20 years ago: Good riddance to Anton LaVey

On October 29, 1997, Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966 and published The Satanic Bible in 1969, died at the age of 67. Mr. LaVey, born Howard Stanton Levey, was mainly a con man and a showman, and often seemed to do things in order to generate publicity; many aspects of his biography that he claimed for himself have apparently been proven untrue. Anton LaVey was already largely forgotten by the time of his death, and with the further passage of time, I suspect he will increasingly be regarded as a footnote character in the culture of the 1960s.

The book Selling Satan: The Tragic History of Mike Warnke (1993) by Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott contains an appendix titled Reality is a Sometime Thing: A Strange Evening with Anton LaVey. As part of the research for their book, Messrs. Hertenstein and Trott were dinner guests circa 1991-1992 at the home of Mr. LaVey and his longtime companion Blanche Barton, and provided the following commentary on Mr. LaVey:

If our quest had been to discover the "real" Anton LaVey, here at last he was: a human being on the edge of eternity, grasping after immortality and significance. he seemed very much alone and quite deluded...

...the interplay between Anton LaVey's barricaded Kingdom of Evil and the rest of the world was full of contradictions. The Satanic Bible, which purported to be a celebration of will, was actually a celebration of LaVey's will, full of "oughts" and "shoulds" that any real nonconformist would have thrown out the window. The Black Pope, hater of humanity--who has praised such isolated "joys" as masturbation--worries about being forgotten, his own icon smashed by time. One had to wonder if perhaps LaVey's entire masquerade was just one long whistle past the graveyard, an attempt to tame evil and take the sting out of death by reducing them to mere objects of "kitsch." But the last laugh was coming.

Jon shook the iron gate--Blanche had insisted we make sure it was locked behind us. We waved to her on the porch and she pulled the front door shut, securing the black house from the violent world of homicidal nuts that LaVey, with his bubble gum nihilism, had helped to create. As we headed down California Street toward our car, my partner and I felt a great sadness for Anton LaVey. It was clear that his chain-link fence against the darkness wasn't going to hold out for much longer.