The Anton LaVey Early Life Coverup

There's more to the Church of Satan than church or Satan

I. Introduction to a Slapfight

There’s nothing more postmodern than to take the religious Adversary of all of Western Civilization and remix him into something that is pointless but simultaneously the avatar of Western Civilization’s current state. The Church of Satan, which was founded in 1966 by Anton Szandor LaVey (born Howard Stanton Levey) once skulked the Hollywood halls and corridors of music studios but now seems little more than just a Twitter account and fractious family infighting. Where it once was there to scare your racist parents and grandparents, it does nothing more now than exist to troll and be trolled by your Nazi nephew. Nearly fifty years ago the album that forever pegged The Eagles, Hotel California, was talked about as having some connection to Anton LaVey in hushed tones during nightmare blunt rotations and now the Church of Satan finds itself indistinguishable from your overly opinionated aunt’s Occupy Democrats Facebook posts. There’s nothing sadder than an aging hipster or a scenester death-gripping a dead scene, and despite finding itself precisely in this position there’s one thing that people still seem to be reluctant to talk about despite it being dead and done: the ethnic and/or religious background of the Church of Satan’s founder.

I had heard that Anton LaVey was Jewish years ago, certainly the surname Levey would leave one to assume this, but I was surprised to discover how controversial this topic ended up being with the gatekeepers of knowledge at Wikipedia. If you go over to the current iteration of the Wikipedia page for Anton LaVey as of January 13th, 2024, this is what the background of LaVey states:

LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey on April 11, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Michael Joseph Levey (1903–1992), from Chicago, married LaVey's mother, Gertrude Augusta née Coultron, born to a Georgian father and Ukrainian mother. His parents supported his musical interests, as he tried a number of instruments; his favorites were keyboards such as the piano and accordion. Anton played piano in a Baptist church as a boy, and played oboe in high school. He attended Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California, until the age of 16. LaVey claimed he left high school at age 16 to join the Clyde Beatty Circus and later carnivals, first as a roustabout and cage boy in an act with the big cats, then as a musician playing the calliope. He played tunes such as "Harlem Nocturne" by Earle Hagen. LaVey later claimed to have seen that many of the same men attended both the bawdy Saturday night shows and the tent revival meetings on Sunday mornings, which reinforced his increasingly cynical view of religion. In the foreword to the German language edition of The Satanic Bible, he cites this as the impetus to defy Christian religion as he knew it. He explains why churchgoers employ moral double standards.

No mention of having any Jewish heritage and some very eyebrow-raising claims about joining a circus that led him to being anti-Christian. This piqued my interest. I’ve heard LaVey was Jewish many times, but I don’t like to just take claims at face value. The Wikipedia article in its current form says he isn’t, which is probably enough for many people who will just skim, but that’s also not good enough for me so let’s take a look at the Talk page and see if there’s any debate on this.

The argument begins with users saying “LaVey was Jewish” and the response being “nuh-uh”, followed by “He said himself he was a Jew-Gypsy” with the retort being “source?” We’re clearly going places here. The user “Arthur Warrington Thomas”, whom we’ll call AWT from here on out and appears to be a fan of National Socialism and Islam, gives us something to work with however with a number of different sources that he feels are relevant to the topic at hand so let’s examine them one by one.

This ended up taking a lot longer than I ever expected it would, so prepare yourself. We’re going to learn quite a bit not just about Anton LaVey and his family and “church”, but also his personal views.

II. Saints and Sinners

The first source is "It’s Not Easy Being Evil in a World That’s Gone to Hell" by Lawrence Wright, which is referenced to have been in Rolling Stone #612, September 5th, 1991. I believe its actual title is “Sympathy for the Devil”, which makes more sense for Rolling Stone, and the subtitle was "It’s Not Easy Being Evil in a World That’s Gone to Hell". A reprint of the original Rolling Stone article can be found online on Mary Ellen Mark’s website as she was the photographer of Anton LaVey for this article.¹ There is also an expanded version of it that was included in Saints and Sinners by Lawrence Wright, a collection of his profiles of controversial figures associated with religion, which is the version I will be using here.

In Saints and Sinners, Wright first recounts meeting with Anton LaVey for a meal alongside with LaVey’s third wife, Blanche Barton. After getting looks from the couple over his choice of bleu cheese for salad dressing², Wright is able to get LaVey on a misanthropic rant that culminates in LaVey talking about his public image:

“I have come out from under my rock because the climate is more conducive to what I’ve been saying,” LaVey remarked. “The zeitgeist now happens to be right. These are salad days for satanism.

“And besides, what’s the worst you can say—that I’m a monster, a phony, a charlatan? That I’m mad? That I’m a murderous mastermind? That I’m some Jew gypsy roustabout who looks at the world through a carny’s eyes? I’ve been accused of being everything from an agent for the KGB to the chief ideologue of Nazism. In the roll of twentieth-century villains, it’s Hitler, Charlie Manson, and Anton LaVey.”³

This appears to possibly be the refence that the anonymous Wikipedia editor meant of LaVey calling himself a “Jew Gypsy”, though the context here makes this seem more of a sarcastic and exasperated statement. Wright eventually visits LaVey in his LARPy home and gets LaVey talking about his early life.⁴ It’s here we get an admission of an eclectic religious background:

“His religious upbringing was “very iconoclastic and extremely permissive. My own family were nonparticipants. I was never pushed into a religious formula. The only thing I ever heard about religion was ‘Another name for God is nature.’ We did have relatives who were Christian and Jewish. I had an aunt who was Christian Scientist and an uncle who was an atheist. You could say I grew up a second-generation nonbeliever or cynic.” Although Tony, as the boy was called, was pleased that he didn’t have to go to a priest or a minister or a rabbi (“so I never had any lies told to me”), he was guarded about his agnosticism. “To say you didn’t believe in God back then was like saying you were a communist. I would say, ‘Of course I believe in God.’ I didn’t want to get clobbered.””⁵

The rest of the piece paints a rather pathetic picture of LaVey as Wright tries to get to the heart of who or what LaVey really was. Wright does his best to apply an empathetic but investigative lens to the many wild claims of Anton LaVey, such as his claim that he bedded Marilyn Monroe while he worked in a burlesque theater before she became famous, but the picture you get of LaVey is less the most wickedest man in America and more a pathetic weirdo, the prince of bloviating edgy tryhards. Among the things we learn about LaVey from Wright is that he had a fetish for urine and urine-soaked clothes, that he considered songs like “Yes, We Have No Bananas” to have magical occult properties, that he liked to tell people he ran away to join a circus, that he was fascinated by mannequins and at least once tried to have sex with them, that his obsession with superhero and pulp comics of the 1940s was second to none, and that he truly, madly, loved Disneyland. Perhaps that was the true cultural victory of Anton LaVey as you could take all of these elements and blend them together, slap a snappy username on it, and it would sound no different than the average Reddit power user.

III. Lucifer Rising

The second source that “AWT” cites is Lucifer Rising by Gavin Baddeley, a UK journalist who had been ordained by Anton LaVey and who started the London lodge for the Church of Satan, but I quickly got confused by how “AWT” rendered this. There are actually two different sources slammed together here. The second half of it we will get to later when we cover the authorized biography. Baddeley’s book is essentially a history of what he sees as the historical and religious roots of modern Satanism, up to and through LaVey himself. There’s quite a number of references to Jews interested in Satanism in it owing to the “Nazi Chic” transgressive nature of it. When he gets to LaVey, he begins to discuss various aspects of his early life:

Indeed, LaVey made a poor candidate for an Aryan superman – not least because of his own mixed blood (partly Jewish), and affection for the ‘degenerate’ carnivals and sideshows of his seminal years. The early Church of Satan membership – prominent among whom were homosexual film-maker Kenneth Anger and black-Jewish entertainer Sammy Davis, Junior – would have been substantially depleted by a Nazi pogrom.⁶

The most arresting paragraph however in this book on LaVey’s early life and lineage discusses the importance of being a “Nazi Jew” to the Church of Satan:

“Perhaps the most striking inclusions in Satan Speaks! are two essays on Judaism. Debate within the Church of Satan during the 1980s had polarised into those who embraced sinister Nazi-chic as a confrontational expression of individualism, and those who regarded Nazism as the repellent epitome of conformity. LaVey, fond of what he called ‘the uncomfortable alternative’, came up with a novel solution. The true Satanist should be a ‘Nazi Jew’, adopting the roles of both scapegoat and villain: ‘The aesthetic of Nazism is grounded in black. The medieval black magician, usually a Jew, practised the “Black Arts”. The new Satanic (conveniently described as “neo-Nazi”) aesthetic is spearheaded by young people who favour black clothing, many of whom have partially Jewish backgrounds.’ And it wasn’t only these young people who had ‘partially Jewish backgrounds’. According to a profile by journalist Lawrence Wright for the September 1991 issue of Rolling Stone magazine, the Black Pope himself was of partly Jewish parentage – born Howard Stanton Levey, from which he’d adapted the more evocative ‘Anton LaVey’.”⁷

Obviously Baddeley is harkening back to the very same Lawrence Wright investigative essay we just covered, but the discussion of LaVey’s own writings and Baddeley’s references to them made me realize this was going to go deeper than I had initially believed. The fact that someone who was as close to LaVey as Baddeley was and discussing Satanism as some of kind of intersection of black magic Jews and Nazi-chic, especially in the context of how to deal with the fractious debate in allowing the transgression of that Nazi-chic in a scene that appears to be very accommodating to people of Jewish descent was very telling. The mentions of essays referring to Judaism by Anton LaVey in a book by him immediately intrigued me. So I took a digression here to look at the words of Jew-Gypsy carny, or however he wants me to portray him, himself.

IV. Satan Speaks!

The book Satan Speaks! is a collection of essays that were published a year after LaVey’s death. Baddeley mentioned two essays on Judaism are present in the book. The first is “A Plan”, the second is amazingly titled “The Jewish Question? or Things My Mother Never Taught Me”. “The Plan” is one of the wildest essays I’ve read in a while and I cannot help but quote extensively from it. First comes an admission that there is a shared affinity with Satanists for aspects of both Judaism and, apparently, Nazism, though the similarities he paints seem superficial:

“Indications are everywhere that we, as Satanists, have an affinity for certain elements of both Judaism (unrealized and unspoken) and Nazism (recognized and spoken)—presumably incompatible. Many factors are involved: The aesthetic of Nazism is grounded in black. The medieval black magician, usually a Jew, practiced the “Black Arts.” The new Satanic (conveniently described as “neo-Nazi”) aesthetic is spearheaded by young people who favor black clothing, many of whom have partially Jewish backgrounds.⁸

LaVey immediately follows up this statement with a discussion on the malleability of identity when outgroup cultures are adopted. The relevance of this is that LaVey apparently sees a growing need for a new identity for people of mixed backgrounds, particularly people from a mixed secular Jewish background:

They are not “Jews,” however. Most have never been inside a synagogue. Nor are they Holocaust aficionados. Through the medium of rock and roll, all white kids have taken up, without realizing it, a black cultural identity, one otherwise alien to them. Blacks are where they are today because whitey insisted on being part black, no other reason. If there is a “White Power” movement today, it’s because of things getting out of hand. If being a Satanist means being rooted in Judeo/Nazism, kids who are on the outside looking in will find it attractive to the extent that they will forge a pedigree, if necessary. Jaffe, in his book The American Jews, predicted that a new and vast mixed demographic of non-practicing and part-Jews would require new identities, but in another manner neither as Christians nor Jews, but as something else. Without realizing it, Jaffe was describing Satanism.”⁹

This concern about the identities of children of mixed Christian and Jewish backgrounds tracks with the claims presented in Lawrence Wright’s profile. If we take LaVey’s reported statement of having both Christians and Jews in his family at face value and as factual, then it stands to assume that mixed identities is something that would be near and dear to LaVey’s thoughts. He goes on and identifies a common enemy between Satanists and Jews:

“Before a new order can exist, the old order must be rendered inconsequential. Satanism has done that. Each year renders Christianity less of an enemy and more inconsequential. Hereditary Jewish culture is a perfect springboard for anti-Christian sentiment. The Jews have a foot in the door as the only historically consistent scapegoated enemies of Christ.”

LaVey goes on and sees the “new Jews” as not having any reservations about aligning themselves with Satanism and who wish to throw off, presumably, the shackles of the shtetl:

“The “new Jew,” probably a mixture by birth, has no compunction about participating in the current avalanche of Satanic popularity. There is no longer a tendency to remain “good.” That was for the old and humble Talmudic Jews who never wanted to rock the boat, and desperately tried to retain acceptance in a non-Jewish society. The day of the guilt-ridden Jewish liberal began to wane after the hippies vacated the premises. The only ones left seem to be among the yuppie-but-guilty affluent stragglers.”

Curiously, LaVey also sees the potential for Gentiles faking having Jewish ancestry in order to claim a kind of stolen valor prestige as he sees the Jews of the 20th Century as winners:

“Gentiles without a drop of Jewish blood might concoct genealogical evidence of a Jewish great-grandfather, thus making them by heredity, generational Satanists. It could become even more desirable than having a great-great-grandmother who was burned at the stake as a witch. And why more desirable? Because Grandpa was a winner, Grandma was a loser. Grandpa may have been a Jew, but he was a survivor and maybe even made something special of himself, despite his devil’s name. “

Finally, towards the end of the essay LaVey makes a reference to the White Nationalist phrase Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG) while discussing that the children of mixed Jewish and Gentile backgrounds will need a place to go:

“It will become easier and more convincing for any Satanist to combine a Jewish lineage with a Nazi aesthetic, and with pride rather than with guilt and misgiving. The die is cast with the vast numbers of children of mixed Jewish/Gentile origins. They need a place to go. They need a tough identity. They won’t find it in the Christian church, nor will they find it in the synagogue. They certainly won’t find acceptance among identity anti-Christian anti-Semites who use noble, rich, and inspirational Norse mythology as an excuse and vehicle to rant about the “ZOG.””¹⁰

After this essay a major letdown comes in the form of the very promising-sounding “The Jewish Question? Or Things My Mother Never Taught Me”. The essay almost entirely covers the purported phenomenon of Jews who have been attracted to National Socialism, from its height in the Third Reich to its less than stellar attempts at revivals within the American White Nationalist movements, as well antecedents of Jewish antisemites in European history. LaVey writes of these situations as “Satanic food for thought”. The most striking passage from this essay involves the Protocols of the Elders of Zion:

“The first time I read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, my instinctive reaction was, “So what’s wrong with THAT? Isn’t that the way any master plan should work? Doesn’t the public deserve—nay, demand—such despotism?”¹¹

It’s difficult to not see this as simply might-makes-right edgelord gloating—the type that is often employed as a rearguard defense as collectivized populism—but the sentiment has been banked for future references.

V. Miscellaneous Sources and the Question of Identity

The next source that “AWT” cites is something called “A Critical Biography of LaVey: Hypocrisy, Plagiarism and LaVey” by John Smulo, though like the situation with Lucifer Rising there seems to be some confusion on this. It links to a website called The Description, Philosophies and Justification of Satanism by a Vexen Crabtree and specifically to its Criticism and Attacks on Satanism by Various Authors section. The closest page on here that matches the description of the source is Hypocrisy, Plagiarism and LaVey (2001) by John Smith, so this is probably what “AWT” means. According to the page, John Smith is a Baptist pastor and taking a quick look at Smith’s attacks on LaVey it becomes quickly apparent this isn’t a primary source. The only reference to LaVey having Jewish heritage is just the same Lawrence Wright profile and confused Lucifer Rising citation. In fact, it’s obvious here that “AWT” copied and pasted word for word the citation John Smith used into the Wikipedia talk page.

The last very relevant source from “AWT” we can look at, as everything after is rather redundant, is a link to a page called Anton LaVey: Legend and Reality which was written by Anton LaVey’s daughter Zeena, and her then-husband, the musician Nikolas Schreck. A Washington Post article from 1998 appears to corroborate this as a real document by them, though its utility here is somewhat minimal. It mostly affirms many of the things that Lawrence Wright uncovered, which Zeena was eager to do due to her falling out with her father.¹² A couple of things to draw from the document however are confirmation of his parents’ names (Michael and Gertrude Levey) and that among LaVey’s outlandish claims were that he was a “Transylvanian Gypsy” and had come from postwar Germany. The entire document is a rather extensive confirmation that LaVey’s claims about his life were almost all entirely lies. On the topic of Zeena and Nikolas Schreck however, there was another passage from Lucifer Rising that appears to lend even more context to the inter-family turmoil and to the LaVey essays as not being just trolling thought experiments but possible expressions of genuine political sentiments:

“The full story behind this very public and bitter schism is probably only known to those involved. LaVey had been through a bitter divorce from Zeena’s mother and the court proceedings were dragging on. He was spending increasing amounts of time with his secretary and biographer, Blanche Barton, who would later bear him a child. Zeena criticised Barton’s biography of LaVey, The Secret Life of a Satanist, deriding ‘the sickeningly repetitive flattery she (he) extends to Zionism, Bolshevism, and the state of Israel while safely negating any Norse or Teutonic mythology’. The rift seemed to be both personal and ideological.”¹³

After the posting of all of these sources, we resume the Wikipedia editor slap fight as the user “jeanne”, who self-describes herself as a LaVeyan Wikipedian who is interested in restoring the Romanov and Bourbon dynasties replies to “AWT” with:

“People are free to capitalise on whichever part of their ancestry they feel defines them as an individual. If he didn't feel that his Jewish heritage helped his image, maybe his chose not to mention it in his books. It's really no big deal. I was born in California, yet on my user page I identify as Irish due to my lineage being about 3/4 Irish. It's a personal thing. I'm not ashamed of being American.”

This isn’t an answer though and it isn’t how we handle biographies. When dealing with a figure like Anton LaVey, who made a lot of his claims about his personal life in the service of his career, you cannot just take what they believe about themselves and reprint it at face value, especially when his writings have shown more than a few thoughts on identity and its meaning. LaVey either has Jewish ancestry or he doesn’t, and so far the evidence would seem to indicate that he does. If this didn’t matter, you wouldn’t care. If this didn’t matter, the identity of George Santos would be taken at face value.

VI. The Secret Life of a Satanist

The next part of the fight on this, which actually was earlier than the posting of the sources we just went through¹⁴, brings us to a question that is asked and answered by an anonymous user.¹⁵ The anonymous editor writes:

“"During this time, it has been alleged, he was involved in underground Zionist groups in San Francisco which helped smuggle arms to the Irgun during the Israeli War of Independence."

This "has been alleged" by whom?! This strikes me on the face as an easy anti-Semitic smear, attempting to link the state of Israel to a noted Satanist. (And a quick Google offers little but Wikipedia mirrors and white supremacist sites.) Sources, anyone?

... Update: To answer my own question: it seems to have been alleged by LaVey himself, via the official biography... objection withdrawn”

This book, the “official biography”, is The Secret Life of a Satanist and was the source that I previously mentioned that “AWT” had confusingly smashed together with Lucifer Rising. Barton was LaVey’s third wife and this biography was published while LaVey was still alive, which means that this source is authorized by LaVey himself so we have to be critical with anything written in it owing to LaVey’s pathological need to self-mythologize and invent his image. Reading this biography after you’ve read the Rolling Stone piece, you are struck by how self-serving the biography is and how enamored with her husband that Blanche Barton was. You get why Zeena may have been annoyed with it. I then noticed another issue when I began taking notes and pulling quotes out and getting their citations ready. The original 1990 biography and the 2014 reprint are different from each other. Blanche Barton had rewritten chunks of the biography due to the amount of objective falsehoods that had been exposed in LaVey’s biography since its original printing. The most noticeable change you’ll first see is in the second paragraph of the first chapter, where the names of LaVey’s parents have been corrected from Augusta and Joe to Gertrude and Michael. Additionally within that paragraph, Barton adds subsequent information about Anton LaVey never being born Anthony Szandor LaVey but as Howard Stanton Levey.¹⁶ For the purposes of this article I will be using the 2014 revised biography.

The second paragraph of the first chapter, as I alluded to, gives us a brief history of LaVey’s lineage. From the chapter titled “Satanists Are Born, Not Made”:

Gertrude LaVey and her husband Michael, a liquor distributor, raised Tony as they would any other bright, even-tempered boy, attempting to instill useful middle-class values without pressing any particular religious dictates on him. By the time he was seven, he grew absorbed with tales of the supernatural and occult, which would obsess him for the rest of his life. Unable to fully understand what he read because of his young age, he consulted his maternal grandmother, Luba Kolton (born Lupescu-Primakov, from a Gypsy father and a Jewish mother), who regaled Tony with the mysteries of her Transylvanian homeland…Accounts of bloody battles fought against Turkish and Russian invaders, between Hungary and Romania over the rights to rule, spurred Tony’s imagination. His grandmother also disclosed tales of the eccentrics in his own family— her late husband, Boris Kolton, a Trotskyite and lifelong iconoclast from the ancient Togarma Tribe in Georgia (from whom Togare, the famous Eurasian wild animal trainer, took his name), and her brother who traveled with carnivals and circuses from the Black Sea to Hungary as a bear trainer…Though originally born Howard Stanton Levey, Tony very early dropped the “Howard” as not really suiting his personality and, by the age of ten, adopted the middle name of Szandor to honor a colorful relative of Romanian heritage. He was already signing his last name “LaVey” as his Uncle Bill did, adding a flash of French panache.¹⁷

Things begin to click when you realize that after dropping Howard, Stanton easily becomes Anton as a nickname, and then subsequently Tony as a shortened form when people are led to believe your name is the exotic Eastern European flavored Anton. Outside of that, there’s a lot going on in this paragraph that needs to be examined. First of all, from the words of his own wife and in his own authorized biography we have an admission of partial Jewish ancestry. On his Wikipedia page, the only ancestry that is listed for him is Ukrainian and Georgian, this in spite of the fact that the previous paragraph in the authorized biography states “Anton LaVey was a mixture of French, Alsatian, German, Russian and Romanian stock.”¹⁸ The present Wikipedia article provides no citations for Ukrainian and Georgian ancestry (though this paragraph does claim that his grandfather was Georgian). It begs the question of why Jewish isn’t relevant here when figures like Oswald Spengler, who was only 1/4 Jewish, is listed as a German of Jewish descent on Wikipedia.

That’s not the only odd thing about this paragraph however. Barton claims that LaVey’s grandfather was a member of “the ancient Togarma Tribe in Georgia”. This is a largely Biblical notion, with the figure Togarmah listed as one of the descendants of Noah and being reckoned by some medieval scholars as the legendary father of the Anatolian and Caucasian peoples, Georgians being one of those people. The issue in having a modern person claim they are descended from the “Togare Tribe in Georgia” is that it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to self-describe like that, especially when Georgian would work just fine and make much more sense. To illustrate the absurdity of calling someone a member of the ancient Togarma Tribe it would be like someone with Greek ancestry saying their grandfather was born of the ancient Javan Tribe in Greece. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Additionally, Kolton isn’t really a Georgian surname, it doesn’t have any of the linguistic hallmarks that you expect to see in a Georgian name. By contrast, while there is the Anglo-Irish surname of Colton with a C, Kolton with K cannot be said to be related to it as the surname Kolton was an in-use surname within the territories the Russian Empire controlled, of which Georgia was one of them. The surname Kolton will come up as a Polish or Ashkenazi name, but when you search for books that contain dictionaries of names, it is almost always considered a Jewish name. Certainly the fact that his grandfather, Boris Kolton, was a Trotskyite likely lends credence to the fact that Boris Kolton was probably Jewish.

The issue of LaVey’s maternal grandparents comes up later in the talk page at the very end of the section on Jewish ancestry. “Smamuel123” links to a Find A Grave page that shows the grave of a “Baris Coulton” with a clearly Jewish headstone at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Los Angeles. Baris Coulton is easily Anglicized from Boris Kolton, or Koltonoff as it is rendered here. Wikipedia power user “Binksternet” replies that Find a Grave isn’t a credible source. This is a fair objection in and of itself, but the grave page is accompanied with a death certificate and death notices that seems to be strong corroboration. Everything about it fits, especially when the present version of his Wikipedia article states his mother’s maiden name is “Coultron” (almost certainly a typo of Coulton). Still it’s a reasonable objection. That really shouldn’t matter though, should it? LaVey’s own biography states Jewish heritage. Baddeley’s book states Jewish heritage. Wright’s journalism mentions Jewish heritage. Does the amount matter when people with small amounts of Jewish heritage have it listed in their Wikipedia bios?

At any rate, there were two other quotations that were pulled from this biography that still need to be examined that were referenced in the talk page. The first we can breeze through as we have already established LaVey’s birth name. What “AWT” quotes:

But it was Sir Basil Zaharoff that became a main focus in LaVey’s life, so much so that, many years later, he opened The Satanic Witch with an homage to Zaharoff as one who knew how to use the power of women to his advantage. LaVey’s grandson, born in 1978, was named “Stanton Zaharoff” in his honor.¹⁹

“AWT” explains why he zeroes in on this quote:

“When referring to LaVey’s grandson’s first name, Barton says that he was named after a character in William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley. Ibid., 42. What Barton fails to mention in both instances is that “Stanton” was Anton LaVey’s middle birth name. Because Barton was LaVey’s live in lover and here the author of his “authorized biography”, the failure to do so is significant because it further goes to prove a deliberate repression of pertinent information for the purposes of advancing LaVey’s self-created “autobiographical” details.”

And “AWT” is correct on this. The 1990 version does say “LaVey memorialized his friendship with Gresham in the names of his daughter and grandson—Zeena and Stanton—named after characters in Gresham’s other famous carnival novel, Nightmare Alley”. In fact, Barton retained this line in the 2014 reprint. I suspected that the character of Stanton in the novel may have actually been an ode to Anton LaVey as the two were supposedly friends, but it doesn’t look like the years of when they knew each other align just right. It might actually just be a coincidence. At any rate, we may move on.

The other alleged quote ended up having more context than was provided. A previous version of his Wikipedia page had said "During this time, it has been alleged, he was involved in underground Zionist groups in San Francisco which helped smuggle arms to the Irgun during the Israeli War of Independence." This appears to be mostly accurate to the biographies (the 1990 and 2014 versions are the same in this respect), but there is some context to these quotes, not that it makes it much more nuanced than it needs to be. Per Barton:

“Through friends, he became involved with militant Israeli groups, some of which were running guns to the newly emerged nation— organizations with names like Betar, Hashomer Hatzair, Poale Zion, the Stern Gang, and Irgun— some of which had already been likened to the Nazis due to their ferocious tactics. Paradoxically, at this same time LaVey was playing piano for reunions of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, those Americans whose idealism led them to Spain in the ’30s to fight for what they thought right, though irrevocably branded as leftist. It was here Anton met men like Dalton Trumbo and Alvah Bessie, two of the most notorious members of the “Hollywood Ten.” Bessie worked lights at the gatherings, unable to find work anywhere else. Anton’s knowledge that he was being filmed by the FBI as he walked into the meeting halls didn’t seem to deter him.”²⁰

There is something comical about this passage, namely that Barton finds a paradox between “militant Israeli groups” and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as though there is a gulf of difference between them. One could try to contrast the two through a malleable ideological lens to try and set them apart, but the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had a very Jewish component to it. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive puts the number of Jewish volunteers at one-third of the force, at a time when Jews would have been no more than approximately 3.5% of the American population. Additionally, in 1972 the International Conference of the Jewish Fighters in the International Brigades in Spain occurred in Tel Aviv, with a five member delegation from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (Abe Osheroff, Fredericka Martin, Bill Sennet, Saul Wellman, and Milton Wolff).²¹ While I could not find any Jewish veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who went on to serve in any of these groups, the American League for a Free Palestine, which was established by Irgun member Hillel Kook, attempted to create a George Washington Legion modeled explicitly on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.²² At any rate, it is strangely coincidental that Anton LaVey would fall in with ardent Zionist fighters when his Jewish ancestry is apparently incidental and not-at-all noteworthy, according to the Wikipedia editors.

This isn’t the only passage that makes mention of Zionism though. LaVey’s exposure to the Zionist gunrunners continues on in the next two paragraphs:

“The outcasts Anton played for appreciated his enthusiasm and regaled him with stories of the partisans who fought in the International Brigades, hoping that some bit of them would survive through him. LaVey recalled, “The whole thing was very much like the escapades in old movies like The Woman on Pier 13. There were two main rendezvous spots in San Francisco: a Jewish Community Center and a Workers’ Collective downtown, where fellows would come in off the boat and went right down to meet contacts in the library of one of these places. I would be hired to play for a fashion show or variety show, and then I’d get through and go right down to the docks where crates of guns were being loaded onto ships to Israel. Many of the guns were ones that had been ‘liberated’ during the war by American soldiers and were slated as DEWAT (deactivated war trophies). But before they had a chance to be officially deactivated they were cosmolined up and sent to Israel. They’d wind up in a crate marked ‘menorahs’ or something— mostly German MP 40s and P-38s, but even Japanese Nambus, anything they could get their hands on. Afterwards, I’d get letters of praise from the fashion show organizers saying how much I’d added to their presentation; little did they know what I’d been doing after their show.”²³

A very bizarre passage occurs another two paragraphs into this recollection, involving the family of famous Israeli Commander Moshe Dayan:

“I felt a culmination of that whole episode in my life many years later, shortly after The Satanic Bible came out. I met with Assaf Dayan, actor son of Israel’s legendary Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and he was glowing about the book, agreed with everything in it. He said it was exactly the philosophy they practiced, were forced to practice, in modern Israel. He extended an invitation for me to stay at his family home in Tel Aviv whenever I wished.”²⁴

Attempting to even research the veracity of this I quickly discovered that the only places that referenced it were websites and books of very questionable repute. It’s not that they are wrong to mention this alleged episode, but simply they take it at face value when the fact is that nothing that LaVey alleges should ever be taken at face value. Of all the anecdotes, this one comes across as the most self-serving in a string of self-serving anecdotes. A famous actor son of a famous Israeli commander telling Anton LaVey personally that Israel practices the philosophy underpinning LaVeyan Satanism? Feels a little on the nose, as it were. It occupies a strange space where many right-wing Jews make similar Nietzschean-type arguments to persuade American right-wingers to view Israel as a will-to-power state they should both support and emulate, while at the same time difficult to believe that a clout-chaser and proven pathological liar like Anton LaVey would have had an experience like this. Despite all that, I am once again forced to ask if Anton LaVey’s Jewish ancestry has no relevance that needs to be edited out of the internet page people are most likely to engage him on? Why does a story like this exist? LaVey felt it was important enough to signal to Zionists that Zionists loved him.

VII. The So-Called Skeptics

We are beginning to wind down now on this Wikipedia editor fight as we come to the most important editor involved in this controvery, “Got2Bthere”. “Got2Bthere”, looking at their edit history, is so heavily invested in reverting and revising the Wikipedia pages of LaVey family members, ritual magic, and the Church of Satan that over 75% of their 210 Wikipedia edits are devoted to some aspect of this topic, a phenomenon which has been going on for over ten years. In the debate of the talk page, “Got2Bthere” has this to say as to why LaVey having Jewish ancestry doesn’t count:

The official biography is known to have many inaccuracies, unsourced and unverifiable statements therein. I repeat what I stated below: Most families of genuinely orthodox Jewish faith maintain proper geneology charts and records as is necessary to the continuance of the religion, particularly on the mother's side. LaVey's mother is listed as Russian and Ukranian, but not Jewish. LaVey's failure to ever in his lifetime produce geneaology references, religious geneaology, bar-mitzvah documentation, or anything more substantial than an off-the-cuff remark in an interview for shock value, does not bode well for the veracity of the claim.

If Ms. Barton would like to produce Mr. LaVey's documentation or certification of his heritage, she's more than welcome to do so. However, there are just as many other earlier written sources prior to Barton's volume where LaVey himself claims he is not jewish…

Claims of LaVey's Jewish heritage stem primarily from his authorized biography by Barton published by the one Church of Satan in-house publishing source (Feral House). Therefore it is not a reliable source for this claim, falling under Wiki's “Questionable sources” and “Self-published sources” Wiki definition: Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts, or which lack meaningful editorial oversight, or those with an apparent conflict of interest."

…

There are many historical comparisons to figures such as L. Ron Hubbard, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Jim Jones, Aleister Crowley, Carlos Castaneda, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, etc. all of whom have followers who, to this day despite exposure to the contrary, uphold falsified histories. So why might it not also be the case in this instance where we have a model of someone who admittedly made it a part of his philosophy to create one's own history?

Vote in favour of removal of claims until proven beyond a doubt.

Since when are extensive genealogical records from Orthodox Jews required to establish a mention of Jewish ancestry in an early life section? When has Wikipedia ever applied this standard? How many more sources are required to be allowed to establish a single mention of this? Milo Yiannopoulos’ Jewish ancestry is self-reported; is it time to revert his page? Allegations of “weev” having Jewish ancestry have been both claimed and denied by him at various points in his life while the citation for him is self-reporting from his mother, whom he is not exactly on the best of terms with; is it time to revert his page? I cite these two figures in particular not to start any fights but to point out that Wikipedia allows the kind of self-reporting for controversial figures who are also known for shocking people and making off-the-cuff remarks that “Got2Bthere” claims is the reason you can’t take LaVey’s claim of Jewish ancestry seriously. If that’s the standard, then apply the standard to Milo and weev and either revert their Wikipedia pages or edit LaVey’s to properly reflect that self-reporting in both primary and secondary sources is legitimate.

To the “Got2Bthere” objections, an anonymous single edit user provides a post on X from the official Church of Satan account which states “Anton LaVey was raised in a secular Jewish household and observed early on how Christians used the term "satanic" to describe anyone and anything they didn't like, and saw the potential of embracing it rather than disputing it.”²⁵ “Binksternet” amusingly sweeps back in in response to this post and creates a separate section called “Not Jewish” to provide this response to the anonymous user, stating that “the Jewish connection is too small, too distant to mention. His grandparents and parents were not Jewish, and LaVey was not raised Jewish.” User “Hob Gadling” (whose own editor page presently equates anti-Zionism with Nazism to the point of drawing a comparison between pro-Palestinian campus activists and the Nazis) joins this discussion and actually complicates the issues for “Binksternet” with a funny “well, actually”:

“according to Judaic law, being Jewish is inherited via the maternal line, so, "too small, too distant" is exactly wrong in this case. His grandparents and parents were not Jewish, and LaVey was not raised Jewish, on the other hand, is more relevant. But since all this is WP:OR, the real question is: do we have a reliable source that calls him Jewish? If not, let's forget it. An IP gave a Twitter source above, but that's worthless.”

In an effort to explain that LaVey is not Jewish because he supposedly wasn’t raised Jewish, “Hob Gadling” manages to point out, accidentally, that LaVey would have to be considered Jewish due to Judaic laws on matrilineal descent which were where most of the original claims of partial Jewish ancestry originally rested: through his mother’s family. An anonymous user then jumps into the debate to point out that Wikipedia does consider self-published sources to be credible, so the Church of Satan tweet should be considered credible, to which “Hob Gadling” gives us this howler: “But not from LaVey. And The Church of Satan is not the one with the Jewish ancestor.” So now the official organization X account cannot be considered credible when speaking about its own founder because the founder is dead and the words are not coming directly from his own mouth. But we were just told that the words from his own mouth in his own authorized biography are also not credible. So what sources exactly are allowed to establish this? Does the Davidic line for Jesus need to be removed because the claim comes from the Gospels?

VIII. The Black Pope and Genealogical Records

We finally come to the last relevant post in this talk page from an anonymous user who amusingly complicates the skeptic case even more with a contradictory notion that makes it clear the skeptics will do whatever it takes to make sure that nothing can be taken into account or considered to be credible.

“The above isn't "proof". Burton Wolfe, a Jewish author and friend of LaVey who wrote the first biography of LaVey (The Devils Avenger), and an updated edition (The Black Pope) after LaVey's death, said that there was no evidence that LaVey's mother was Jewish; in fact the claim has never been made. Jewish heritage is acknowledged to be matrilineal and LaVey alluded to himself as being of mixed Jewish-gentile heritage. As only LaVey's father was Jewish, it does not seem accurate to refer to laVey as "jewish" — secular or otherwise — but rather to acknowledge his mixed heritage. He would not be regarded as Jewish by other jews.”

So now it’s Anton LaVey’s father who is Jewish but because it only counts if it’s the mother then Anton LaVey isn’t Jewish. I am once again forced to ask if this is the criteria, then why is Oswald Spengler listed as being of Jewish descent? The criteria of matrilineal Jewish descent that is being arbitrarily applied here would mean that Spengler’s mother would not actually be considered Jewish by these rules as she was only Jewish through her father’s line, meaning the Jewish identity ends with him since she wasn’t raised Jewish, which is the other arbitrary criteria that is being applied here. This whole thing is rather silly and the fact that plenty of people with mixed heritages are listed as having Jewish heritage on their Wikipedia pages highlights the absurdity to which these editors are going to make sure that it never goes on Anton LaVey’s biographical information.²⁶

Let us examine these Burton Wolfe books however. Well, one of them, because there is no digital version of the original biography—1974’s The Devil’s Avenger—much less a scan.²⁷ So instead we will have to only examine the 2008 “authentic biography” of LaVey, The Black Pope. Burton H. Wolfe is indeed Jewish, as the Wikipedia editors asserted but it is surprisingly difficult to find biographical information on him. When one sees the Wayback Machine archive of his old blogspot, it becomes readily apparent why he probably has a tendency to fall off the face of the earth; he is a little out there, in the Boomer Online sort of way. We have some autobiographical information though from The Black Pope that will help fill in the gaps.

After a painful divorce, Wolfe fell in with the Haight-Ashbury crowd at the height of hippiedom and wrote a book about them, The Hippies. Wolfe then joined the Sexual Freedom League, a sex advocacy organization that was founded by a professor who had been fired for writing a public letter defending premarital sex, Leo Koch²⁸, and a bisexual libertine who would later be convicted of child molestation, Jefferson Poland.²⁹³⁰ Through this motley crew’s sponsored lectures he ended up in the orbit of Anton LaVey, their myriad conversations and friendly gatherings becoming the foundation of The Devil’s Avenger. In reflecting on this work, Wolfe claims most of it was true but some of it was not and with the publication of the Barton works on LaVey and the Church of Satan, he felt compelled to correct the record, both his previous one and hers. He promises, much like Wright did, to reveal the man as he really was.

Wolfe, firstly, once again confirms that Anton LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey and that his parents were Michael Joseph Levey and Gertrude Coulton. Wolfe then throws us something that I cannot find corroborated anywhere else, that Gertrude Coulton’s birth certificate states that she was born to John S. Coulton and Bernadette Crotty. Wolfe does not provide a visual copy of her birth certificate as he did with LaVey’s. So I went digging into the records myself and Wolfe was either very mistaken or is outright lying. I will try to be charitable as it wasn’t as easy to go through records around 2008 compared to now. There was a John S. Coulton and a Bernadette Crotty in Cleveland but they did not have a daughter named Gertrude.

From the 1910 Census:

The Coultons had three daughters, Dorothy, Elinor, and Helen. Not only do none of them have even conceivably the name Gertrude, even within their middle names, Gertrude Coulton’s 1903 birth corresponds here to Dorothy, whose full name was Dorothy Beatrice Coulton and later married into the Gleason family. These records remain consistent with only very minor name discrepancies across the 1930 Census, the 1940 Census, and John S. Coulton’s grave record.

By contrast I was also able to find records for a Gertrude A Coulton that correspond to a woman born in Ohio in 1903, and the results were surprising. Or perhaps not if you’ve had the same hunches I’ve had. Once again from the 1910 Census:

The records for Gertrude A Coulton from Ohio have all of the information that corresponds to both details that were mentioned in Barton’s biography and the Find A Grave. Gertrude’s father was named Baris. And while Gertrude’s mother here is named Lula instead of Luba, across her various records she appears as one or the other. What’s different here is that Lula/Luba is not cited as being from Romania or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which would be one of the assumed origin points, but from “Russ-Yiddish”. In the 1910 Census, people from outside the United States had the country of origin placed first and the language they spoke second. I’ll attach some more examples to show this, but both Baris Coulton and Lula are listed as Yiddish speakers, meaning they’re both Jewish.

1910 Census in California. Examples you can see are “Nor Norwegian”, “Ger German”, and “Can English” as an example of countries placed first and languages second.

1910 Census in New York. You can see “Rus Pol” for from Russia but speaks Polish and “Aus German”. If Lulu was actually from Transylvania, her census entry would have likely read “Aus Rumanian”, “Aus German”, or “Aus Yiddish” depending on whatever they would have claimed their native tongue to be.

Getting deeper into covering the controversy over LaVey having any Jewish heritage, and if that means anything, Wolfe states “the issue of Jewish identification is more complex” and prefaces the discussion with saying scholars “have thrown up their hands and said that the only way that a person can be identified as Jewish or not Jewish is to examine her or his family background. If parents are identified as Jews, they say, then their children are Jews.”³¹ He goes on to say:

“Where does that leave Anton? Since his father's name is so very Jewish, and since the information about him from Anton's stepbrother, Owen Mayer, seems to point so conclusively to identification of Michael as a Jew, it is virtually certain that Anton was the son of a Jew. The available information about Anton's mother, on the other hand, indicates the opposite: she was gentile. Gertrude was at one time a fairly common name for Jewish women. My mother was named Gertrude, and her entire family consisted of Jews. But Coulton is not a Jewish name. Coulton is a name that traces back to English gentiles, mostly Protestants. I have never come across any Jew named Coulton.” So, maybe the answer to the question of whether or not Anton should be identified as Jewish or gentile is that he was half Jewish and half gentile. It would have made no difference, in any event, had he stated openly that he is part Jewish so that the question about it would not have persisted.

I can’t help but be suspicious of Wolfe’s motivations here, especially after the previous confusion over the Gertrude Coultons. I find it hard to believe that a man of Jewish descent in America is unaware that it was routine for immigrants to Anglicize their names either in simply spelling or outright changing it, often as a direct translation of their original names. My own Russian-identified family came from the Podolia region of what is now Western Ukraine and transliterated their names to very non-standard English spellings to make it easier for Americans to be able to pronounce it. If the Coulton family are Jewish immigrants from the former Russian Empire, then the spelling of Coulton (an established English name) is a very likely substitute for a common Ashkenazi name, Kolton. This is something we’ve already established as it’s the name Barton used for LaVey’s grandparents. Wolfe mentions this by way of making inaccurate statements:

Nor is there any evidence to support Anton's claim that he was descended from "gypsy" and "Mongolian" grandparents, or from a "Transylvanian grandmother" named "Luba Kolton," who were in some way responsible for Anton's father being a "gypsy." The name "Kolton" is suspiciously like Coulton, the name of Anton's mother. And Anton's father, born in the U.S., was in no way a gypsy.³²

Wolfe made it clear that this book was in some ways a response to Barton’s, so my suspicions are heightened when he completely misrepresents what Barton’s book said. Barton explicitly said that Luba Kolton was LaVey’s maternal grandmother, so this has no bearing on Anton LaVey’s father.³³ This is especially strange when Wolfe does end up acknowledging this aspect without discussing what was actually said in The Secret Life of a Satanist:

“But the woman who was the companion and practically the common law wife of Anton's for more than 20 years, Diane Hegarty/aka Diane LaVey [, LaVey’s second wife]…has vigorously denied that Anton deliberately tried to conceal his Jewish roots. Indeed, he told a number of individuals, including me, that he had a Jewish grandmother. And Diane told me that when she questioned him about the issue of his Jewishness that had come to her attention, Anton laughed and said of course he was partly Jewish.”³⁴

Wolfe then gets into LaVey’s lies about his own family’s name in a direct challenge to Barton. Wolfe refers to a photograph that was in The Secret Life of a Satanist:

“In an attempt to explain away his name deception by characterizing it as merely a change from Levey to LaVey, Anton posed for a photograph, reproduced in The Secret Life of a Satanist, of himself standing next to a sign containing the capitalized letters "LE VEY" beside an unidentified road in an unidentified village or town. According to the caption under the photo, the name LeVey was assigned by immigration officers to Anton's father at Ellis Island, where "officials characteristically renamed" an immigrant by her or his last place of residence. That is more nonsense. It is only true that when immigration officers at Ellis Island could not ascertain the name of an immigrant because it could not be read and the immigrant could not speak English, the officials supplied a name from a list. But the names were people names, not place names. The LeVey tale was concocted by Anton so that he could claim that he merely changed his name to LaVey by substituting an a for the first e. That story falls apart because the original name for his family used by Anton before he switched to "LeVey" was "Boehm," that name was perfectly readable, and so there would have been no reason for an immigration official to change it to LeVey. Moreover, there was never any capital V in the name, and the place in France is spelled Le Vey, with Le separated from Vey.”³⁵

Wolfe is obviously correct here. Barton even removed the photograph in the 2014 edition of the biography.

From the 1990 edition of The Secret Life of a Satanist

Wolfe allegedly spoke to LaVey’s stepbrother in order to discover the reasoning for this:

So, what was the true reason for Anton's changing his name from Levey to LaVey? Anton's stepbrother, Owen Mayer, an attorney practicing law in the San Francisco Bay Area, offered this conclusion in an interview with me: "Anton changed the spelling and pronunciation of Levey to LaVey for theatrical reasons and to conceal his Jewish roots."³⁶

This seems odd at first because LaVey always allowed for some mention of having Jewish roots to be made. LaVey claimed partial Jewish ancestry in Barton’s book through Luba Kolton. While speculative, the obvious reasoning for why LaVey would only claim very partial Jewish lineage lies in the type of image he wanted to project and mythologize. A little bit of Jewish heritage from exotic Dracula lands is a spice, but having two Jewish parents born and raised in America, even if their parents are immigrants themselves, just makes you another Jew in America. You’re Howard Stanton Levey, a Jewish entertainer in America instead of Anton Szandor LaVey, this dark and mysterious Old World phantasm with a diversity of roots in ancient Eastern tribes of the Caucasus and Steppes, dark Transylvanian forests, the Western Occult Tradition, and Gypsy magic and esoteric Jewish mysticism. A little bit of Jewish heritage makes you exotic, but too much just makes you a Jew.

On the topic of LaVey’s father, Wolfe quotes the step-brother:

“Can we be certain, I asked Mayer, that Mike Levey is properly identified as a Jew? "Let's just say," Mayer replied, "that maybe it takes a Jew to know a Jew. Mike had a Jewish schnozz, he looked Jewish, he told Jewish jokes, and he could effect Jewish intonation in his speech quite well.""³⁷

Well, his name is also Levey, an extremely common Jewish surname that denotes Levite descent. I have not discussed his father’s side much at all in this essay, but it’s difficult to imagine that he was anything other than Jewish. So if Anton LaVey is Jewish through both his father and his mother’s side, then maybe the non-Jewish member of his family is the paternal grandmother? Maybe that’s where that supposed Christian Scientist aunt is.³⁸

There’s one other passage within The Black Pope that is worth looking at because it is another example of the recurring theme of what LaVey felt his Satanism had to offer to the Jewish people. Wolfe tells us of a woman he knows whom he pseudonymously named Lilith, “a haughty Jewess” (his own words) who was a divorcee who had joined the Church of Satan. Her father’s experiences in World War II in Europe had made her angry at the Jewish religion. Wolfe recalls the conversation as such:

"But that's what Judaism does. It teaches people to be humble, flatten their egos, and avoid pride because it's sinful. And you can see the hypocrisy of it, especially, in the synagogue: all of these super-wealthy Jews in mink coats and flashy jewelry driving up to the synagogue in their Cadillacs and going inside to give thanks for their daily bread. Well, they have expensive egg rolls every morning. All they're doing is poking fun at poor people who really need the kind of thing they're giving thanks for.

"I also became fed up with Judaism because of the passivity it causes. Every time the Jews get in trouble, they go to the synagogue and tell each other 'look what happened to us in this or that time of history, and we still survive and we are strong; this, too, shall pass.' It's all baloney. That is what happened to them in Europe. I saw it. I was a little girl and didn't understand it then. Now I do. If they really were strong they would have stood up and fought back. I am proud now of the Israelis because they are fighting for their rights. But the Jews elsewhere are hypocrites."

Perhaps the Jews of Israel practice Satanism more than Judaism, I suggested to Lilith.

"That's right," she agreed. "Satanism is the correct religion to have."³⁹

Funny how this theme keeps coming back up.

IX. Michael Aquino

This brings me to—what I thought would be—the end of this journey to unravel this Wikipedia slap fight. It seemed to me there was more than enough evidence to say that Anton LaVey has Jewish heritage, even more than was initially reported. LaVey just doesn’t seem to be the mixed Jew I initially thought, there’s enough to indicate that he was Jewish on both sides and that his invented religion was meant to provide something for people of partial Jewish descent, enough to see a Jewish identification at play in his life. Yet I didn’t want to say case closed just yet. In the process of writing this I was made aware of a couple of other writings to look at, and this ended up being an exercise in how one can get to a mundane truth within an inflammatory subject.

While speaking to a friend about this article and asking him about his thoughts on Satanism and its place in the weird and esoteric underbelly of California, as he is an amateur expert on this subject, he encouraged me to look deeper into what Michael Aquino had to say about it all.⁴⁰ Even mentioning Aquino has all but guaranteed that this article will be noticed by a certain type of people as he has been fodder for many speculations and allegations and it’s easy to understand why. The short story is that Michael Aquino was a U.S. Army officer who was literally involved in psychological operations and joined LaVey's Church of Satan in 1969 while a member of PSYOP/Special Forces. Aquino had been editing their newsletter The Cloven Hoof through the 1970s until 1975 when he had his own perversely Wittenbergian break with LaVey over the selling of initiatory ranks within the Church of Satan.⁴¹ Aquino through the 1980s continued his military career, mixing business with occult pleasures as he used his position to get access to the infamous Wewelsburg Castle and perform a working there:

The reason for my silence during the past month is about to be explained; I have been out of the country. During the first part of October I participated in a series of tours of NATO installations in England, Belgium, and Germany arranged through the World Affairs Council…After the conclusion of the NATO tours, I was able to undertake a long-awaited personal quest…Heinrich Himmler had appropriated a Westphalian castle, the Wewelsburg, and had modified it for ritual and Black Magical activities of the SS.⁴²

After touring the castle he was permitted to spend time alone in the Hall of the Dead, where he performed his Wewelsburg Working. This occult ritual, brought to you by NATO.

Through the 1980s Michael Aquino would become more known to people who follow these topics due to daytime talk shows like Oprah and Geraldo⁴³ as well as a public accusation of sexual abuse by a three-year-old daughter of an army clergyman, for which Aquino was never charged for due to problems with the accusations. This history, as well as his sincere appreciation and practice of the occult and experience in psychological operations (he wrote a book on this called MindWar), has made him fodder for many speculative theories⁴⁴ with respect to powerful institutions and Satanism. It certainly doesn’t help that Michael Aquino deliberately cultivated a Vulcanesque physical appearance meant to spook the squares. He became a fixture of speculative theories about his influence and his connections through the rest of his life, until he seemingly passed away four years ago.

The interest in Michael Aquino here, as he could be an article unto himself, results from his recollections on his time in the Church of Satan, which he cataloged in his self-published and frequently revised work, The Church of Satan.⁴⁵ On our topic of Judaism and the Church of Satan, a number of anecdotes from Aquino come up. The first is from his time as editor of The Cloven Hoof, and the reactions that LaVey’s second wife, Diane Hegarty, had to a piece that Aquino was working on called “The Root of All” for The Cloven Hoof #VI-5, October IX/1974. Aquino originally wrote (emphasis mine):

“Socialism will work only as long as the productive elements are willing to carry the Roobs [sic] along on their backs, which they will do as long as they are able to enjoy at least a certain percentage of their own achievements. When the burden finally gets too heavy - which it will - the productive elements will either emigrate or give up the struggle and become parasites themselves. Emigration has not yet taken place, simply because the United States is still less socialist than any other country, has the highest standard of living, and controls two-thirds of the world’s industrial capital. As socialism gains a constricting hold, however, there will be a backlash phenomenon of catastrophic proportions. At one extreme this may result in an Oliver Cromwell (R. Reagan?), at the other a Hitler. Such a backlash has already taken place in many nations such as Portugal and Argentina. Prime candidates are now the major powers. Keep your eye on England and Italy, two industrialized countries practically immobilized by socialism. In the United States it may take a little longer, but the impetus is there.”

Obviously we don’t have the space to give you a crash course in economics, so you’re going to have to put your brain in gear if you want to understand the detailed processes that forge the aforementioned scenario. One thing to bear in mind: In the short run politics may dictate economics, but in the long run it’s the other way around. Example: The raising of oil export prices by OPEC was almost a foregone conclusion, because Arab deposits in U.S. banks had just been slashed by two successive dollar devaluations on top of the already-high inflation. If you were Sheik al-Yamani, what would you have done?”⁴⁶

The work is a good example of one of the intersections that have occurred with modern Satanism and personality strains of conservative/libertarian thought, such that I’ve uttered the phrase “conservative Satanists” on more than one occasion in the last five years having noticed this phenomenon. The relevance of this to Judaism will be made clear as we examine Aquino’s back-and-forth with the LaVeys on this piece. He was instructed to redact a number of things from this article by Diane Hegarty. Aquino publishes the letter she wrote to him which states (again, emphasis mine):

“For this issue he approved “money, etc.” and the deletion of Teddy Bare. He understands your reasoning [I told him I wholeheartedly agreed] and appreciates the expression of your affection and loyalty to him.

Sometimes Anton does things for the pure perversity of it; he quite enjoys doing exactly the opposite of what people expect of him! And in this case, though he didn’t say so, I expect he thought it might be fun to make the Birchites squirm a bit [or maybe get them quarreling amongst themselves over “this LaVey character”, a la Martello/Bonewits] by giving one of them a plug.⁴⁷

I know he is aware of the stupid “red menace” crap in the book, because he commented to me: “Just when one of these guys might get some intelligent people heeding what he has to say, he throws a brick wall up in their minds against anything valid he might offer when he starts raving about the ‘pinkos’.”

This is not just a rambling aside, but is intended to give you further insight into the nature of the beast. It also leads me to the point that, while you - and I - often don’t follow his reasoning on a particular matter, it is rarely stubbornness or whim on his part. Instead it is backed up by rather complex intellectual strategy. At least I’m never bored!

Now to the no-no’s. Delete “R. Reagan?” after “Cromwell”. Whether this comparison is interpreted as positive or negative, Reagan isn’t a strong enough figure. On the positive side his balms aren’t soothing enough, and on the negative end his waves aren’t big enough. He’s just another android.

Re the Sheik al-Yamani example, the Satanic overview to which Anton was referring [and about which I made the notation] is that villains are created when the need arises. In this case the Sheik’s shekels problem could have been intentionally gauged to force him to take the Villain (Joker/Harlequin) card.”

The other point to consider is that, like it or not, the Jews still control the public media for the most part in this country. [Roger Price, incidentally, falls into that category.] So either use a more “tactful” (pragmatic) example, or at least delete the final sentence (“If you were Sheik …”). Besides all this, when you come right down to it, it’s really people’s kinky “persuasions” that control politics, economy, and everything else.⁴⁸

In discussing this back and forth that he had with the Hegarty and LaVey, Aquino reflects that LaVey's view on the truth was that to LaVey the ends of the intended effect of writing justifies its means in order to actualize that intended effect. Aquino, however, saw value in truth for its own sake and saw problems with this purported pragmatism. Moving onto the requested deletions, Aquino remarks on how prescient the talk of Reagan was in 1974 and quotes from a 1980 issue of The Cloven Hoof where LaVey actually praises president-elect Ronald Reagan for giving him a “good feeling” that he never got with Carter and for having “intelligence”. Was he being cheeky or is this more of that peculiar crossover between Satanism and conservatarianism? At any rate, Aquino then gets into the comments that actually troubled him, the ones that Hegarty made about the Jews:

While I could take or leave a compliment (?) to Ronald Reagan, I was somewhat more disturbed by Diane’s prohibition of anything even potentially offensive to Jews. Sheik al-Yamani, Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia⁴⁹, was troublesome to a great many more people than Jews, and to a great many nations besides Israel. At the same time his dashingly good looks and urbane, cultured manner made him a difficult man to hate. To me he was an excellent example of what a skilled Lesser Magician can do, and I hadn’t given a thought to the religious-lobby angle.

As a Satanist I had long been accustomed to tolerating no sacred cows, and the sudden imposition of one on me from 6114 California Street was startling and irritating. Was this policy from the same man whose Satanic Bible had included:

I gaze into the glassy eye of your fearsome Jehovah and pluck him by the beard; I uplift a broad-axe and split open his worm-eaten skull!

If the Church of Satan were not free to criticize all hypocrisy, falsehood, and corruption - if we could target, say, only Christianity - then we could not pretend to be motivated by the unblemished search for truth. Rather we would be a mere faction presenting a propagandistic facade to competing and opposing factions - in this case an ally of Judaism or even Zionism against the Western Christian tradition.⁵⁰

Aquino evidently balked at the notion that Jews and Zionists were being given special treatment in avoiding offense, stepping over completely Hegarty’s words that they also control the media. To Aquino, the reasoning behind the deletions was essentially a declaration that Satanism was “an ally of Judaism or even Zionism”. Despite these misgivings, Aquino was a loyal soldier for the time being though it’s difficult to imagine that discovering that the founders of Satanism weren’t quite the critical-to-everyone truth seekers he imagined them to didn’t helped fuel the coming split.

The only other reference to Jewish aspects and the Church of Satan relevant to this article that I could find in Aquino’s work, outside of his chapter on Sammy Davis Jr.⁵¹, is in his appendices reprinting a letter from LaVey’s daughter Zeena that was written to Aquino. This material was part and parcel of the acrimonious split between Zeena and her father and his “church”, and goes hand-in-hand with the intersection of figures within this scene who were also interested in the trappings of National Socialism.⁵² In a letter she wrote to Aquino to mend bridges with him, which was the writings that Baddeley had been previously emphasizing in Zeena’s attack on her step-mom Barton, she states (again, emphasis mine):

“The most recent and blatant example of [LaVey’s irresponsibility] may be found in the publication of the absurd catalogue of lies entitled Secret Life of a Satanist by (as told to) Blanche Barton. This fluffy PR release masquerading as a book included, with typical irresponsibility, a photo of my son without ever seeking his or my permission…

…

Another fact conveniently not included is the common knowledge that as the codirector of the Werewolf Order, I have paved a unique path of my own inspired by the Western European magical tradition. These very European magical traditions, which I have always maintained as my own, are of more personal importance to me than the largely Eastern and negative Judæo-Christian imagery still so boringly peddled by the [Church of Satan]. In the desire to appeal to the masses, Barton’s book makes it glaringly clear that the real motive of the Church of Satan is to attract cash from “economic power brokers”; what other reason could justify the sickeningly repetitive flattery she (he) extends to Zionism, Bolshevism, and the state of Israel while safely negating any Norse or Teutonic mythology?”⁵³

The Werewolf Order is a reference to the magical order of her then-husband Nikolas Schrek which was also a reference to his band Radio Werewolf, which was also (probably) a reference to the plans for National Socialist resistance in a conquered Germany called Werwolf. It is interesting to note that if we accept that LaVey was Jewish on both sides, then Zeena is effectively half-Jewish herself, meaning she is exactly the type of person that LaVey was writing essays about who would need Satanism for their identity. The conflict over European magical and pagan traditions contrasted with “Zionism, Bolshevism, and the state of Israelism” in these writings certainly makes one wonder.

While Aquino’s book does not appear to offer any further information on LaVey’s lineage, it does give us context for the familial split between Zeena and her father and an insider’s perspective of how LaVey perceived intersections with Judaism, Zionism, and National Socialism. I chose not to read the entire book or compare differences between the editions, so if there is something more here to glean, that will be up for someone else who wants to carry the research torch to find.

X. Carl Abrahamsson

I was ready to finally close this out when I was once again recommended another book to take a look at. In 2022, the apparently Swedish photographer, writer, and musician Carl Abrahamsson⁵⁴ published Anton LaVey and The Church of Satan, a book that covers Abrahmsson's experiences with LaVey as well interviews from LaVey's friends and relatives as well as ostensibly previously unreleased materials from LaVey himself. I was prepared for a retread of everything that I had previously covered and was pleasantly surprised there was new stuff I could include into this distended research project.

Abrahmsson recounts that when he first met LaVey in late 1989, they had gotten onto the topic of the occult, a passion the two men obviously shared. LaVey read to Abrahamsson from a book called Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath by the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht. The novel depicts the descent into madness of a tortured artist and is accompanied by illustrations that got the book fined for obscenity in the 1920s. LaVey then read to Abrahamsson from A Guide for the Bedevilled, a 1944 book from Ben Hecht that cries out for the plight of the “three million” Jews killed in Europe and condemns the Germans as “pig-eyed” “abominations” who will never be forgiven by time. Reflecting on why LaVey was reading from this book, Abrahmsson says:

“I was not aware of this book at the time. LaVey explained that Hecht had been a staunch anti-anti-Semite and had been active in trying to awaken the powerful Jews of Hollywood to become not only enraged but also engaged in the critical situation in Europe. Alas, to no avail. After the war, Hecht was a rogue Zionist, trying to facilitate the establishment of the State of Israel in every way he could. I knew of Hecht mainly as an author of dark 1920s fiction, and as an Academy Award–winning scriptwriter. Now, LaVey had brought out a wider reflection of this obvious hero of his.”⁵⁵

LaVey is quite the fan of Zionism it seems since if he admires Ben Hecht and the Irgun fighters he claimed to have rubbed shoulders with in San Francisco, then presumably he also admired their insurgency against the British and these sentiments that Ben Hecht expressed towards the British in his “Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine”⁵⁶:

“Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”

Even if you remove the Zionist context, it’s hard to imagine Anton LaVey not celebrating this sentiment.

Abrahamsson then references the essay we previously covered, “The Plan”, stating “LaVey himself was Jewish by birth and at times even expressed Zionist leanings, but at the same time he admired fascist aesthetics from both Italy and Nazi Germany.”⁵⁷ Later in an interview with Peter Gilmore, the current High Priest of the Church of Satan, and thus an authority on his own institution:

“Anton LaVey was raised in a secular Jewish family, one that left behind old-world traditions of dress and observance to become Americanized, and part of that background was an encouragement of freethinking, of valuing the arts, sciences, and education. James Yaffe’s The American Jews was put on the Church of Satan’s reading list so that one could see how a religious group evolved into an ethnic group that would be seen by other groups to hold certain valuations and aesthetics— what Doktor [LaVey] thought might be the path forward for Satanism in the centuries to come.”⁵⁸

I assume Peter Gilmore is probably the one behind the official Church of Satan X account or, if not, he is dictating it on some level as the “secular Jewish family” line is one that was repeated often by the account.

Further into the interviews, we have one from LaVey’s son with Blanche Barton, Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey,⁵⁹ though Abrahamsson just calls him Xerxes LaVey. As Xerxes was a child when his father died, his recollections about him are limited but we learn a bit about Anton from the way Xerxes describes himself and his family. According to Xerxes:

"As I have gotten older I have taken ownership of my personal history, and I do not particularly mind people knowing my background...it is odd to meet people who expect me to be this brooding Gothic caricature, or a “devout Satanist” who constantly name-drops my father only to be met with an outdoorsy yet bookish young Jewish man...But I am very well aware of the privileges that I have as somebody whose parents were socially well connected, and I present as white and well educated on top of that…I identify as a secular humanist, nonpracticing Jew, and not particularly devout Buddhist...I have long held a Left-Libertarian streak. There is certainly a lot that I could agree with my father on as far as not having a herd mentality or ensuring that oneself is capable of self-reliance, but I don’t consider myself a Satanist or occultist as such."⁶⁰

Xerxes later in the interview also outright refers to his father as a “Slavic Jew” who had a “very stable upbringing with a middle-class family”.⁶¹ He also brings up the issues of genealogy, stating of his own family’s history:

All I know is that my father’s immediate ancestry was from Ukraine and Russia on his mother’s side, and his father was Jewish, with his family having come from France. Supposedly, I have family from Romania or Georgia, but I am not sure of the authenticity of that information since I have yet to find corroborating documents.⁶²

From his own son’s mouth we have doubt being cast on the veracity of those Romanian and Georgian claims. Someone let the Wikipedia editors know that those categories need to be removed from his page as the man’s own son is saying “citation needed”. This also now stands in contrast to what we're told about LaVey having mixed heritage. I initially took that claim at face value as it seemed to track with how LaVey viewed his "church" as a harbor for children of mixed marriages. Perhaps then he was thinking of his children as his wives were not Jewish, but if that's the case, it would appear that Xerxes at the very least resolved this for himself as he views himself as a Jewish man.

Before moving on from the Xerxes interview, there was one other passage which caught my eye. By the end of the interview, Abrahamsson asks Xerxes what issues Xerxes would have had with his father and he answers on the topic of 'socio-politics'. He disagrees with his father that it's impossible to be apolitical the way his father conceived himself to be. After comparing his father's Social Darwinism to his more egalitarian leftism, Xerxes gets into the crux of the issue he has with the image his father cultivated:

“He certainly had some questionable sources as well, and I do not see why he felt so influenced by a work like Might Is Right, given how incredibly anti-Semitic, sexist, and racist it was. Nor do I understand Satanists’ fascination with the incorporation of fascistic imagery such as the Wolfsangel. At least that was around before the Nazis. The Sonnenrad on the other hand, which I’ve seen used by Satanists from multiple groups, was commissioned by Himmler himself. I suppose the goal is to be as shocking as possible, but it is quite bizarre given my family’s heritage. I know it is not just the [Church of Satan] that has “fashy” folks interested in it; the problem springs up in all sorts of occult and pagan groups. I suppose that it’s due to their anti-Abrahamic nature coupled with the fact that they’re seen as so edgy, so they attract people from the political fringes. Ironic, considering it’s a philosophy that espouses equal rights and sexual liberation. Perhaps the Church should make more efforts to call out bad actors, but I get the feeling they don’t care too much about how the general public views them and would rather handle such matters internally. It is worth recognizing these things. That all being said, I have certainly met bigots from other philosophies as well, and the majority of Satanists I’ve met are good-natured and tolerant people.

The Church of Satan was accepting of trans people and other people from the queer community long before most other groups were. Not only that: it boasted members from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds at a time when desegregation had barely been passed as judicial law, much less as practice. Now, both the [Church of Satan] and Satanic Temple have publicly advocated for LGBTQ rights, and the [Church of Satan] endorsed Black Lives Matter. So I am sure my father and I would have found common ground on shared interests and more general cultural liberalism.”⁶³

Personally, I think the son understands the father better than anyone else has.

XI. Conclusion

And finally we come at the end of all this.

Throughout the writing of this I grappled with the point of what I was doing. Anton LaVey having Jewish heritage wasn’t really something that was in question to me, people who have known him have openly spoken about it for years, so what it comes down to is the desire to prove a point. A desire to show the lengths at which the gatekeepers of knowledge will go to protect a constructed and mythological image. In a way, LaVey won his long war. What the Church of Satan effectively did, and continues to do, has been thoroughly normalized (just look at what it and the subsequent Satanic Temple have done with their various activisms in courts and schools) and the advice he gave on self-mythologizing largely succeeding despite the numerous punctures to it and revelations about him in his lifetime and after his death.

LaVey laid out his own philosophy of this notion in The Satanic Witch, in a way that makes it difficult to believe that he wasn’t projecting. On the idea of changing your name to something more interesting, Howard Stanton Levey, of definitive middle-class Jewish upbringing, writes that “to say that a man’s name is an extension of his ego is true, and many men will employ a fancy name as a cover-up for lack of ability or achievement.”⁶⁴ It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t thinking of himself on some level. He later goes on to say:

“Don't ever take away a convenient falsehood. If you remove certain conventional lies, you will be hated for it. Most people need lies…The consistency of your image depends upon it. So long as you know the truth, that's all that matters.

There are two kinds of lie. The first is the lie that people want to hear. If you have ascertained that your quarry expects to hear certain things, you must tell him what he wants to hear, no matter how far-fetched or unable you are to back up what you say...The second type of lie is the one that will gain you credit and recognition, whether others want to hear it or not. This is the kind of lie you must be careful with...This is the type of idle boasting that places your foot firmly into your mouth and causes no one to take you seriously after they get to know you.

…

If it is subsequently discovered that you made up the whole story, yet you are fulfilling your role…the people who count won’t care one bit about your little sham. The only ones who will get up in arms, demand your removal (yet secretly gloat over your exposure) will be those who are your inferiors in the first place.”⁶⁵

I know people who are well-versed in this topic are going to feel like there’s still so much more to cover. There is, but there’s a point at which we have to stop ourselves. There’s stuff that I wanted to get into that I ended up leaving on the cutting-room floor, or simply didn’t delve deeply into because I was already concerned about the mission creep. I poked around at Boyd Rice’s materials, but couldn’t find anything I should really include that required its own write-up.⁶⁶ I wanted to get into the fractious in-fighting between the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple and the history of Lucien Greaves and Shane Bugbee’s attacks on him, but that will have to come in another article.⁶⁷ I watched the documentary An American Satan, but couldn’t find anything that fit the scope of this research. It’s time to stop.

Anton LaVey was Jewish. There’s no question about that. What I found myself grappling with was was the meaning of all of this. People tried to cover it up, but why? At what point does it matter? The speculative theories around the Church of Satan feed right into that mythos that LaVey wanted and continue to give it life.

Coming through the other side I feel like I’m left with only smoke and mirrors. People who hate these strange would-be mystics do so understandably, but I think they might see more there than there is. It’s not that conspiracies don’t exist and it’s not that there aren’t powerful people engaging in abject evil, but the ugly truth is that their evil reads more like a clinical rap sheet read out in a monotonous tone. Flash and pageantry and smoke and mirrors are just that, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an actor or a magician there on stage guiding your eyes. But what they do after the curtain call when you actually are not looking is far more terrifying because of just how normal it is to them. So much of these transgressive movements were all about scaring the squares, and they get off on knowing how mad you are. What scares them however is when you know who they really are.

1. I could not, for the life of me, find a copy of this specific issue online and I am unfortunately not a member of a university which would have given me access to the ProQuest catalogue. However, I feel fairly confident that the photographer Mary Ellen Mark’s version is a word-for-word reprint of it after checking Lawrence Wright’s book Saints and Sinners. I am generally gun-shy about not having the original primary sources as I’ve seen so many alterations and outright made-up nonsense from purported sources over the years, but I feel confident that this is a kosher reprint, though I almost did buy a print version just to be certain.

2. Lawrence Wright mentions that the reason for this faux-pas is due to an extremely peculiar passage written in The Satanic Witch, a book for women who would like to maximize their satanic witchiness and show other “liberated” women a thing or two. LaVey writes: “I have devised a pleasant test by which one can tell whether a person is dominant or passive by nature. I call it "The LaVey Salad Dressing Test."…Men who are dominant and masculine archetypes prefer sweet dressings, such as French, Russian, Thousand Island, as do women who are dominant or latent or practicing lesbians. Women who are passive, submissive, and feminine archetypes prefer Roquefort, bleu cheese, and oil and vinegar, as do males who are passive or latent or active homosexuals. Salads are seldom liked by small children unless a sweet dressing is applied. The taste of sweet dressing, with its minty, tomato, spicy taste (plus the fact that it is most often used when seafood is incorporated in the salad) resembles the odor of a woman's sexual parts and is therefore agreeable to the archetypical male. Conversely, the aroma and taste of the strong, cheesey [sic] Roqueforts, blue cheese, oil and vinegar, etc. is similar to the male scrotal odor and reminiscent of a locker full of well-worn jock straps. This is naturally subliminally appealing to predominantly heterosexual females, passive males and males with homophile tendencies.“ LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Witch. United States, Feral House, 1989. pp 105-106

3. Wright, Lawrence. Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell , Matthew Fox. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011. p. 124

4. It’s also here that we learn that Wright investigated the dispute over Anton LaVey’s birth details. LaVey had been claiming that he was born Anton Szandor LaVey to Joe and Augusta, but Wright found no records corroborating this. Instead, on the same day of LaVey’s birth, he found a Howard Stanton Levey born to Mike and Gertrude LaVey.

5. Wright, Lawrence. Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell , Matthew Fox. United Kingdom, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011. p. 126

6. Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising (pp. 316-317). Plexus Publishing Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

7. Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising (p. 465). Plexus Publishing Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

8. This and all subsequent quotes from this specific essay: LaVey, Anton. Satan Speaks!. United States, Feral House, 1998. pp. 20-22

9. LaVey is almost certainly referring to James Yaffe, not Jaffe, whose book The American Jews is subtitled “Portrait of a Split Personality”. Yaffe’s book was originally published in 1968. A couple of passages from this work standout as probably the passages that influenced LaVey. 1. "But what are these [mixed Jewish] children being lost to, really? The forms and institutions of Judaism certainly...But they aren't lost to those universal ethical values which the forms and institutions are supposed to preserve...In every respect—except the formal and religious one—they are bringing up their children as Jews." 2. "This new synthesis hasn't found its form yet, and won't for a long time. And so it takes many different ones, all of them fluid and temporary...When they finally find their voice and their direction, they may be the vanguard for a new Judaism--which probably won't be called Judaism at all. Or Christianity either." Yaffe, James. The American Jews. United States, Random House, 1968. pps. 341-342, 346.

10. I am reminded of works I’ve seen among the so-called Dissident Right extolling the creative energies of “mischlings” and their importance to a Nietzschean influenced muscular right-wing that eschews the slave-morality values that have so often held the supposed “right-wing” back.

11. LaVey, Anton Szandor, and LaVey, Anton. Satan Speaks!. United States, Feral House, 1998. p. 71

12. Parsing out the very public acrimony between Zeena and her father would be beyond the scope of this article and would involve having to interpret the personal motives of the people involved. As Baddeley states, “the rift seemed to be both personal and ideological”. Her associations with LaVey rival and would-be Satanic Luther-esque reformer Michael Aquino complicate the matter as well as her then-husband, Nikolas Schreck, who signaled hard some kind of support for National Socialism, even if just aesthetic or transgressive, with his music and nom de guerre. And since this article is about the accusation of LaVey having Jewish heritage, this acrimonious fight between the Church of Satan and the Schrecks develops even more complexity and mudslinging as Schreck’s real name, confirmed by Baddeley, is Barry Dubin and there are many accusations that he is Jewish as well. I will not be covering those accusations at all as we are already way beyond the original scope of this article, but slinging Jewish as an accusation is pretty regular for both Satanists and nationalists it seems.

13. This specific criticism from Zeena will have its full context reposted in the section on Michael Aquino. Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising (pp. 337-338). Plexus Publishing Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

14. I am still new to understanding how Wikipedia editing works, and had previously assumed that talk pages had their edits made sequentially. This turned out to not be the case.

15. In the context of Wikipedia, when we say anonymous we mean that they don’t have a named editor account, so their edits only come up as theirIP address. The easiest way to have any of your edits on Wikipeda reverted, by the way, is if you are anonymous. Not putting any kind of name to what you’re doing raises the suspicious that you’re a Wikipedia vandal.

16. While comparing the two versions I initially thought this was going to be an issue of needing to constantly compare the two, in actuality the passages most relevant to this article appear to be unaffected by these revisions. They’re actually given more context now, if anything.

17. Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (pp. 19-20). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

18. Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (p. 19). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

19. Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (p. 27). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

20. Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (pp. 53-54). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

21. Rein, Raanan. “A Belated Inclusion: Jewish Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and Their Place in the Israeli National Narrative.” Israel Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2012, p. 34. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.17.1.24. Accessed 20 Dec. 2023.

22. Penslar, Derek J.. Jews and the Military: A History. United States, Princeton University Press, 2015. p. 223

23. Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (p. 54). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

24. Barton, Blanche. The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (p. 55). Feral House. Kindle Edition.

25. There are multiple instances of the official Church of Satan account discussing Anton LaVey having Jewish heritage and that this informed his creation of the Church of Satan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

26. Off the top of my head, I’m reminded that Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Bonet, and Maya Rudolph are both considered Jewish despite only having Jewish fathers. Zoë Kravitz, the daughter of Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, has the funny distinction of being half-Jewish despite only having two fully Jewish grandfathers, and she is still considered Jewish. Being Jewish, it seems, is more complicated than it seems.

27. And I’m not going to pay $300 just to skim a bunch of ludicrous assertions that were ground zero for the Anton LaVey’s self-mythologizing. The book is such a rare print that it is a highly sought after collector’s item. My only chance to examine it would be if a nearby library has it, but frankly the juice isn’t worth the squeeze on this. The second biography will do.

28. Interestingly, the fallout of Leo Koch’s dismissal led to his university, University of Illinois, to revise its dismissal policies which ended up benefitting another professor at University of Illinois, Revilo P. Oliver, when he came under fire for his own views. Evensen, Dave. "Contrary to commonly accepted standards of morality." The Quadrangle. Fall 2022. pp. 26-27. https://las.illinois.edu/system/files/inline-files/LASNews_Magazine_FALL22_NEWdigital.pdf

29. A more comprehensive history of Jefferson Poland’s sexual activism, which is quite extensive, is best covered in Allyn, David (May 23, 2016). Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History. Routledge. pp. 42-47, 52-53, 104, 162, 241-242

30. The citations on Jefferson Poland’s sexual violence are difficult to find since his death in 2017, but remnants of it can be found in the following places: Morrow, Kelly. "Sex and the Student Body: Knowledge, Equality And The Sexual Revolution, 1960 To 1973". 2012. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD dissertation. p. 64 and California. Court of Appeal (4th Appellate District). Division 2. Records and Briefs: D005108, Appellant's Opening. N.p., n.p.

31. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. pp. 18-19

32. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. p. 20

33. I have tried to avoid editorializing too much within this article, but Wolfe’s book often feels like it deliberately plants FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) in order to muddy this issue in places.

34. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. pp. 21

35. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. p. 20

36. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. p. 20

37. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. pp. 21

38. I’m not going to dig that deep to find out. I’ve already spent way too much money on this essay alone.

39. Wolfe, Burton H. 2008. The Black Pope: The Authentic Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. Ebook. pp. 132

40. I had asked him specifically about the California thing with respect to Satanism, and when I asked him how he would explain it he responded: “It’s a big rabbit hole but I would say the most relevant is just that it’s another form of synthetic counterculture that was grown in the laboratory of 1960s-1970s California. LaVey of course had a lot of interesting associations, but his was essentially the Jewish Dollar General version of Aleister Crowley. Michael Aquino is far more interesting, as a figure. The relevance of Satanism wanes with that of Christianity, and this goes some ways to explain the overlap between Esoteric Nazism and Satanism, as the former was and remains far more transgressive against the Judeo-Christian standard of public morality. I would think if he were alive today, Anton LaVey would become a Catholic or something similar, like others of his ilk have.”

41. Baddeley in Lucifer Rising recounts the split as such: “As a high-ranking officer in US military intelligence, with service in Vietnam and a doctorate in political science to his name, Aquino was the kind of deviant-Establishment figure that LaVey’s organisation needed. But, in 1975, Aquino led a walk-out of disaffected Church of Satan members (the exact number is heavily disputed) to start his own Satanic order. The schism was precipitated by an explicit LaVey proclamation that priesthoods in the Church of Satan were available to those who demonstrated their success in the wider world – such demonstrations to include gifts of cash or valuable objects. Just like the Pope in the sixteenth century, the Black Pope faced the challenge of attempted reform. As Protestant reformer Martin Luther had begun his protest as a criticism of the Papacy’s sale of indulgences (spiritual ‘get out of gaol free’ cards, allowing sinners to pay their way out of damnation) so Michael Aquino, his Satanic equivalent, was upset that the Black Pope was running the Church of Satan as a business...To make matters worse, LaVey had ordained his chauffeur as a priest of the Church of Satan – a man Aquino considered unsuitable for such a lofty position. Aquino argued that LaVey had cheapened his faith with an increasingly materialistic approach, never grasping that, as a Satanist, one should never be seeking the moral high ground. From LaVey’s point-of-view, the idea that he was sullying his ‘faith’ was risible – he preached doubt.” Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising (pp. 215-216, 217). Plexus Publishing Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

42. Aquino, Michael. The Temple of Set I (Page 85). . Kindle Edition.

43. I’ve included links to these segments so that people can make their own judgments but these two specials give a good example of the problematic and lurid nature of how these topics have been presented. The Oprah clip is difficult to take seriously as it pits Aquino against a young man who is at best troubled as he is discussing an alleged ritual murder he took part in but has no recollection of who the murder victim was or who his co-conspirators were. The Aquino segment on Geraldo starts at 26:30 and is more of the same, with Aquino talking about the atheistic and rationality aspects of modern Satanism while Geraldo tries to draw a sensationalist angle by going through all of the usual topics of the so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. This kind of television informs a lot of the discussions around these topics and figures and makes it very difficult to have a critical conversation without hysterical discourse or lurid lies mixed in with the facts.

44. The obvious impulse is to use the term “conspiracy theories” but I choose to avoid that due to the emotionally charged and loaded nature of the term. It bundles together both people who critically study the existence of actual conspiracies and people with less than credible personas and track records. It, more than anything, discourages critical speculation and analysis, by discouraging people from engaging the topic or even being critical of one’s own speculations due to the siege mentality that it generates.

45. There are eight editions of Aquino’s book and I honestly do not know how different they are from one another. The two best versions I was able to get my hands on easily were the fifth and eighth edition, but I don’t know what the differences between all of the editions are. So I apologize if you’re aware of anything in other editions I should have included, but I really didn’t want to collect and compare eight different versions.

46. Aquino, Michael. The Church of Satan II (Page 513). . Kindle Edition.

47. The references to Teddy Bare and Bircherites has to do with a Western Islands book that lambasted Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, titled Teddy Bare: The Last of the Kennedy Clan which had been published in 1971. Western Islands was the publishing arm of the John Birch Society. In the context of Diane’s letter, she had asked Aquino to make a favorable mention of the book in the latest issue of The Cloven Hoof that they were working on. Aquino objected to the idea of giving them a favorable mention since Anton LaVey had previously been the subject of an attack by the John Birch Society in an article they had published in 1970 called “Satanism: A Practical Guide to Witch Hunting” where they had declared “next to Communism, [Satanism] has come to be the fastest growing criminal menace of our time". Among the accusations leveled include that LaVey is “an ardent socialist”, which isn’t at all true for LaVey but given the propensity for these types of conservative groups to use words like “globalists” to indicate to one segment of their audience that what they really mean is “Jew” while maintaining plausible deniability that’s not what they mean, one wonders if that’s what’s going on here. As for why LaVey and Hegarty wanted to give Teddy Bare a favorable mention, by the narrative that Aquino sets out, it was purely to troll people and for the transgressive thrill of having Satanists flirt with the far-right. Ultimately, LaVey and Hegarty acquiesced to Aquino’s objections and let him delete the positive plug for Teddy Bare.

48. Aquino, Michael. The Church of Satan I (Page 336-337). . Kindle Edition.

49. Ahmed Zaki Yamani was the Saudi Arab oil minister who had been instrumental during the founding of OPEC and came to global prominence with his role in the 1973 oil embargo during the Yom Kippur War. Michael Aquino had admired his ability to bring the world briefly to its knees and seemingly actualize his political will.

50. Aquino, Michael. The Church of Satan I (Page 337-338). . Kindle Edition.

51. That episode is worthy of its own article and definitely well beyond the scope here, but the connection between Sammy Davis Jr. and the Church of Satan has provided ample ammunition for speculative theories that explore the intersection between Satanism and Hollywood.

52. There’s also a discursion that could be made here as Aquino discusses his experiences with James Madole, the founder of the National Renaissance Party. The way that Aquino recounts it, a member of the Church of Satan named Michael Grumbowski, who went by "Shai", left the organization in order to work with people associated with James Madole and the National Renaissance Party who were interested in the occult. The National Renaissance Party had ties within the American National Socialist and White Nationalist movements but was set apart due to that aforementioned interest in the occult and being more influenced by Francis Parker Yockey compared to the other groups in the United States. As Aquino tells it, Anton LaVey was very familiar with the National Renaissance Party, writing in a letter to Aquino that the NRP "is composed largely of acned, bucolic types transplanted to New York. They spend their time getting jeered at in street demonstrations. Yes, the Nazis did it too, but they had a fresh approach. Nowadays, however, swastikas sell books and movies but not supermarket shoppers. I know Madole personally and have been to N.R.P. headquarters. Even have card. They would do anything for us. So would Klan, for that matter. I do not endorse either, but acknowledge camaraderie from any source. Madole is actually a nice chap who is doing his thing. No need to fret over Hell’s Angels types. They will come in handy one day, whether they be American Nazi Party or Jewish Defense League." Aquino, Michael. The Church of Satan I (Page 369). . Kindle Edition.

53. Aquino, Michael. The Church of Satan II (Page 710). . Kindle Edition.

54. Some are probably curious about Abrahmsson’s own lineage based on his name. I couldn’t find anything that indicated that he himself is Jewish, but I also don’t know if that’s relevant in this specific instance since there’s very little editorializing here, compared to Wolfe.

55. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (pp. 37-38). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

56. The terrorists of Palestine in this instance is a favorable depiction of the Zionist insurgents in the Palestinian Mandate who were committing terrorism against the British.

57. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (pp. 58-59). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

58. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (p. 235). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

59. From my understanding he actually was named Satan, but seems to prefer to go by Xerxes. According to Abrahamsson he is an anthropologist. There’s a lot of speculation that he changed his name, understandably so, though if those speculations are correct he’s still very interested in the occult and on good terms with people like Abrahamsson. I opted not to include the alleged identification of him that’s out there as it isn’t germane to this essay and there is no confirmation.

60. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (p. 291-292, 302-303). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

61. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (p. 296). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

62. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (p. 302). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

63. Abrahamsson, Carl. Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Infernal Wisdom from the Devil's Den (pp. 307-308). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

64. La Vey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Witch. United States, Feral House, 1971. p. 60

65. La Vey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Witch. United States, Feral House, 1971. p. 197-198

66. A follower of mine helpfully got a funny quotation for me though from Boyd Rice’s The Last Testament of Anton Szandor LaVey, from page 118, 120. “LaVey was an adept mimic, and could occasionally take on the personalities of characters he’d invented. One was an old Asian man who took trips to Reno, Nevada, to see a particular prostitute. One was a film noir mob-boss. Another was a German movie director a la Von Stroheim; and yet another was a Yiddish fella’ whose name was Rudi something-or-other. LaVey would go into characters without warning and sometimes the charade would last for hours. And when such did occur, it was like you really were talking to another person, after a few minutes, you’d find yourself forgetting it was Anton LaVey you were talking to - he’d been replaced by a thoroughly convincing persona.”

67. I will be returning to this.