversary and all this kind of shit, but it kind of served as like a lighter villain, which is what we kind of talked about. But the devil apparently went to Michael Aquino and says, "Why you gotta make me so Jewish?" And then they went and they changed him and he made him into Set because he's deeply into Egyptology.

Well, he says that he wants to be called by his proper original name.

Yes.

Like what we know as the biblical Satan is actually the ancient Egyptian deity Set. And he's right. God of storms and desert, usurper and murderer of his brother Osiris.

And his belief is that the Setian Egyptian princes and kings were the most powerful, and that once they started going away from that— it included the Osiris myth, which is where the Jesus myth would come from— that is when the Egyptian, uh, world started falling apart, was when they decided that the Osiris myth was the main religion. When before, when they were worshiping Set, they controlled almost all of Africa.

Well, good for them. I do know that the— I do know the Egyptians hate Jews. I know that much.

That much I do Rise from your grave.

Now, the Temple of Set was, against all odds, a relative success, and Aquino continued running the temple for years while maintaining rank in the United States Active Guard Reserve. Mostly, though, Aquino settled into the role of an academic, earning a PhD in political science before taking an adjunct professor job at Golden Gate University. Aquino also continued his fight with Anton LaVey, which some described has an obsession.

It's 700 pages long.

Besides publishing a scathing history of the Church of Satan that debunked many of LaVey's claims about his own biography, Aquino also found and released divorce proceedings, restraining orders, and even bankruptcy filings that all painted LaVey in a negative light.

Man, don't get in a fight with a fucking nerd who's good at paperwork.

No, dude, that's the problem is, and the guy did all the paperwork is the guy that fucking comes against you just like, oh God, I got I don't have time for this fucking shit. Yeah, yeah. Shut the fuck up, Michael! Michael, shut up!

And you can't fight him because he was the guy that did all the paperwork for it.

He just knows everything. You don't know anything.

Whilst continuing the fight with LaVey, Aquino also became obsessed with Nazi occultism. See, in 1983, he went on a work trip on behalf of the United Nations to Europe, but he decided to play hooky a bit so he could drop by Wewelsburg Castle in Germany. Remember, Wewelsburg was supposed to be Heinrich Himmler's headquarters for his Nazi occult Ahnenerbe Aryan Knights of the Round Table.

Yay!

So after sneaking in, Aquino actually performed a magical ritual within the underground ceremonial space that Himmler was planning to use to hold his own rituals.

You know, he didn't— you know, he didn't even sneak in. You know that he used his government contacts to get access to it.

Well, yeah, that's what he did.

Yeah, he went in and he was like, he got in and then—

I'm here from the UN.

I'm here to do stuff.

Whatever you want, man. You know the UN fucking hated that shit.

Oh yeah. Well, according to the Temple of Set Wikipedia page, out of this ritual came the Second Order of the Trapezoid, which was a simple repackaging of Anton LaVey's early governing body of the Church of Satan. But since Aquino was just as big of a nerd as Himmler, he took a page from Himmler's book and agreed that his Order of the Trapezoid was going to be a chivalric order of knights.

The trapezoid is the door to the angles. The angles are the way to the center. The center is the heart of evil.

Sure. This, of course, brought accusations that Aquino was sympathetic to Nazi ideology.

He was!

And like all these assholes, Aquino said that, you know, the Holocaust, it's repugnant.

It really is distasteful.

Distasteful, repugnant.

I don't like it either.

It really, it rubs me That's my thing. It rubs me the wrong way.

But he also believed that Heinrich Himmler had, through occult means, summoned an extraordinary psychic force. That force, Aquino said, had been misdirected by the Nazis, although according to Aquino, quote—

It need not have been. Whatever.

Yeah.

Yeah, just say it normal, Michael. You know, I, upon rereading all of this, right? So Anton LaVey, Anton LaVey and Michael Aquino had very different views on Nazism. They did. But his view, I think Michael Aquino's view, Anton LaVey's view is opportunistically naive and probably misaligned with the rest of the world.

Super. We'll get into that later.

Yeah, Michael Aquino is one of those guys of, "The reason why I don't like neo-Nazis is because the OG Nazis would have killed them all." Because they're weak.

Not tough enough?

They don't do it right. The idea is that they didn't do it right. Himmler would have killed these neo-Nazis. Believe in this idea that anything, and it's like, would they, again, another thing he doesn't particularly understand is that if your magic is attached to the Holocaust, it doesn't matter what good it could have done.

Yeah.

It doesn't, I'm just talking as a wizard, right? I'm talking as a fake wizard on a podcast telling somebody to understand that even I know anything that's connected to the Holocaust is not, the Holocaust ain't a mistake.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? It's not just like, ooh man.

It's not a whoopsie. It's not a whoopsie-doo, all right?

It is a gigantic genocide machine created by a specific point of view fueled by occultism. So let's just not act like it's fucking, that it's sep— you can't separate the two.

I just can't believe the military let him stick around.

Well, you also have to remember that he was good at, quote unquote, good at his job. And also this is a time period and you've, we've talked about this. World War II was a lot closer, right? So we kind of had already beaten meet the Nazis. So there is still a little tiny bit of a view of like, even if they fucking pop up, we're kind of like, uh.

Yeah, I mean, no one's really taking the Nazis seriously.

Yeah, they're losers.

Yeah, right now. Yeah, not now, not now, but in 1983 they are.

They're back in charge now. Yeah, and also it's not like he is broadcasting that he's doing all this stuff.

No, he kept it close to the vest.

Yeah, and the army also, especially intelligence services, intelligence services don't give a fuck what you do outside of your own personal life, outside of what they ask you to do. As long as you get the job done, they don't give a shit. They don't care at all.

It's kind of the problem with them.

Yeah. But as Michael Aquino became a far more visible Satanist, or Setian as he'd call it, the target on his back got larger and larger as the Satanic Panic was cultivated by the same people Aquino was courting.

Oh, I thought the target on his back got larger and larger as he got fatter.

That too. That too. I think the shirt just got tighter.

Well, Aquino appeared as a guest on not just the Oprah Winfrey Show, but also on Geraldo. And few people in the media did more to stoke the flames of the satanic panic than Geraldo Rivera.

Even though he had the same facial hair as Anton LaVey.

But even though I suppose Aquino was trying Trying the hide-in-plain-sight tactic, the Satanic Panic finally touched Michael Aquino in 1986 after an investigation was opened looking into accusations of Satanic ritual abuse at the Presidio Army Base's daycare in San Francisco. Allegedly, 58 children were abused at the daycare. By 1987, Michael Aquino himself was named when the 3-year-old daughter of an Army chaplain accused Aquino of sexually abusing her during a Satanic Right, held at Aquino's San Francisco home.

What?

Yes. Yes. No, this shit happened.

The man, the big man with the eyebrows, he did it to me when we were talking about the devil.

It happened hundreds upon hundreds of times throughout the entire decade into the '90s. People went to prison on shit like this.

It's happening right now again.

Yeah, but back then specifically, the idea is kids want kid wants to please. That's what— that's all a kid wants to do is a kid wants to make you happy and a kid wants to get a reward. So they would start asking these kids leading questions and the kid just kept saying yes because they would get rewarded anytime they said yes. And, you know, kids of course say wild— like they just say wacky shit.

Yeah.

Like, you know, the things that don't make any sense, but the people asking the questions would take them seriously and it would just build and build and build and build until finally you had an entire satanic underground that didn't actually exist that was basically built by 3-year-olds.

A fucking 3-year-old doesn't even know the English language.

Well, the reason why they were weaponizing 3-year-olds in order to prop up, to either create smokescreens for their own crimes, I'm just gonna say that, they were very either covering up for themselves and they were using the innocent words of a 3-year-old in order to do that, or they were specifically of the belief, which we saw with the West Memphis Three, that they get this idea, these like local yokels start to have this idea that, I'm fighting Satan himself because I believe that this shit is real. So if you don't believe, no one would believe any of this if they actually didn't believe in Satan himself.

Yeah, but that's the thing is that with that, I mean, West Memphis Three, that is definitely local yokels. This is a fucking army base in the middle of San Francisco.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, these are serious, serious accusations against people within the military itself and people are taking it extraordinarily seriously.

You know what's interesting is I always see, and we see this happening now, when like they hate something and they go at it so hard to try and take it down, all they end up doing is making it more popular.

Always. Yeah. And we'll actually give specific concrete examples of that later on in this episode. Well, police raided Michael Aquino's San Francisco home and searched high and low for any sign of Satanic ritual abuse. But of course they found nothing because nobody ever once found anything ever anywhere. Eventually it was discovered that Aquino wasn't even in San Francisco when the abuse was supposed to have taken place.

And you can go look that up, y'all, because I've already seen some messages about Michael Aquino. It's all— we are still getting it. And that's the thing, Michael Aquino sued everybody who wrote the books about him naming him as the suspect. And he won. And he won. And then the thing is, but guess what? It didn't do anything because I'm still getting emails calling Michael Aquino a child molester. And it's like, he's a lot of things.

Yeah, he's—

But he's not a child molester.

He's mostly just—

An asshole.

An asshole.

Yeah, yeah. He lacked the physical ability.

He honestly could probably barely get it up for his wife. Yeah.

I don't know. I will admit he does have child molester body. Of course he does.

Yeah. That's why it's stuck. Yeah.

It's the chubby, it's the chubby head. It's the chubby face. It just screams child molester.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the little eyebrows. I mean, we all know it's the eyebrows.

Unlikable too. So incredibly unlikable. Yeah. But, and And that's the thing, he wasn't even living in San Francisco when all this was happening. He was living across the country in Washington, D.C. Provably living across the country in Washington, D.C. It was proven in court that he was not anywhere near San Francisco when all this happened. But the allegations followed Aquino for the rest of his days. After years of battling the false rumors, he finally shot and killed himself with a gun in 2019 in the face of terminal cancer.

That was a wild couple of sentences.

Oh yeah. He had a rough end there.

Yeah, that was, yeah, yeah. Michael Aquino ended hard. That life.

They all do.

Yeah, yeah. They really all end very hard. It is not like, no one, none of these guys die like surrounded by their grandchildren or by friends or any, no beautiful ceremony. It's a hard end every single time. It turns out It turns out spending your entire life cultivating hatred and anger and fear tends to just, by the time you get to the end of it, there's really not a whole lot of rainbows left.

Yeah, not a lot of selling points for the hangup.

Now Michael Aquino was not alone in the satanic ranks when it came to accusations of sympathy towards Nazis, neo-Nazis in particular. Anton LaVey did indeed pal around with neo-Nazis throughout the 1970s and beyond, which seems at odds with his legitimate friendship with a Jewish Black guy like Sammy Davis Jr. But the radical acceptance that LaVey and the Church of Satan had towards Sammy Davis Jr., that worked both ways. While I certainly don't agree with it, it seems like Anton LaVey would associate with anyone who tickled a certain intellectual curiosity, regardless of how foul their beliefs might be. But as we all know, as soon as you let Nazis inside in any capacity whatsoever, However, every other Nazi sees your organization or your location as a safe space. But it seems like Anton LaVey was not familiar with the Nazi bar principle. It could, however, also be that Anton LaVey simply found these people fascinating because the neo-Nazis who were supposedly friends with Anton LaVey, they were in fact the weirdest and most pathetic of the entire bunch.

There's one very illuminating letter in here that made me realize what Anton LaVey was doing, which is, again, I don't think it was correct, but he, he had a motive. So it was neither, it was not intellectual curiosity and it wasn't even like he was into the guys. He straight up, just straight up, he straight up said Satanism needs every ally. Mm. We need everyone. We need the Nazis and the Jews. In his mind, Anton Lavey said, the neo-Nazis were never all that serious. They held their Nazism on their sleeve, and that sleeve can be ripped off. And his idea was that I can insinuate myself into these Nazi groups, and then what we do is you start to, oh yeah, your enemies are my enemies, I hate those guys. But it's like, there's somebody even worse, the Catholic Church, am I right? Mm-hmm. And then eventually Anton Lavey would work his way through these, join the Nazis and the Jewish people in a hatred towards the Christian church, and as allies to Satanism. And he doesn't understand that they're just not gonna hang out Yeah, they're just not going to. It's not gonna fucking happen.

Common ground's not there. It's really fucking stupid.

It's not gonna happen. It's a pipe dream. He legitimately just— because that was the thing, like, everybody thinks that everybody else is using everybody else.

Yeah.

And he thinks that, oh, they'll help us, and they're not even that serious. And it's just like, no, bro, it's like, that's the problem, is that you're making them serious.

Yeah.

When you hang out with them, you give them legitimacy. And guess what You know what that is? Weirdly, a lack of self-esteem on your part, Pope of Satan. That's a lack of self-esteem of you understanding how much you don't need them and how much technically you didn't need anybody. And you should have stuck to that, that I didn't need anybody.

Yeah.

He was desperate. He was.

And he wanted— he has the Trumpism thing of, "I just want a friend." He has a conman—

He just wants to be liked.

The difference between the carny, and I think than any other type of person in this is that he's a genuine entertainer, and I think that he had a vacuous hole in him that was looking for love. And I think a lot of con men are desperate for love, and then what they do is, is create a set of circumstances in which that love can be so powerful and so pervasive is that it's supernatural. That's why L. Ron Hubbard was looking for it. That's why these people look for it. It's because they're so empty.

Yeah.

And they want love so bad. They want to be loved and unconditionally. Loved. So they have to create a cult to do it.

And he really is like portraying the fucking lead character of Nightmare Alley. Yes.

Yeah. And he is not understanding the irony in it because like, that's what I mean by third phase.

Yeah.

Is that he doesn't understand he's becoming the thing that he never wanted to be.

Yeah. It's why all these guys end up bitter and alone at the end of their lives. 'Cause they just, they refuse to change and they just become the, they just become the bitter old old fuck who doesn't do anything with their life.

He actually weaponized it into a ritual called emotional crystallization initiation. It was an ECI thing that he called it. And what he would do is he said the way for a man to keep his youth was to surround himself with pictures of himself from his youth and to not engage with youth culture. He said that, that it's like, but it's the opposite. What he didn't understand is that he was crystallizing himself.

Yeah.

Surrounded by, it's why James Woods go, it's why people you turn MAGA. It's because you, as you're an older man, you get to this point. It's why older guys hit this point, because you fall out of love with yourself.

Yeah.

And you want to find new community and you want to find new excitement. You want to be around a bunch of people to make you feel exciting and young and fulfilled and all this stuff. And you want to remind, be reminded of when you were young.

Yeah.

And it gets why fascism uses nostalgia as a weapon.

Always. It is the most powerful weapon they have. Well, the man that's usually identified as a neo-Nazi associate of Anton LaVey is James Hartung Madol, who was raised in the upstate New York town of Beacon. Born in 1927 to an incredibly anti-Semitic mother who brought Madol up herself.

You never hear that.

You never do hear it. It's like, "Boy, my mother hated Jews." It's never like that. Well, James was, to put it lightly, a massive fucking nerd. He was a lonely young boy who found refuge in science, going so far as to build a laboratory in his own own home. But when he reached his teenage years, he came to see science in Faustian terms. The scientist, he came to believe, was a semi-divine mage who sought mastery of the Earth and the whole universe.

Oh, that's the guy who made Tostinos?

Yeah, I bet it.

Yeah, the guy who made fart pills?

Well, partly, Madol's ideas on science came from the science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, in which the so-called heaven-storming scientist fought against God himself.

Fuck you, God! I've made rubber! And it's synthetic! I don't need your plants anymore, God! I'm free from your yoke, Lord! I made lube!

I shall use these to make my pipes fit together better.

Gah gah gah gory God!

Madol also absorbed the authoritarian utopias and the master races that were so popular in the sci-fi of the era. And when you mixed in his mother's antisemitism and everything happening with the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and '40s, you had James Maddow, sci-fi fascist.

Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Shooting Jews with lasers.

Now, before we go too far into this, I'm just curious, where is the Church of Satan on science? 'Cause obviously science has killed God. So where—

Oh, they're very pro-science.

Yeah.

They are pro-science, but also Anton LaVey is one of those guys that is into folk magic and, like, local cures. So he is also into that. Like, he does like science and stuff. Michael Aquino is a big, like, science guy, obviously. And then— but he also believes that there's, like, lesser magics that can help you as well.

Let's say that they're more likely to die the death of Steve Jobs than most people.

Maybe.

Yeah. So in his late teens, James Madol found other sci-fi fascists like author Charles B. Hudson. Hudson was a preacher pre-war American fascist who, in addition to writing sci-fi stories, had caught the attention of other American fascists with his bulletin, America in Danger.

The Turner Diaries is a sci-fi novel.

Yes. No, there is a massive undercurrent of fascism within the sci-fi community that's been there.

Finland's always had a fucking— all of that.

Yeah. Obsessed with Atlantis.

Yeah. Yeah. It's been there since the '30s and '40s. Well, in this conspiracy-laden publication, America in Danger, Hudson blamed the Jews for every bad thing that ever happened in American history. Including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

No!

Anton LaVey's future friend, James Madol, absorbed Hudson's writings, mixed it with sci-fi, and turned it into his own flavor of Nazi movement. Managing to somehow be a nerdier fascist than even Heinrich Himmler, James Madol formed a far-right political movement based in the sci-fi community called the Animist Party, which was announced in an issue of the pulp magazine Startling Stories. He did this in 1949.

35, which is an admittedly ballsy year to do this, to put out that ad. I know fascism's having a bad year, but I think that we could bring her back, boys. Let's go. Let's go. I actually thought animists, didn't animists, don't they believe, I thought that was like a whole thing where they believe every object has a soul.

I don't know why he called it the Animist Party. I couldn't really find much information on what the Animist Party, 'cause James Madol, like all of this information is out there, but he is kind, he's a bit of a forgotten figure in the neo-Nazi movement. But he is also— shares a lot with the modern Nazis, you know, the modern far right.

And what the modern fake reactionary Satanist groups are doing too, like the ONA and those guys.

Sure.

You know what, also, that was specifically disproved to be connected to Michael Aquino.

What, the ONA?

ONA, yeah.

Yeah, well, let's not get into that. Too far, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I will talk about the Order of the Angles. You wanna talk about a ritual? We want to get into some ritual ideas. Really don't want to talk about it. Lovecraftian kind of comes into the spotlight.

This series will end today, my friend.

I'm just saying, there's lots of stuff we could get into.

Don't want to talk about it in any way whatsoever.

It's about the different ways to look at Satan.

Pretty soon, James Maddal— Pretty soon, James Maddal—

The trapezoid's the door. The angles are the way. Stop it.

Pretty soon, James Maddal dropped the Animist Party and joined forces with a German-American named Kurt Mürtig, who founded a neo-Nazi group after Hitler's death called the National Renaissance Party. And I didn't realize how horrible of a name Kurt Mürtig is until I said it out loud.

Yeah, but also it's great.

I was thinking like, what a great Nazi name.

It is.

Kurt Mürtig. Oh fuck, here comes Mürtig.

Yeah. Oh, I thought you all stopped talking, will you, because you were talking about me.

Well, actually, Mürtig was a German American. He was a German American. He had spent the '30s Nazis, like being basically a Hitler fanboy. He was one of the founders, like one of the first American Nazi parties, big figure. But the group that he founded, the National Renaissance Party, it was taken from one of the last things Hitler wrote, in which Hitler said that springing forth from his death would be, quote, The seed of the radiant renaissance of the National Socialist movement. Yeah. And they died.

Oof! I love the taste of bullets!

Gasoline! Not petrol, excuse me.

Eva, you tried this first!

God, I love to kill a woman!

But Mertig was already an old man when he founded the NRP, so future friend of Anton LaVey, James Madol, he quickly took over as the leader of the National Renaissance Party in 1949. But with Madol in charge, the NRP began exploring science fiction other half: fantasy. Before— hey, I prefer fantasy. I mean, we're more of— I'm a fantasy guy, you're a sci-fi guy.

That's how they'd get you. That's how they—

I like westerns.

Yeah. Where's our Nazi westerns?

Before long, Madole was injecting the NRP with occult ideas that were a mixture of the fantasy stories Heinrich Himmler had picked up from German volkswriters and the speculative fiction of magazines. Madol began writing occult political treatises with names like The New Atlantis: A Blueprint for an Aryan Garden of Eden in North America.

There's like 5 racist dog whistles in that. That's actually skilled how many different racist dog whistles are just in that one sentence.

Yeah, there's a lot of guys that's going to see that and go, "Oh, I'll pick that up." The real New Atlantis is New Orleans. Don't discount Miami. They're gonna fucking race to the bottom of the ocean. Fingers crossed. Yes. Well, in The New Atlantis, Madol predicted that once fascism took over and all the Jews and people of color were eliminated in America, the Aryan race would use its principles to take their ideology to the stars. But in the real world, Madol was having a hard time putting his fantasy hierarchies into practice. Nobody except a few morons were listening to his ideas as he shouted them from the street corners of New York City. So Madol took those morons and established what he called his security echelon. These were his street fighters, They were supposed to be his stormtroopers. Madol and the security echelon would spend the next few decades harassing people on the streets of New York City while dressed as stormtroopers. Madol himself, he gave speeches, but he always wore a fucking crash helmet because he got his ass kicked so much.

Ah, God, it's great!

Now, besides the psychic damage they caused, they were relatively harmless in the physical realm. That changed, however, in 1963 during an incident that is alternately called, and I'm being totally serious here, it was called The White Castle Plot or The Siege on White Castle.

I've done that before.

Yes. I've done some trench warfare inside of a White Castle.

No, the White Castle plot is I'm really high, but I want some White Castle. How we gonna get there?

How we get there? I think the Uber driver stopped at the drive-thru.

There's a whole movie about that. There's that gigantic—

—whole movie, yes, that is about that. Yeah, and then you—

I am definitely— I'm talking about the burger joint White Castle here.

Oh yeah, I also will say this is the type of shit— let's just say this is the type of stuff that made them not take the neo-Nazis super seriously. Yeah, I think that's the problem is that they really were kind of cute for a while. Yeah, they were just kind of stupid.

Yeah, at this point I'm more scared of Shredder and the Foot Clan.

Yeah, yes, it's like they were just bad, they were bad stupid Nazis that just yell at you and they were extremely unpopular. Popular.

Yeah. Well, in July of 1963, the Congress of Racial Equality, AKA CORE, they were demonstrating against White Castle restaurants in the Bronx over racially discriminatory hiring practices.

So which is what? So CORE's good or bad? Good.

Good.

Yeah. Okay. And were they only hiring white people in the Bronx to work at White Castle?

Well, therein lies the problem. Different time, my friend. It's also 1963. You know, the racial makeup of New York City changed incredibly fast throughout like the '50s, '60s, and '70s. So we're, I believe in 1963, I can't remember if Robert Moses had completely destroyed the Bronx just yet.

Yeah.

But we're getting there.

Okay.

It's either right before or right after. But yes, you do bring up a good point. But it's a time of transition for New York City. Well, after James Madol's neo-Nazi National Renaissance Party heard about CORE protesting at the White Castle restaurants in the Bronx, they arrived to counter-protest and to to literally defend the honor of White Castle. By the end—

You can't be wrong with 100% fat horses. Yeah.

All the managers of the White Castle being like, "I bet I can get about 1,000 burgers out of that horse." By the end of the White Castle plot, 8 members of the NRP were arrested, but not because they had valiantly battled the members of CORE at a fast food restaurant. Restaurant in the Bronx. Instead, they were arrested because of their own incredible stupidity. See, 3 members of Madol's NRP had gotten their asses kicked by members of CORE at White Castle, so they went to the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx to report the assault.

I got beat up! I just want to say, yes, we are Nazis, yes, but we got hurt. They slapped us. Can you please— can you please— yes, we're Nazis, we're the most powerful evil force in the world. One of them me a honky. Can you imagine that? That's a racial slur. That's a racial attack.

I mean, in the '60s, the only place you're allowed to legally fight is the Bronx. Yeah. Right.

Well, while one detective took the Nazi statement, another went out to take a look at the truck in which the NRP had arrived because it was obviously a very suspicious situation. The second detective saw out out in the open: a fully loaded .22 revolver, loaded tear gas guns, a crossbow loaded with a steel-tipped arrow, a butcher knife, a switchblade, a straight razor, and an ax.

Yeah, you're gonna wanna throw a blanket over that.

But how will we get to it?

That's the arrogance of these guys. It's like, no, but we're white. We're the master race.

Yes, we're the master race. These guys, these are cops. They understand what we're all about. Let's just say if you're the master race, you might wanna Master hiding all your crimes.

Well, Madol was picked up later that day, charged with conspiracy, and sentenced to 2 years in prison. But all that's to show you that the neo-Nazis that Anton LaVey kept company with, they were a bunch of fucking morons. And you know, today's alt-right, pretty close to what Madol was like. They're specifically, they're really into Warhammer 40K. Unfortunately, they're big Dune fans.

I know, I know.

The current alt-right.

Well, that's just 'cause they just don't, they don't understand the actual sacrifice Lido 2 makes. And that is actually the key. Again, it's lack of understanding. Yes, there are certain parts about it, but also how in the fuck are you possibly a neo-Nazi and anti-dude when it's literally against the Ubermensch and the concept of the Ubermensch? Mitch McConnell looks like a sandworm. We know the best part about Mitch McConnell is that hopefully soon he'll be eaten by a bunch of dirt worms. That'll happen soon, right?

He'll be dead soon.

No, these are a lot of the guys that they love Star Trek, but they're like, the Darth Vader was right. You know, they're the ones who love the Empire instead of the Rebels.

And they're inherently wrong.

Yeah, and they all hate Star Trek because they'd say, you know, because Star Trek is too woke, as they say.

Darth Vader killed the Emperor.

Yeah, Darth Vader didn't like being Darth Vader. You missed the whole fucking thing. You missed the whole fucking thing. Darth Vader hated being Darth Vader. He was upset. He was upset. He was a slave.

He made the wrong choice.

He was a slave. It was the wrong choice for him. And he knew, and he only could free himself It was his death.

Can I piss—

And that's the whole idea of the fucking film.

Can I piss people off real quick?

Yes, please.

Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars movie.

Not— you are new to Star Wars?

Wow.

I love Empire, obviously, I love Empire.

And I mean, A New Hope is easily the best.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It starts off good.

Believe me, I still— Yeah, that's a plus.

It is.

It's a big plus.

But also—

The Ewoks are supposed to be Wookiees.

They're supposed to be, they were, but also—

Baby Wookiees?

But I'm one of those, and Axis and Allies, when we play at IOCon, I always play Axis. Yeah, all right, I'm one of those guys. All right, even I get it.

No, it's understandable sometimes. You just shouldn't, you know, build your entire political philosophy around it. No, you're dumb if you do that. Indeed, stupid. Now, concerning Madol's friendship with Anton LaVey, it was mostly their hostility towards Christianity that aligned their movement with Satanism.

That's the idea.

Like Himmler before him, Madol was looking for pre-Christian pagan sources of the so-called Aryan religion, which of course never existed. But even so, his search for knowledge led him to Anton LaVey. Apparently, Madol and LaVey met frequently at the NRP office and at an occult bookstore in New York City called the Warlock Bookshop. They started meeting sometime in the 1970s. Madol thereafter erected a large Satanic altar in his apartment and also played recordings of LaVey's Black Masses at several NRP meetings. Now, we don't know exactly what Madol and LaVey discussed, but a letter from 1978 1974 does exist between Madol and a Church of Satan member, in which Madol asked if a small group of Satanists could help introduce NRP officers and members to, quote, "more advanced concepts of occult philosophy." But from what it seems like, the NRP and the Church of Satan, they were both fringe groups who were seen by society at large as evil. As one scholar of the far right put it, their cordial relationship was basically networking. The hated hobnobbing with the hated to see if they could gain something from one another.

Yeah.

And one's trying, one is always trying to use the other one. And so nothing gets done.

There was another group called the Order of the Black Ram that did something like this too. And so Anton LaVey wrote a letter to them, which has always kind of been like the Church of Satan's official stance, which is this idea of like, he wrote this letter being like, we cannot join forces because Satanism does not choose allies care— like it chooses its allies carefully, but I will stand beside you in the fight against the church. Like, it's that style of horseshit.

Yeah. Now the NRP is so old they're called the NNRP. It's pretty good.

That's not bad. Yeah, I like it. You're allowed. NRP died real quick after James Madol.

Oh, of course, of course.

As far as the fate of the NRP went, it died with James. When Madol succumbed to cancer in 1979, his mother turned over all of the NRP's his so-called records to a staunch French-Canadian Madol loyalist named Jean.

Jean.

Just Jean.

Madol's mother handed over all the documents at the memorial service for her son in New York City, but Jean, perhaps distraught after attending his friend's funeral, he struck a concrete abutment in the highway while on his way home. Jean was killed instantly, and the records Madol's mother had entrusted to John blew away like so much litter, thus ending the National Renaissance Party within days of James McDowell's death. That's fucking great. Literally ended up as fucking New York City garbage.

That's awesome.

In 1979, just more shit in the street.

I could see like his mom at the funeral is like, I'm looking for Gene.

Yeah, is Gene here? Hello, hello, my beautiful.

Eugene, James left a message that I'm supposed to give you all these boxes that are full of his— it's his things.

That is supposed to—

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Now, from what I can tell, the 1970s truly were the last time that Anton LaVey had any fun with the Church of Satan. In 1980, the FBI and the Secret Service raided the Church of Satan's black house on Halloween, choosing the date, I'm sure, in an attempt to catch LaVey doing doing something dirty. But the FBI did have a reason for being there, because an informant had told the FBI that Anton LaVey was involved in a plot to murder Senator Ted Kennedy.

See, this is the type of shit he got really sick of dealing with.

Yeah. Well, from what I can tell, LaVey was supposed to be the go-between on the murder, delivering 8 kilos of hash to a Chicago mafia boss as payment for the hit on Senator Kennedy. The informant said that he himself was a member of the Church of Satan, and he was actually planning to instigate a gunfight during the handoff that would have resulted in LaVey's death and hopefully in the death of the mobsters as well. And when the smoke cleared, the informant said that he was going to walk away with the drugs and walk straight into the Church of Satan to become its new leader. But possibly to get out of some other charge, the details are unclear. The informant was coming to the the FBI with all of this information instead. All of this information was, of course, utter and total horseshit.

Of course.

Not even a single ounce of it was true.

It's a good story.

It's a great story. It's a really good—

It's a great story.

It's a really great story. But the authorities having no idea what actually happened inside the Church of Satan—

Of course not. They think it's evil. They think he's evil.

They're probably terrified.

Oh, they think they're going against the devil himself.

Yeah.

They set up a massive operation to catch Anton LaVey. The FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, they set up a blockade at Chicago's O'Hare Airport to meet all incoming flights in the days preceding Halloween 1980. They were convinced that LaVey was going to arrive any day with a briefcase full of hash. LaVey, of course, never did. Instead, when agents raided LaVey's house on Halloween, he was just sitting there, hanging out.

Yeah, he's an old man.

Yeah, he told the FBI that he had the highest regard for Senator Kennedy and his family, and that he would never have any involvement with drugs because he was morally opposed to them. That was actually the truth. He was morally opposed to drugs.

He didn't do drugs.

Just see the FBI showing up, guns drawn, like, this is actually just kind of sad.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, wow. You should be more evil than this.

In 1980, he's—

Anton LaVey's 50.

Yeah.

You know, he's 50 and he's getting—

Circling the drain. Yeah. He's getting fat and old.

Watching TV with the helmet, no shirt, gut hanging out. Yeah.

You're like, "Fiddle faddle?" You're like, "Fiddle faddle." But part of the reason why the FBI might have taken the allegations about Anton LaVey so seriously is because earlier that year, the book that kicked off the Satanic Panic, Michelle Remembers, was released, and it was taken incredibly seriously. Now, Michelle Remembers claimed to be an autobiographical account of a woman who had been raised by Satanists who belong to Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. These Satanists had allegedly exposed this woman to Satanic ritual abuse so horrifying that she had repressed all the memories until a psychiatrist helped her recover them. Now again, it is all bullshit.

Anything attached to the Satanic Panic movement is not real.

It is not real. There is not a single ounce of proof for any of it in any way whatsoever.

Should be called Michelle Misremembers.

It really should be. Let's get her fucking ass. Let's dig her up. I want to see your fucking bones.

But Michelle and her psychiatrist, they were fucking great talk show guests. They were amazing. So the Satanic Panic began to spread. Then came the McMartin Preschool case in 1983, which featured 300 allegations of Satanic ritual abuse that were completely and totally unfounded. Again, not a single bit of evidence for any of it. Martin only resulted in wasted time, money, and energy. But while no convictions were obtained, the trial lasted 7 fucking years.

She ruined everybody's life.

I believe it was the longest trial in California history. Maybe even one of the long— I think it still is one of the longest trials in American history. And it attracted expected constant and frantic media coverage.

Oh man. So probably just took whatever money they had left.

Everything. They just drained every, every, just drained every single person that was attached to it. It's one of the, it's just a fucking nothing but tragedy and pain.

Every person involved in the McMartin preschool trial, like they were just people who ran a daycare.

Yeah.

And that was it. Just they were, they liked kids and they got caught up in all of this shit and their lives were ruined. Hundreds of people had their lives ruined because McMartin's just one.

Yeah.

It's one of dozens that happened all across the United States for 15 years, at least. Most often, the media sided with the prosecutors, and the Church of Satan was often singled out as a main culprit. The news show 20/20 made things even worse in 1985 when they accused Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible of being responsible for America's supposed rash of child daycare ritual abuses.

Are you slandering Barbara Walters right now?

Yeah, hey, if she was involved in this story, then I'd say that Barbara Walters Barbara Walters was wrong.

Barbara Walters, yeah. And it's not slander.

It's an opinion. It's not. It's an opinion. She is wrong. And she had a big head and a tiny body. Baba Wawa. Baba Wawa.

Now, you'd think that Anton LaVey would've had something to say about all this. But judging from his reaction, LaVey was all but done with being the boogeyman by 1985. And it's at this point in the story that Anton's daughter, Xena, recipient of the world's first satanic baptism, Germanic Baptism returns.

Obviously also we know Zina LaVey is the DNA basis for the clone that is Taylor Swift. And Taylor Swift was built by Nazi scientists in order to sway the public because when she switched— Not Zina LaVey, Zina Shrek.

She changed her name many years ago.

You're right, but Taylor Swift is going to make a fascist turn. She's going to destroy the world. And I just want you to remember that I'm saying this right now. She's gonna make a fascist turn and we're We're gonna have to probably sacrifice her to something. I just know that as a group, just keep your eyes open for that. Just know that. Just remember that.

All right. Now, Xena was just 22 years old when 20/20 ran the story maligning the Church of Satan. But when she called her father, Anton, and asked him, "What's your media strategy for this?" he had nothing. As far as he was concerned, he didn't have anything to worry about, and he certainly wasn't going to go out in the public to say anything.

Yeah, he just rotted on the vine.

Now, Xena was rightfully convinced that the situation was only going to get worse if they didn't respond at all, because silence could be seen as an admission of guilt, or at the very least, you know, it left open speculation. And when speculation is open, that's when lies start to come in, and that's when people start deciding what the truth is for themselves.

Yeah, and this was also shit about child rape.

Oh shit, people are being arrested and charged with crimes against children. This was absolutely something to take incredibly seriously.

Get in front of. You spent so long writing letters about— like, some of the letters in this fucking book are about, like, them arguing about the enamel distributors that they got for the Baphomet medallions. Like, shit like that, that he was all over all of this shit. And then when it comes to this, he's just nowhere.

But he's just gone.

He's defeated.

Yeah. I mean, finally, LaVey admitted to his daughter that he actually didn't have anyone to deal with interviews or media appearances. Differences anymore because Diane Hegarty, co-founder of the Church of Satan, she was fucking gone by 1985.

Oh yeah.

In 1984, after years of emotional and physical abuse, Diane Hegarty left Anton LaVey. She claimed that he had screamed at her frequently and had once knocked her unconscious with a headlock.

All that started happening after he got old too. It was like in the second, like the latter half of their marriage. Well, he— It seemed, it seemed to really ramp up.

It definitely ramped up. I mean, it was —known that he had anger problems privately. Yeah, he was an asshole. But the 1984 split was the first time that these allegations were made public.

They viewed him as like a prickly grump though. Like, it was like that kind of thing. And then he just got angrier and meaner and, you know.

According to Anton and Diane's grandson, the abuse against Diane had only grown in the last few years that they were together. In other words, Anton's outward abuse seems to coincide with a realization in the early 1980s, this was as far as the ride was gonna take him. He also didn't give a shit about what was happening in the outside world.

That's the ECI.

Yeah. Nor did he care what happened to anyone else as a result of the Satanic Panic. Zina, however, she did care. So she offered to help as the church's spokesperson temporarily until Anton found someone permanent. This temporary spokesperson role, however, would last far longer than Diana wanted because Anton LaVey could be a very, very lazy man.

Nothing illustrates this principle more than the Church of Satan book because the, all of the letters are from Diane. So all of the correspondence would, like Anton would write letters when he was specifically kind of moved by something or whatever, but Diane was the one doing it all. Diane was micromanaging the newsletter. Diane was micromanaging all the different grotto stuff.

Not micromanaging, just fucking managing.

With Michael Aquino, right? She was doing it every, she was doing every bit of it. I honestly feel like she was the one with most of the passionate opinions about things. And that Anton, 'cause she'd speak on behalf of Anton, right? Where it'd be like, oh, Anton thinks this, but Baba thinks this. And she's like, no, you're just writing the letter.

Yeah, and also like Xena's like, you're dying, but this is the rest of my life.

Yeah, now it's on me.

And he's not even dying. He's like 54. True, true. He's 54 years old. He doesn't have any sort of like—

He does not look good for 54.

He looks very bad for 54, but he doesn't have a terminal illness. He's just done. He's done with life. So as the Church of Satan's official spokesperson, Xena appeared on every show from Phil Donahue to Sally Jesse Raphael, debating Christians while spreading the word about Satanism in an effort to put out some of the fires of the Satanic Panic. Ironically, Xena's TV appearances caused membership numbers in the Church of Satan to skyrocket throughout the '80s, which never would have been possible if all those Christians hadn't made up all those stories about Satanic ritual abuse.

'Cause she's a beautiful woman, and she made that perfect example.

She was very eloquent.

'Cause also, if you look at all the pictures in this book, guess what it all is? Ugly men with incredibly hot women. It's the entire group. It's all—

This is why you like this so much.

Yeah, buddy! That was the whole fucking point! The whole point is that it allows nerdy idiots to hang out with the hottest chicks in the fucking city.

Sure. So what's the deal? How come? I mean, ugly girls had to have been Satanists too.

Honestly, very few. Well, 'cause you know what part of it—

'Cause they all think—

No, no, I would say, you know, it's not about that. It's not about, it's not ugly or pretty, it's feminine.

Yeah.

One of the Satanic principles is high masculinity, high femininity. So the women, if you were to come to Clearwater, there was like dress codes and there was other rules that we didn't get into in the actual nitty gritty gritty of it, but he would say in it being like, if you're coming as a woman, I want to— I want them up, tits up, makeup, hair, like it's getting up. I want you high, high, high femme. Yeah, sure. All right, that's— I'm telling the truth.

Yeah, all right, Satan, whatever you say, Satan.

And the guys had to wear suits.

Well, yeah, there, because you're famous for your suits.

It's different now, but now I'm not doing it. I'm not going to his house. If I do, I'm trying to wear So it's kind of more stuff.

Well, as it turned out, Zeena was actually one of the people who helped put the Satanic Panic to bed. She worked with law enforcement agencies to set the record straight, because before Zeena opened the books, so to speak, law enforcement knew next to nothing about actual Satanism. For the cops, they'd watch The Devil's Reign and think it was real, which is like scientists basing theories of time travel solely on Back to the Future. Future. But thanks in part to Zeena, the FBI issued a report in 1992 refuting all the criminal conspiracy theories concerning Satanic ritual abuse. But by 1992, Zeena had already resigned from the Church of Satan and had renounced her dickhead father 2 years earlier. Because while Anton LaVey still wasn't what you'd call a good guy during the '60s and '70s, he became an absolute piece of shit in the '80s and '90s. And so by 1990, all of the people who'd been with Anton LaVey in the Church of Satan's heyday, they were gone. Diane had left 6 years earlier. Michael Aquino had left 15 years earlier. And after Xena's dust-up with her father, she'd left LaVeyan Satanism for who else but Michael Aquino's Temple of Set.

Oh man.

Immediately became a high priestess in the Temple of Set.

Wow.

Became one of the people that like ran it. Like big fuck you to dad. Oh my God.

Must have loved that.

Oh, he stole the whole thing. He stole the whole crew. He stole the head of the Lilith Grotto. He stole the head of the Yuggoth crew. He stole the head of the Babylon crew. He stole every important Satanist.

Yeah. Now, lawsuits over the ownership of the Church of Satan and all its properties, they lasted throughout the '80s. It was between Anton LaVey and Diane Hegarty. But when LaVey was summoned to court over a restraining order filed by Diane Hegarty in 1984, LaVey claimed to have taken revenge on the world using magic. He said that he wrote a letter announcing his magical intention for all hell to break loose when he got the summons. And sure enough, at the very hour that LaVey was supposed to be in front of the judge in San Francisco, tragedy struck 9 hours south in the California town of San Ysidro. This was the day of the infamous McDonald's massacre, which was one of America's first major mass shootings. Shit was crazy. Crazy. Yeah. A man named— and we're, we're gonna do a full series on this. It's a fucking fascinating story. But a man named James Huberty opened fire on a McDonald's with a machine gun, killing 22 and wounding 19 more. LaVey, however, believed that the similarity between Diane's last name, Hegarty, and the shooter's, Huberty, that wasn't a coincidence. So he took credit for causing the massacre with his magic spells.

Fucking schmuck.

You know, it just, but it It is interesting. When you're in the magic world—

This one's a stretch.

This is a huge stretch.

He was flailing. Yeah, I mean, he's—

The only thing that the names share is that they start with an H and end with a Y. There are other coincidences in Anton LaVey's life that are incredible.

No, but now he's trying.

Now he's reaching. He's obviously losing his touch in every way. And it doesn't end there. In 1984, when Anton was 54 years old, he entered into a relationship with a 17-year-old girl named Blanche Barton. Who'd written him a letter from college. The two of them immediately got into sex magic, BDSM, and quite a bit of piss, all while Anton was still married to Diane.

When you're old, that's the last thing that goes.

It's like, come on, you weren't gonna do that with Sammy Davis Jr., but you're gonna do it now at the end of your life and ruin your marriage, you fucking idiot.

You know what though? But if you look at it, it's exactly the problem, is that it's Arrested Development. This is an example of him trying to dial back the clock and thinking that he can regain something else by like, how many times do we see an old man marry a almost child? Because literally they're just trying to feel something again, which is not how it goes.

Nope. Well, after Diane left, Blanche Barton stuck around and eventually wrote Anton LaVey's official biography. It is absolutely filled with easily disproven lies, but Barton still repeats these lies in every interview she gives as if they were gospel truth, including an interview I saw in the special features on the Devil's Reign Blu-ray disc. Like, he's— to this day, man. But for all his former infamy, Anton LaVey simply faded into the background of American culture in the last decades of his life. Even though he died in 1997, his last notable appearance in the public eye had been 10 years earlier, after the arrest of serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was, of course, a committed theistic Satanist.

Oh yeah. His own batch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a— he's a— Let's call it bespoke Satanism.

Yeah, boutique.

Yeah. See, before Ramirez had killed anyone, he'd driven to San Francisco so he could meet and talk with Anton LaVey. Reportedly, Ramirez stopped Anton in the street and politely asked if they could chat about Satanism for just a few minutes. LaVey, however, brushed Ramirez off and told him to write a letter instead.

It's probably 'cause he smelled like shit and looked like a fucking chupacabra. He looked awful. Like, I can tell exactly. You know Richard Ramirez. So him going like, "Hey man, you wanna fuck? I wanna talk about singing with you for a while." And he's looking at him and just being like, 'cause that's the height of his abilities. And he's like, "You're not a hot chick." Yeah. "I'll see you later." "You need to get outta here." "Write me a letter." He should've been nice to him.

Could've saved some lives.

Well, I don't think he would've.

I don't know. Not with Richard Ramirez. Yeah.

Yeah. Not with Richard Ramirez. 'Cause as soon as Richard Ramirez returns to that sweet, sweet mainline cocaine, it's all over from there.

Wow.

It's much more the mainlining cocaine than it is the Satan.

It did.

When it comes to Richard Ramirez, that's really what drove a lot of it.

He could have straightened him out. Cocaine's bad, Lavey's out.

I think it would've been fun. Honestly, I wish.

Now I'm back on your side.

I wish.

Now I'm there. Well, Ramirez apologized for bothering Lavey. He wished him a happy solstice and walked away. But after Ramirez was arrested and branded as the most evil serial killer in America, American history, Anton LaVey saw an opportunity to press that outrage button one more time. When the press reached Anton LaVey for comment about Richard Ramirez, LaVey said that Richard was, quote, "The nicest, most polite young man you'd ever want to meet." And I guess to Anton LaVey, he was.

He was. In that moment, he wasn't killing him and his wife at gunpoint.

Yeah, he wasn't scooping her eyes out and leaving them on the dresser.

He just wanted attention so fucking bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's so interesting that the Satanic Panic really— like, it should have been his moment. You know, like that, it really should have been his moment to shine, to come out. I mean, Xena took the mantle and she made it happen, but that should have been his, you know, his moment. But I think really what I think it is, is I think Diane was the one who got him out of the house. And without her, he's just some lazy fuck that doesn't feel, "I'll get to it tomorrow." I don't think he's intelligent enough.

Well, it's not, you know what? It's not about, I actually think he is quite intelligent. It's self-conscious and able to change. That is the main issue. He purposely froze himself in place. When you, you have a responsibility as a fucking wizard. Like I know that's ridiculous to say. He had a responsibility. He looked on what Aleister Crowley did, and he looked at Helena Blavatsky, he looked at all these things, and they all fail. They all eat shit. And the reason why they all fail and eat shit is because instead of what I was saying in the beginning, becoming Gandalf the White, getting rid of the old you, becoming the new you, the first half of your life is spent changing the world, the second half of your life should be spent having the world change you. Mm-hmm. Because you are now in it. You've done it. You've made your mark. Now it's like, where does my mark go? How can this come back and change me? And then how can I be here for all of you? Because I set this up. So I am responsible for this fucking thing. That's how I view it.

He should've been like, I'm responsible for the Church of Satan. I'm there to save it. I'm gonna end it or do whatever I want with it, but it's mine and I'm gonna protect it and I'm gonna do what needs to be done to protect it. And I'm going to I'm gonna dance it. I'm gonna do all these things. But he just didn't do it. And it led to his demise.

That's why I'm enjoying Flea's jazz album.

It's really good.

I love that album, man. I love that album.

Now, unfortunately, the end of Anton LaVey's life was pretty much defined by his legal fights with Dianne Hagarty, who even filed restraining orders claiming that she feared feared for her life. By 1993, LaVey had lost everything, including the Black House. But a friend of LaVey's bought the Black House from Diane, and he allowed Anton to finish out his years amongst the remains of his former groovy life. I guess that's how Anton LaVey's— he existed at the allowance of other people.

Yeah.

Didn't care. By the '90s, LaVey had stopped doing interviews and was hospitalized time and again in the last last 6 months of his life. He died on October 29th, 1997, of respiratory failure, but LaVey had arranged for his death certificate to say that he had died on October 31st, Halloween, proving even with his death that it was his belief that there was no reason why the truth should get in the way of a good story.

Goddamn. And there's lessons to be learned here, man.

Yeah, there's a lot of lessons to be learned.

There's a lot of lessons, and I think that's why it's so even important that we did this series that way, 'cause it's like, I want to expand as I get older. I do not want to narrow. You are. Hey, you fucker, I'm out. I'm bulking. I'm bulking. But I wanna fucking get better. I wanna get better as I get older. I wanna be the best I've ever been by the time I'm 75.

Yeah.

I wanna, by the time I'm 75, I wanna have like taken all lessons that I've learned and try to do something else with it. And I feel like these stories are important to hear because yeah, they went, made their mark on a world, but then they just left it at that. Well, the difference is you have a quest for knowledge.

He thought that everything he thought was gospel.

Yes. And then it was done.

Yeah.

And then the thoughts were done.

And you know, he, and he could have done so far, like in 1980, he could have come right out after Michelle Remembers was released and said no. And, and he could have opened up the Church of Satan to the world. He could have showed people like everybody, like, look, look, look, it's a fucking social club. We, we do magic rituals that are kind of magic, but not really.

Yeah.

All this shit that they're saying isn't true. And he could have headed the fucking satanic panic off at the pass.

Oh yeah. Be like, look here, the main tenet says we don't fuck kids. Yeah. We don't fucking rape anybody. We don't do that.

He could have done that. And the thing is, is that the Satanic Panic was partly caused by him founding the Church of Satan.

Yes. Oh no, he did it. He did it. Yeah, that's what I mean. He was responsible.

He was responsible and he completely and totally left all responsibility to everybody else.

It's so weird because he like championed a life of like adversity, but then the moment conflict shows up, he just gives up. Yeah.

But that is an example of what we He gotta good, like I've been saying this for a little bit about how like good guys gotta beat bad guys. Right. Good guys gotta win. Satanism's supposed to give you that edge. That is what nice. And that's what I'm taking onto it and reminding myself all the time. It is about the independent wild spirit inside of humanity that wants us to be free. And there is something about that that I try to remember at all times. And then every single time these kind of forces want you to choose one thing or another, it's like, fuck it, I'm a free, I'm free. Like you can't make me choose. And so I think that if I'm gonna keep that and keep changing and going and then use that aggressiveness to fight people I don't like.

Yeah.

That are legitimately bad guys.

Yeah.

I will fight the bad guys.

You have to. Got to.

Yeah.

Patreon.com/lastpodcastonthelift is where you can go see our stream and support us financially directly. You can also watch us on Netflix. We have all of our episodes newly recorded up on Netflix itself. And you can follow us on all of the bullshit socials @LPontheleft, TikTok and Instagram. It's the only ones we got.

That's all we got. The only ones we will have.

We got—

Except we are on FetLife as well, but you'll have to find us on there.

We got 3 JK Ultra dates left. That's June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and July 18th, Oklahoma City. It's got, man, Man, I'm fucking, this has been such an amazing show. I'm so happy. Yeah, I'm so happy. That we did this and like it is ending. It is time to put this baby to bed. And I can't wait to move on to something else with you boys.

And I love it. And I'm gonna miss it, but it'll be fun.

I'm gonna miss it too. But come on out and see this show because after Oklahoma City, I am not gonna be back out on the road for a good long while because my brain is about to fall out of my ass.

But Eddie and I will be shucking our fat asses across this goddamn country, making you laugh anywhere you'll allow us. And also go to available our new show, Eddie and I Movie Stories on SiriusXM Podcast Plus, and the video is on Patreon every Thursday. So if you join the Patreon, you could see it on there as well.

Yeah, that's right. Also, Henry and I got a new show on October 24th, Side Stories at the Mateel Community Center. We're going back to fucking Humboldt.

We're coming to Humboldt for Halloween. Yeah. I might come along on that one.

That's gonna be a blast. Now I'm smoking weed again. Oh my God, I want to go to the land of weed.

Oh, you're gonna like this. We do there so bad. So we're gonna do— we're gonna announce that, but we're gonna make it— we're gonna really beef that up. I don't know what we're gonna do with that show, but we're doing something Halloweeny with it.

Yeah, make sure you show up in costume like you did last year. You all looked fucking amazing.

It was awesome.

That's such a good time. And then I'm also— I'm not taking the break that Marcus is taking. I'm taking a full 22 hours off, but then on July 19th. I'll be in Plano, Texas.

Oh my God.

Yelling at all those motherfuckers.

Fighting the good fight.

Yeah. And I got lots of cities on my schedule, so go to eddytunes.com if you want to come see me live and do my standup show. Phoenix was amazing. Thank you to everyone who came out.

Yeah, that Plano club's great. Like I said, that's where I saw Mitch Hedberg when I was in college.

Fuck yes.

Yeah.

That's what I'm talking about.

That's cool.

Indeed.

All right. I love you guys. Oh, HGX2, watch it. The Finals were last night. I hope you fucking loved it. The whole thing's available. Season 2 of HDX2.

I told you!

Yeah, what are you talking about?

I fucking crushed your wife. I crushed your fucking wife. You fucking bitch, man. I beat her with my hands.

Oh, we love you guys. We'll see you next week.

Hail Satan.

Oh, and hail Gein.

Hail Xena. I liked her. No? She's interesting. Didn't say anything bad about her.

Taylor? No, I didn't. There's a lot. Yeah, there was a Nazi thing.

Oh, well, fuck Xena.

Let's see. I mean, come on, it's obvious.

Our man Sammy.

Hail Sammy Davis Jr.

Yeah, you could also probably just give Shrimp— Satan's got nothing to do with any of this.

You hailed him already. I'm not hailing him again.

Yeah, you don't need that.

Satan was just hanging out. Whatever. No, nothing for Taylor.

Taylor Swift's an Aryan fucking evil general.

It's just Sammy. Come on, Sammy.

Just Sammy Yes, yes, hail Sammy.

I'm gonna say, hail Clogman! Hail Jack Clogman!

Me Clogman! Me Clogman! Clogman! Clogman! Clogman! Clogman!