Anton Szandor LaVey

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Anton Szandor LaVey (originally Howard Stanton Levey ; born April 11, 1930 in Chicago , Illinois , † October 29, 1997 in San Francisco , California ) was the founder and high priest of the Church of Satan . LaVey claimed to be the first to define and organize modern Satanism . He was the author of the 1969 Satanic Bible .

Life

Anton Szandor LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey on April 11, 1930 in Chicago to Gertrude Augusta Coulton and Michael Joseph Levey. What we know about his life is largely based on his own statements to his biographer Blanche Barton, which, however, have been questioned on various occasions. His own daughter Zeena later described large parts of her father's biography as "catalog of lies" and "nonsense produced for their own benefit".

LaVey's family moved to California, where he spent his early years in the San Francisco Bay Area and Globe , Arizona . There LaVey showed an early interest in various instruments, preferably keyboard instruments such as the pipe organ and the steam organ , on which he taught himself to play the piano.

LaVey attended high school in Globe, but dropped out after a while and left home. He joined the "Clyde Beatty Circus" initially as a henchman, later he was assigned other areas of responsibility; so he worked there, among other things, as a predator tamer and organist.

LaVey later stated that the work influenced his view of religion; so he later wrote in the 1969 Satanic Bible:

“On Saturday evenings I regularly saw men staring lustfully at the half-naked dancing girls at the fair, and when I accompanied the evangelists' events on the organ in a tent at the other end of the fairground on Sunday mornings, I saw the same men again. Here they sat on the benches with their wives and children and asked God for forgiveness and deliverance from their carnal urges. And the next Saturday evening they were back on the fairground and stared at the girls. "

LaVey left Los Angeles and returned to San Francisco, where, according to his biography, he worked for three years as a police photographer in the San Francisco Police Department , which was later questioned by biographers as there were no records to prove this.

In 1951 LaVey married Carole Lansing, with whom he had his first daughter Karla in 1952 . He split from Lansing in 1960 after meeting Diane Hegarty . Both never married, but in 1963 she gave birth to his second daughter Zeena Schreck (nee Zeena Galatea LaVey).

In 1967, LaVey employed a topless dancer named "Sharon King," whose real name was Susan Atkins , on one of his nightclub shows . Atkins was one of the main culprits in the murder of Roman Polański's wife Sharon Tate , which was committed a year later by the so-called Manson Family .

In the late 1960s and 1970s, LaVey was influenced and written by philosophers and writers such as Ayn Rand , Friedrich Nietzsche , John Dee and Ragnar Redbeard . a. several essays as well as the books The Satanic Bible (1969), The Complete Witch (1971) and The Satanic Rituals (1972).

In the 1970s he was plagued by money problems. LaVey announced that higher priestly degrees in the Church of Satan could only be obtained in return for financial consideration. This led to outraged reactions from his supporters and ultimately a split in the Church of Satan: In June 1975, some members founded the Temple of Set under the leadership of Michael Aquino .

In 1987 he married his third and last wife, Blanche Barton, with whom he fathered a son named Satan Xerxes in 1993 .

On October 29, 1997, Anton Szandor LaVey died in San Francisco of pulmonary edema as a result of a heart defect. The date of his death was subsequently changed.

Church of Satan

The seal of Baphomet , a symbol of the Church of Satan .

According to his own information, LaVey founded the Church of Satan on Walpurgis Night on April 30, 1966 and announced the "Year one, Anno Satanis". In a devil costume with horns on his cap, he celebrated black masses in the basement of his townhouse in San Francisco . This made it a controversial focus of media attention. So he attended talk shows and appeared on the front pages of many magazines. Whether he was actually called in as a consultant on horror films like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby , as he himself claimed, is controversial.

In the years that followed, after his religious community had found adherents worldwide, LaVey devoted himself to writing, teaching and teaching; he wrote some texts, including the Satanic Bible . His goal was to free the “true” modern Satanism from its medieval doctrines and thus make it understandable for all people. At its core, his teachings are about radical materialism and hedonistic individualism that celebrates the human body, the ego and sensual pleasure. With these values, LaVey was compatible with the hippie movement that flourished in California in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, he hated them as "psychedelic vermin" because he was against the equality of all people practiced by them . He called himself misogynous .

The religious scholar Hugh Urban sees elements of satire and religious parody in both the rituals of the Church of Satan and the teachings of the Satanic Bible .

Discography

  • The Satanic Mass , LP (1968, re-released 1994 and 2001)
  • Answer Me / Honolulu Baby , 7 "single (1994, re-released 2001)
  • Strange Music , 10 "EP (1994)
  • Satan Takes a Holiday , CD (1995)

Primary literature

See also

Web links

Wikiquote: Anton Szandor LaVey  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Ancestry of Anton LaVey
  2. ↑ “a catalog of lies”, “self-serving bullshit”. Quoted in Hugh Urban: New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements. Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2015, ISBN 978-0-520-96212-5 , pp. 181 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  3. ^ Anton Szandor LaVey: The Satanic Bible . Second Sight Books, Berlin 1999.
  4. ^ Zeena Schreck homepage . Retrieved December 28, 2012.
  5. ↑ Annette Lamothe-Ramos: Beelzebub's daughter . In: Vice Magazine . Vice Media Inc. Retrieved July 26, 2012.
  6. ↑ Don Lattin: Satan's Den in Great Disrepair . January 25, 1999. Retrieved August 14, 2012. 
  7. ↑ a b Anton Szandor LaVey in the Notable Names Database (English)
  8. ↑ Medway, Gareth J. (2001). Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York and London: New York University Press. ISBN 9780814756454 .
  9. ↑ Lewis, James R. "Who Serves Satan? A Demographic and Ideological Profile". Marburg Journal of Religion. June 2001.
  10. ^ Anton LaVey; Founded the Church of Satan . In: Los Angeles Times , November 8, 1997. Retrieved February 28, 2012. 
  11. ^ Anton LaVey's Faked Death Certificate
  12. ↑ James R. Lewis: Satanism Today. An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore, and Popular Culture . ABC-Clio, Berkeley 2001, p. 229; Hugh Urban: New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements. Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2015, ISBN 978-0-520-96212-5 , p. 183 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  13. ^ Hugh Urban: New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements. Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2015, ISBN 978-0-520-96212-5 , pp. 183 ff. (Accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  14. ^ Hugh Urban: New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movements. Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2015, ISBN 978-0-520-96212-5 , p. 179 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
personal data
SURNAME LaVey, Anton Szandor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Levey, Howard Stanton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American occultist, founder of the American Church of Satan
DATE OF BIRTH April 11, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1997
Place of death San Francisco California