Pod Insights Last Podcast On The Left Episode 669: Anton LaVey Part IV - Old Wizards Die Hard About this episode The boys close out the story of Anton LaVey with Sammy Davis Jr.’s unlikely turn as Satanic showbiz royalty, Michael Aquino’s nerdy revolt against the Church of Satan, and the Satanic Panic that transformed the Black Pope from America’s boogeyman into a washed-up warlock clinging to lawsuits, legends, and one final lie.
Transcript 20,454 words · 7 speakers
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0:31 Speaker 03 There's no place to escape to. This is the last time.
0:35 Speaker 04 On the left.
0:39 Speaker 03 That's when the cannibalism started.
0:49 Speaker 05 All right.
0:49 Speaker 06 We'll load you up, bro.
0:50 Speaker 05 Um, before we begin today's episode, I want to warn you about the level of nerdiness we're about to enter into. Eddie was not ready.
0:58 Speaker 00 Well.
0:59 Speaker 05 He was not prepared as we were talking in the preamble about the things that we wanted to bring up in today's episode. He was actually, I could kind of feel his disappointment, but also, I mean...
1:09 Speaker 00 See, disappointment, I felt indifference.
1:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, see, I think what's good about the nerdiness in these episodes is I was able to lose my respect for both of you. And it really helps me as an employee.
1:21 Speaker 05 Right. It allows you to make braver choices.
1:25 Speaker 00 It happens with all of them. Congratulations. Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name's Marcus Parks. I'm here with the scholarly Henry Zebrowski.
1:34 Speaker 05 I, uh, I'm gonna end this whole show with a sort of allegorical rundown of how I'm gonna apply Gandalf's entire, like, life-traveling moment, all the things he learned, to the story of Anton LaVey.
1:47 Speaker 00 But that is at the end, so there's gonna be plenty of fun until then. We have...
1:53 Speaker 00 We have the man that's bringing us the fun. It's Ed Larson.
1:56 Speaker 06 That's right, man. I wear, I know what I did today. I wanted to bring up the cool. I got my George Clinton shirt on. Hell yeah. I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that at least one of us is kinda cool.
2:08 Speaker 00 I brought it back down with my Neil Adams Batman t-shirt.
2:12 Speaker 05 Oh, actually, I think I destroy everything with my two-volume set of the history of the Church of Satan, written by Michael Aquino. Seven hundred pages of total correspondence mayhem.
2:26 Speaker 06 Seven hundred pages each?
2:27 Speaker 05 No, three hundred fifty pages each, and one of the books is just the appendices for the first one.
2:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, very much smack of copy paper.
2:36 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, this is great. This come, you can honestly, I'm really happy. A lot of, you can run these at work.
2:41 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, it's great. It's a, your satanic sacrifice was getting laid again.
2:46 Speaker 05 Hey.
2:49 Speaker 05 She won't read it. Also, you want to see naked pictures of Susan Atkins?
2:52 Speaker 06 Who's Susan Atkins?
2:53 Speaker 00 Susan Atkins, the Manson girl.
2:55 Speaker 05 There's naked pictures in here. It's awesome.
2:57 Speaker 06 Oh, okay.
2:57 Speaker 05 Dude, you fucking don't know how cool shit can be once you get books.
3:00 Speaker 06 You know, you ever hear, you know, they have the internet?
3:02 Speaker 05 No, man. This is how I like to masturbate. I like to masturbate with gigantic, like, little plate sections and appendices. Look at that. Look at these bananas. There's some hot seventies babes in this shit.
3:13 Speaker 06 Edward uses stage blood as fucking body lotion when he jerks off.
3:22 Speaker 00 Well, we're not gonna get into the nerdy just yet. We're still in the cool. We're still in the story of Sammy Davis Jr.
3:28 Speaker 05 Oh, fuck yeah.
3:29 Speaker 00 When we last left the story of Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan, we were right in the middle of telling the tale of how one of their most unlikely adherents, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., became friends with Anton and the rest of the Church of Satan crew. Now, when Sammy Davis Jr.'s TV movie, Poor Devil, aired on NBC with obvious references to real Satanism, like Sammy's oft-repeated flashing of the devil horns.
3:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, babe.
3:54 Speaker 05 I love him.
3:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, the program caught the attention of the upper echelons of the Church of Satan. Diane Hegarty, co-founder of the Church of Satan, some might say, uh, the entire brains behind the entirety of the Church of Satan. She said that she was flabbergasted when she, Henry, I like how you, you grabbed your book and then decided to put it back down.
4:15 Speaker 05 It's in this book. Honestly, this entire book shows that Anton LaVey, uh, he didn't do anything.
4:22 Speaker 06 But isn't this the other guy? Isn't this Aquino shit?
4:24 Speaker 05 Long story, we'll get into it.
4:25 Speaker 06 Aquino wants to make him look bad.
4:26 Speaker 05 We know, we know.
4:28 Speaker 00 Well, Diane Hegarty said that she was flabbergasted when she saw a lovable, funny, harmless demon being depicted on TV by no less than Sammy Davis Jr., who in 1974 was one of our more harmless celebrities. She was also excited because if people began seeing Satanists as something closer to Sammy Davis Jr. and further away from, say, Charles Manson, then the church could really get cooking on membership. Michael Aquino, who was still Anton LaVey's right-hand man in 1973, he surprisingly agreed. In his letter to Diane Hegarty, in which he called Poor Devil a magnificent commercial for the church, he added that the show's message was not far afield from what Satanists believed. And in this, I actually agree with Michael Aquino. I noticed it as I was watching Poor Devil.
5:13 Speaker 00 In Poor Devil, the accountant played by Jack Klugman wants revenge on his boss, played by Batman's Adam West, in his usual style of acting in which he sounds like he's constantly on the verge of a painful orgasm he doesn't actually want.
5:26 Speaker 06 Won't you, uh, go get me some milk?
5:34 Speaker 00 It's gonna be a long time before you get another day off. Get another day.
5:41 Speaker 00 But Adam West's character is constantly taking advantage of Klugman's character and generally makes Klugman's character's life miserable, which made Adam West's character a perfect target for revenge. Klugman's character, however, balks at revenge and takes it all back when he sees that his plan is gonna hurt a lot more people besides just his boss. He, his whole plan is he's gonna empty out the department store where they both work on December 24th, and Adam West is gonna look like a dickhead, but then he realizes that it's gonna ruin Christmas for a lot of people, and a lot of the people who work at the store are also gonna get hurt. So he says, bring it all back, bring it all back in.
6:17 Speaker 06 Wow, even Satanists wanna save Christmas.
6:21 Speaker 05 If you listen to a lot of Satanists, truly Satanism, how do you but Christmas is one of a goth's like favorite side holidays that isn't Halloween.
6:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:32 Speaker 05 Because Christmas is also just as filled with dark magic and all these kind of crazy dumb shit as anything else. Santa's a fucking home breaker in, he's a fucking thief in the night. He breaks in your house magically.
6:44 Speaker 06 And it's Satan.
6:45 Speaker 05 He punishes you if you're wrong.
6:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:47 Speaker 00 Well, and also just at a very base level, Satanism is very materialistic and what's more materialistic than American Christmas?
6:54 Speaker 05 Nothing.
6:55 Speaker 00 Nothing. Nothing in the world. But even though it seems like Klugman's backtrack is gonna leave him right back where he started, the mere act of focusing his energies on revenge, that results in his boss losing his mind and his job to Klugman himself. So with the help of Sammy Davis Jr.'s cartoonish Satanism, Klugman still gets his revenge, he still gets his greatest wish, but he does so without hurting anyone except the one who deserves it. So Aquino is correct, it was actually quite satanic.
7:26 Speaker 05 It was, and uh my, the guys, Dave Willis and Casper Kelly, the men of Your Pretty Faces Going to Hell, I didn't understand that they had held a screening of Poor Devil with Dana from Your Pretty Faces Going to Hell.
7:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, Master Shake.
7:39 Speaker 05 Master Shake, they kinda went and they, they did a viewing of it and they had a great time.
7:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. Now Anton LaVey didn't even see Poor Devil, but after talking to Hagarty and Aquino, he also saw the potential here, and the three of them began hatching plans and plots. See, Poor Devil was a TV movie running about 70 minutes, but it had the potential to go to series. So Anton initially aimed to get screen time in future episodes and perhaps even swing a location shoot at the Church of Satan's Black House. Again, it sounds like it's for the church, but really, it's more about getting Anton into Hollywood.
8:14 Speaker 05 That's all it is, or at least getting Hollywood close to Anton.
8:18 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
8:19 Speaker 05 And that sweet location fee.
8:20 Speaker 00 Very good location fee. Michael Aquino meanwhile, was focused on church business as always. He suggested that Anton give Sammy Davis Jr. an honorary magical position, and it said that Hagarty openly wondered what Sammy Davis Jr. would think about being offered the opportunity to be the world's first black Jewish satanic warlock.
8:42 Speaker 05 Yeah! That's a fucking goal dude!
8:44 Speaker 06 Man, that's a fucking resume!
8:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, man! And singer and actor.
8:52 Speaker 00 The Candyman. I mean, yeah, I mean, he's, isn't he the one who wrote Candyman for Willy Wonka?
8:57 Speaker 05 Oh, well, no, he got, well, no Candyman was originally in the musical. He, it's kind of funny. He famously hated that song. He said it was his biggest hit, though. He started singing it and then he has to go do it everywhere, but he did not write the Candyman. He covered the Candyman.
9:11 Speaker 00 He covered the Candyman. Okay, all right. Well, as it turned out, nothing in this world could have made Sammy Davis Jr. happier than being the first black Jewish satanic warlock.
9:21 Speaker 05 I may be getting his eye back.
9:24 Speaker 05 It seemed like you really bummed him out for a while.
9:27 Speaker 00 Well, the Church of Satan sent a letter offering the honorary warlock position and just a month later, Davis sent a letter back saying he was all in. Now, after accepting their membership, Davis sweetly said that he was pleased that no one at the Church of Satan was offended by a poor devil.
9:44 Speaker 05 We fully understood Satanists can't get offended.
9:48 Speaker 00 No.
9:48 Speaker 05 Every time for the whole thing.
9:50 Speaker 00 What are you talking about? Satanists get offended all the time.
9:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, not by stuff like, not by attention.
9:58 Speaker 00 Davis then gave the Church of Satan his upcoming performance dates in the Bay Area so they could present him with his honorary warlock degree in person.
10:08 Speaker 06 Oh, my God, so many angry Italians.
10:13 Speaker 00 And LeVey was quite pleased to find that one of Sammy's local concerts just happened to fall on Friday the 13th.
10:19 Speaker 05 Oh, hell, yeah.
10:20 Speaker 00 Furthermore, the theater where Sammy was performing was called the Circle Star Theater. A circle and a star is, of course, a pentagram, so the coincidences urging them all to move forward just kept coming. And so, on the night of the performance, just before Sammy Davis Jr. went out in front of an audience of almost 4,000, he received his warlock ordainment certificate and his official Baphomet medallion, although Anton LeVey did not present it himself. In a letter to Michael Aquino, LeVey wrote that they should all just play it cool, elaborating further that the less they push, the better Sammy's opinion of the church would be.
10:56 Speaker 05 Anton LeVey. So, Michael Aquino, right? Writes this letter to Anton LaVey, how proud he is. And the first time he got to meet Sammy Davis Jr., he was like, not only was Sammy absolutely impressed with my theological breakdowns and all the differences between what we believe and do not believe, but also so was his PR people and his manager. So I gave them both the Satanic Bible and I gave them all. And Anton LaVey said, truly, one of the great, a great piece of show business advice. Never talk to the PR guy if you could talk to the celebrity. He's like, stop talking to the PR guy right now. Don't give him anything. The PR guy's not your friend. Fuck the PR guy. Sammy's your friend. You talk to Sammy.
11:37 Speaker 05 If you want Sammy and you want to talk to Sammy, you call fucking Sammy. Because guess what? You give the PR guy the Satanic Bible, guess we're never gonna see again. Sammy. So you just gotta fucking just talk to Sammy. So Anton LaVey is-
11:53 Speaker 00 It's great advice.
11:54 Speaker 05 Anton LaVey is constantly fighting this idea of open and underground Satanism, which we'll get into.
12:01 Speaker 00 And so, after the backstage ceremony, Sammy Davis Jr. went out with Baphomet displayed prominently on his chest. And he performed one hell of a show. Then closed his performance with an anthem that might as well be the Church of Satan's theme song. Henry, if you would.
12:21 Speaker 05 Whether I'm right, or whether I'm wrong.
12:29 Speaker 05 Whether I find a place in this world or never belong.
12:36 Speaker 05 I gotta be me. I've gotta be me.
12:43 Speaker 05 What else can I be but what I am?
12:51 Speaker 05 I gotta be me. "I Gotta Be Me" is such a good obnoxious scaryokey song.
13:00 Speaker 06 It is such a good like, just like that's life.
13:03 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:03 Speaker 06 Cats, Hive. I forgot about that fucking song and I jammed that whole album when we were listening to this. Sammy is like, I think he's my favorite rap packer now.
13:12 Speaker 05 Easily. He's my number two. Obviously I like Frank, I like his, I love Frank's voice and stuff, but he's my number two.
13:17 Speaker 06 See, Dean was my guy and he took over for that, so Frank's down to number three for me.
13:22 Speaker 05 Damn.
13:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, and unfortunately, you know, his last name is Bishop, so he's out.
13:27 Speaker 05 Bishop sucks.
13:29 Speaker 00 Fuck off, Joey. Now Anton Higarty and Aquino spent the next few months weirdly hovering around Sammy Davis Jr.'s house without actually knocking on the door or letting Sammy know that they were even in the neighborhood. Cause as I said before, certain elements of Hollywood tended to intimidate Anton LeVey. He could give great advice to Michael Aquino, but when it came down to doing it himself, he was, he could get a little pea shy.
13:53 Speaker 06 He was not- They couldn't know he was there with his giant gold helmet.
13:58 Speaker 00 Sitting outside in the bushes.
13:59 Speaker 05 Everybody sit back, everybody, hey, play cool. Play cool, don't worry, no, no, no. Play cool, no, he's just, he's, he's facing us with his dead eye. He's cool, no, he can't see us. No, he has no idea that we're driving the hearse.
14:12 Speaker 05 No idea.
14:14 Speaker 00 I mean, you gotta remember that at heart Anton LeVey was still just a carny trying to level up in the world of entertainment. And while it's all show business, there's a wide gulf between carnival folk like the former Tony Levy and Hollywood stars like Sammy Davis Jr.
14:31 Speaker 05 Oh, they're as miles apart. I'd actually kinda even say that Sammy Davis Jr. is a more powerful magician than Anton LeVey.
14:36 Speaker 00 Sure.
14:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, cause he's successful.
14:38 Speaker 05 He's successful. I'm not even joking.
14:41 Speaker 00 But perhaps keeping their distance was the right move because a few months after the concert at the Circle Star Theater, Sammy Davis Jr. invited Anton and Diane, but not Michael Aquino. I thought he made such a good impression.
14:55 Speaker 00 I thought everybody was- He's gonna get me, look at my eyebrows, aren't I diabolical? He invited Anton and Diane to a small gathering at his home. Reportedly, when Davis opened the door, he hugged Anton and Diane as if they were all old friends. But besides Anton and Diane, Davis had also invited a pair of young witches. Presumably, Davis was hoping to explore the sexually experimental side of satanic indulgence with the heads of the church themselves. Because after all, who's gonna be freakier than the head freaks?
15:25 Speaker 05 That's what you think.
15:26 Speaker 00 That's what you think, but what Davis didn't know is that despite the fact that Leveille continually encouraged others to indulge in their most carnal yet consensual urges, Leveille and Hagarty were not swingers. Orgies weren't their thing. They liked piss.
15:41 Speaker 05 Oh, they liked piss?
15:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:42 Speaker 05 Yeah. A great deal, so much, is this the time?
15:45 Speaker 00 Uh, to talk about piss?
15:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:47 Speaker 00 Sure.
15:47 Speaker 05 So, one of the fun things that is revealed in these books by Michael Aquino is the fact that they heavily sanitize the rituals in the satanic bible, which is kind of funny that they did. They hid the real stuff. So, in the original Satanic Mass, not only did they put a little thing, the wafer, the Christian wafer, inside the hoo-ha of the naked lady altar, right? Once they put it in the chucha, then her job was to masturbate to completion on top of it with it, in her side, inside of her, right? Then he pops it out of the slot after she's cum, he puts it in a cup of pee pee till it dissolves. Everybody drinks the pee pee because a woman dresses as a nun is pissed into a bowl before then, and everyone drinks that pee pee.
16:32 Speaker 05 And then at the end of that, after everybody's had all the piss and that lady cum-filled wafer, Anton Leveille stands in front of everybody, jerks off to completion, and then that's the end. And that happened multiple times.
16:44 Speaker 06 Did he jerk off to completion in the thing that everyone drank?
16:47 Speaker 05 No, after the fact, he would come into a cup and then they would put it on the altar and it was like, that's like...
16:53 Speaker 06 But no one drank his cum.
16:55 Speaker 05 No.
16:55 Speaker 06 I don't think so. Just the lady cum and the piss and the, and the Catholic cookie.
16:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, they're not monsters.
17:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, they're not disgusting. Now make it gay.
17:04 Speaker 06 I do love those Catholic cookies.
17:07 Speaker 05 I just get a big pack of them, just, you know, wrapped up in prosciutto.
17:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, I pop them, I flip them in the air like I'm an old-timey gangster, catch it in my mouth, have a good time, like, this one's for you, old man.
17:15 Speaker 05 Put one in the pussy, see how it goes. Ask Julie.
17:21 Speaker 00 The point is, all that's ritual stuff.
17:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:24 Speaker 00 And it's all very controlled. It's not a part of their daily lives.
17:29 Speaker 05 No, and right after, they literally had coffee and pick.
17:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, so on the nights that Davis hung out with LaVey and Hagarty, these ended up being Sammy Davis Jr.'s tame nights. Anton and Diane were his sober friends, who were more likely to bring over a German silent film to watch than a fat sack of drugs to snort.
17:47 Speaker 05 Fucking nerds, man. They're just fucking nerds.
17:50 Speaker 06 It's honestly like when fans finally get the chance to hang out with us, it's like oddly boring.
17:55 Speaker 05 Yeah. Just like, sorry, guys.
17:57 Speaker 00 Real normal shit. Real normal.
18:00 Speaker 06 You like the pool?
18:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
18:02 Speaker 05 Honestly, the pool is great.
18:04 Speaker 00 See, besides sex, Sammy Davis Jr. also had a taste for substances. He was a whiskey man with a nose for cocaine. But when Anton and Diane settled in during that very first hang, Davis's silver cocaine bowl got pushed behind the bar with his whiskey. Instead of dabbling in indulgence, Leve and Davis spent hours discussing the tenets of Satanism. And while Leve was disappointed to hear that NBC hadn't picked up Poor Devil, he was damn near euphoric to hear that Davis was both experienced with Satanism and informed of its finer, more subtle points.
18:39 Speaker 06 See, I always thought that if I'm gonna discuss the tenets of Satanism, cocaine would help. You know, you think... Do you really think that they'd be wanting to have more fun?
18:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, what is it? I can't remember what Robert Evans said about cocaine. Is it, you know, it ruins the boater, but it turns up the verbiosity? Something like that, yeah.
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21:53 Speaker 00 And it is completely ad free. Yes, I said it, ad free. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Live from your grave. Now, over the next several years throughout the mid 70s, Anton LaVey and Diane Higardi became Sammy's regular guests at intimate dinners, big parties, live shows, and visits to Sammy's second home near Lake Tahoe.
22:21 Speaker 05 You've got to remember, Anton and Diane, fabulous dinner guests.
22:25 Speaker 00 Great dinner guests. At Lake Tahoe, LaVey was flattered to see that Davis had displayed the Baphomet necklace presented by the Church of Satan in a prominent place in his master bedroom, because Sammy Davis Jr. was, according to many girlfriends, an almost too frequent practitioner of sex magic.
22:41 Speaker 05 Fuck, yeah, dude.
22:41 Speaker 00 Sometimes you just want to fuck.
22:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, dude, of course. You're like, why do we got to do the whole prayer? Why are we doing the candles?
22:47 Speaker 00 He was all about the rigamarole.
22:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, I've heard of foreplay, but not 666 play.
22:51 Speaker 05 Hey, haha, that's good. Write it down.
22:54 Speaker 06 It's really good.
22:55 Speaker 05 Write it down. I don't got to write it down. It's gone now.
23:02 Speaker 00 But while Sammy Davis Jr. would flirt with Diane Higardi on occasion, it was not his fairly innocent comments about Diane that would eventually inflame LaVey's jealousy. Instead, Anton LaVey was more jealous of one of Sammy Davis Jr.'s other friendships. See, from what I can tell, Anton LaVey wanted to be Sammy's only spooky friend.
23:23 Speaker 05 I don't understand. I thought I was your spooky friend.
23:27 Speaker 05 Oh, she brings somebody else, but that's fine. Oh, that's fine. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure they're super spooky, but...
23:33 Speaker 05 I thought I was a spooky guy. How often do we have to hang out with Billy Crystal? Yeah. Now, he's spooky. He's spooky. He scares me. He could be anybody. Muhammad Ali, anybody black.
23:44 Speaker 05 I can't believe it.
23:46 Speaker 00 When Sammy put together a dinner party, he invited both Anton LaVey and Christopher Lee, Sammy's co-star on Poor Devil. Jealousy was inflamed, and eventually Anton went on the attack.
24:00 Speaker 05 Cause Christopher Lee is, is himself, he believes himself to be like an occult master.
24:07 Speaker 00 Sure.
24:07 Speaker 05 Right? So on his own.
24:09 Speaker 06 He's killed people too.
24:10 Speaker 05 He's killed people, he knew J.R. Tolkien, he is Saruman, like he is that guy. He was fully into the occult, but what Anton LaVey and Sammy Davis Jr. didn't know is that he was on the other side of the occult. He's like a witch finder general. He's like one of those guys that believe he's like, "The power of Christ does beat the power of evil. And the reason why I do my films is to show the folly of evil." Like it's his whole thing. And he didn't understand that he was walking into one of those.
24:40 Speaker 00 Yeah. And also like if you just put Christopher Lee, if you stack up Christopher Lee next to Anton LaVey as a man, Anton LaVey's a pissant.
24:49 Speaker 05 Oh, Christopher Lee could literally beat him to death.
24:51 Speaker 06 No, he's giant, right?
24:52 Speaker 00 Well, no, I mean, I'm talking about just, um, I'm talking about more character wise.
24:57 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, Christopher Lee's a fucking incredible artist.
25:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, Anton LaVey was actually pretty big. He was over six foot tall.
25:02 Speaker 05 Oh shit, I didn't actually really think about that.
25:04 Speaker 06 Christopher Lee was 6'5".
25:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, he was 6'5". Yeah, exactly.
25:08 Speaker 05 But he also has, he had time in the war.
25:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
25:10 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:10 Speaker 00 Well, Davis thought that LaVey and Christopher Lee would get along great.
25:15 Speaker 05 Sure.
25:15 Speaker 00 I mean, come on, you're the Church of Satan, you're Dracula, it's gonna be awesome.
25:19 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:19 Speaker 00 But it was soon obvious that LaVey was both insecure with how close Lee and Davis were, and he was also said to have been annoyed by Christopher Lee's quote, "priggish manner."
25:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, you don't like my priggish manner when I don't like your facial hair that looks like the trimmed bush of a old woman.
25:39 Speaker 05 I hate your goatee so much, I want to put a bayonet in it.
25:44 Speaker 06 It was such a bad choice by Anton LaVey. If he would have buttered him up, if he would have kissed his ass a little bit, imagine what getting Dracula would do for the Church of Satan.
25:54 Speaker 05 Well, don't you think that Anton LaVey, he, it just was, he really was too bitter for his own good.
26:00 Speaker 00 He really was. He couldn't, he couldn't see the forest for the trees. Cause it's like with Christopher Lee, you get in with Christopher Lee.
26:06 Speaker 05 Oh, that's real Hollywood.
26:07 Speaker 00 The world of B-movies.
26:08 Speaker 06 Oh, my God.
26:09 Speaker 00 Opens up, he, he's the, at this point, he is the king of the B-movie.
26:13 Speaker 06 He would have been a movie star, Anton LaVey.
26:15 Speaker 00 Might have been. But, eventually, everything came to a head when LaVey started an argument over who was the best Dracula. Lee himself, who had played Dracula ten times, or the original, Bella Lugosi. LaVey, of course, was-
26:30 Speaker 06 Why would you do this? Who is doing, who thought this was a good fucking idea?
26:34 Speaker 00 It's such an antagonistic dickhead, they thought, um, you know, Dracula, he's pregob, you know.
26:40 Speaker 06 He's no Bella Lugosi.
26:41 Speaker 00 No Bella Lugosi, but you know, if you wanna, if you give me a Dracula.
26:45 Speaker 06 You fucking piece of shit, I will smite the witch. I like Bella Lugosi number one, Dracula number two, and then I think you're probably three, I think. I've thought about it. Let me ask, have you thought about being black?
27:01 Speaker 00 Well, LaVey, of course, was adamant that Christopher Lee was dogshit as Dracula compared to Bella. And after LaVey baited Lee a little too much, Sammy Davis Jr. had to step in just before Lee and LaVey got into an actual fistfight. But, considering how Sammy Davis Jr. was five foot four, and Christopher Lee was six foot five, I think the so-called fight was more for show than anything. I think they just kind of, you know, bowed out, like, what'd you say to me?
27:27 Speaker 06 What'd you fucking say to me? What'd you say? I curse you. You don't think I curse, I curse.
27:34 Speaker 06 Hey, listen, you guys gotta calm down, see? Yeah, you're right.
27:38 Speaker 05 Crazy cats, why we doing this? Come on, you girls, you girls are getting cold.
27:45 Speaker 00 Even though the Spooky Boys dinner party went badly, LeVey and Davis's friendship continued to grow for reasons beyond just a good hang. See, LeVey accepted Davis for everything that he was, including the fact that Sammy Davis Jr. was also bisexual, or at the very least, highly fluid when it came to sexual relations. And so, LeVey and Davis were friends throughout the 1970s. LeVey would send books on the occult to Davis with the sign-off, "Infernally yours", while the two developed a shared nickname for Satan. They called him by the archaic term, "Old Sluefoot", which Davis loved because he was an accomplished tap and soft shoe performer.
28:24 Speaker 05 Well, that was so funny because they keep, they always call him in their letters, they always call him "The Man Downstairs". He was like, "Check with the man downstairs", like it's this whole thing that he does where it's like, "Yeah, check in with the man downstairs, it's not gonna fly."
28:38 Speaker 00 It's really funny the way they just feel like...
28:41 Speaker 05 God, he's so cool. It is.
28:43 Speaker 00 Now, throughout his friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., it seems like LeVey was finally getting everything he wanted. Davis brought Anton into his inner circle of show business connections, and at Davis's parties, Anton LeVey finally felt like he belonged. He was holding his own with Hollywood stars and music industry professionals alike. You know, Christopher Lee, of course, aside. But, there was one man that Anton LeVey forgot all about, a man that still had a lot of pull with Sammy Davis Jr., even though he'd always treated him as little more than a prop. That man was none other than the leader of the Rat Pack himself, old blue eyes, Frank Sinatra.
29:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, God, you know, he was obviously an asshole. He was such a prick.
29:28 Speaker 06 He was involved with the mob and all that shit.
29:30 Speaker 05 But like fake too, you know what I mean?
29:32 Speaker 06 Nah, he really was.
29:33 Speaker 05 He was, he got, he put himself in the mob, yeah.
29:35 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, no, but I will say, I mean, like, that's where the money is.
29:38 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
29:38 Speaker 06 That's where Sammy's got everything.
29:40 Speaker 05 Yo.
29:40 Speaker 06 That's where it all is.
29:42 Speaker 05 I'm trying, like, the Frank Sinatra, like, accent's also so good, being like, there was a story Don Rickles was saying, about how one night him and Frank were out drinking until like 3 o'clock in the morning, and he said there was this lightning storm outside the bar, and then the lightning would flash, and the lightning would flash, and Frank Sinatra eventually was like, "Someone go tell those photographers to just knock that shit off."
30:07 Speaker 00 Well, as the 70s turned into the 80s, Sammy Davis Jr.'s social life was getting a little too groovy for the famously square Frank Sinatra. Now granted, Davis was definitely partying way too hard. But from what it seems like, it was Davis's close association with Satanists like Anton LaVey that really got Sinatra's goat. So sometime in the late 70s, Sinatra told Davis to get his shit together and cool it with the drugs and the booze. But above all, stop hanging out with all these godforsaken Satanists.
30:38 Speaker 06 Italians do not like Satanists. No, they're not a fan. No. Which is very interesting, because you figured they would love it.
30:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, you'd think so. They're certainly a fan of nun porn, which is pretty close to Satanism, if you ask me.
30:51 Speaker 06 They just are, they're big priest fans over there. Big, oh, big priest fans. They really believe in the church.
30:58 Speaker 00 They do. But Sinatra's comment about Satanists was highly ironic when you consider that the time Davis spent with Satanists were always his most sober and sexless nights.
31:09 Speaker 06 Yeah, that was when he was learning.
31:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, Sinatra should have said, "Yeah, it was Satanists. Good influence. Keep hanging out with them."
31:16 Speaker 06 Yeah, stop hanging out with the old whores. Send them to me. Send them all, Frankie boy. But Sinatra was the connection to all the money, all the producers, the fucking mob. No one likes this shit.
31:28 Speaker 00 Yeah. Now, we don't know for sure if Sinatra's tut-tutting is really what caused Davis to pull back on his friendship with Anton LaVey. But after the conversation, little by little, the frequent hangouts turned into occasional phone calls, and Anton and Sammy drifted apart by the end of the decade. It also could have been that Sammy Davis Jr. or someone close to him, they saw what was coming on the horizon in the 1980s. See an excerpt from one of Davis's many memoirs, 1980's Hollywood in a Suitcase. It ran in the New York Daily News as a preview under the subtitle, "A Touch of Satanism and Lessons in Love."
32:05 Speaker 06 Fucking bastard.
32:07 Speaker 00 In this excerpt, Davis wrote that he joined the Church of Satan and still had many friends within the organization. Flat out writing, "I became a Satanist." But, when the book was actually released, all mentions of the Church of Satan had been wiped away because the Satanic Panic had finally arrived.
32:25 Speaker 05 This is where the temperature changes for this whole fucking thing.
32:30 Speaker 00 1980.
32:30 Speaker 05 As you start to see, so they had an issue in the grottos, right? So the grottos were obviously the main problem. Because the grottos were, it was a constant fight since the beginning of the church.
32:43 Speaker 00 And the grottos, just to remind you, were the kind of satellites of the Church of Satan, which people would kind of grow their own Satanic organization within their community.
32:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was like the-
32:54 Speaker 00 That had to report back to the Church of Satan in San Francisco.
32:56 Speaker 05 They did. There was the Lilith one, the Yogath, there was Babylon, there was Stegan, all these like kind of different names. And each one of them kind of had a prob- they had a constant issue with, what do, how do we manage these? How tightly are we supposed to be running these? How much are we supposed to be micromanaging these grottos? Michael Aquino was like, "Total freedom. Every one of them needs to do whatever they want. Cause constant fucking problems." And the main, one of the main problems is being out or being in as a Satanist. Which means either being a public Satanist, or being a, um, Anton LaVey liked to call his underground clergy. His underground clergy were his, was his favorite. Which is people that had regular jobs, that did not want the world in general to know that they were Satanists, but they showed up to the rituals.
33:41 Speaker 05 The main problem the grottos were having was, yeah, people were signing up, but no one was coming to the ritual. No one was doing stuff. Because some were, some of the grottos were out. Some of the grottos meant like, "Oh, we have public rosters, you can know that who is here." And there were people that were, like, they were constantly fighting back and forth, "How do you figure this out?" And the Satanic Panic was one of those things that accelerated all of it. Because one grotto was like, "We're mainly undercover people. Are we, what are we supposed to do?" And it was this entire scandal, a local, uh, uh, same thing that kind of always happens. molested a bunch of kids. They like did a whole thing about satanic cults and all this kind of shit. A lot of heat was growing around this one grotto. And they were like, what the
34:23 Speaker 05 fuck are we supposed to do? How do we save ourselves from all this heat? And Anton LaVey wrote a scathing letter being like, you're supposed to stand up for the church of Satan, and go write about how we don't do this. You're supposed to stand up, identify yourselves, and do this. And it created this massive fucking problem. It was like one of the first things where they were like, no, you're you're you're like now Michael managing us after telling us we could do whatever the hell we want. And it caused a big fucking issue, destroyed that grotto.
34:50 Speaker 00 Yeah. Now, even though Sammy Davis Jr. Was no longer public with his Satanism, he never stopped practicing. And he was known to cautiously gauge interest in Satanism with other celebrities if he got a feeling that the other celebrity might be hip. I fucking, I love this one.
35:05 Speaker 05 This is good.
35:05 Speaker 00 When a tribute show was being put together for Sammy Davis Jr. In 1989, after he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, Eddie Murphy was chosen as the MC. And reportedly during a dinner between Eddie Murphy and Sammy Davis Jr., Sammy lightly said, you know, Satan's as powerful as God.
35:22 Speaker 05 That's fucking, that's so fucking cool.
35:26 Speaker 00 Just dropping it in there?
35:27 Speaker 05 Sammy Davis Jr.'s the only real Satan. He's like, he's so close to being the top person of Satanism. He was so close.
35:36 Speaker 00 Just dropping it into a conversation with fucking Eddie Murphy in 1989, when Eddie Murphy is like, the most famous man on earth.
35:42 Speaker 06 He's like 22 years old.
35:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, red hot star.
35:48 Speaker 00 Well, the famously close minded Eddie Murphy just responded with, what the fuck are you talking about?
35:53 Speaker 05 I don't know.
35:56 Speaker 00 I'm just talking, you know, Sammy, Sammy just talks. So Davis dropped the subject as soon as it was brought up. But according to friends and girlfriends, Davis practiced Satanism and ritual magic well into his dying days. One girlfriend said that she had to stop seeing Sammy because of his interest in sex magic in particular, but not because he did anything bad. Love making, she said, became a ritual tied into the worship of the occult in ways that she didn't want to understand. But it must be said that Sammy's did get quite dark at times with everyone's consent. Davis was fond of drawing blood with sharp objects like broken bottles, often from genital areas, but always like, so I just can imagine Sammy Davis like, you mind if I bring the bottle into it?
36:39 Speaker 05 And just like, and then what, Billy Crystal, like watching from the cuck chair? Just being like, I have this amazing idea about a play about Mickey Mantle. Like, is that all he's doing?
36:51 Speaker 00 But to his credit, it must be mentioned that his aforementioned wife, Alta Vies, stayed with Sammy from 1970 until his death 19 years later. In fact, the information about sex magic comes from letters written to Alta Vies, in which a shared associate was seemingly just keeping Sammy's wife up to date on what her husband was doing.
37:11 Speaker 00 But when Sammy Davis Jr.'s big send off at the end of his life was televised in 1989, Anton LaVey was not invited. Instead, he watched it at home on TV with everyone else, probably cursing Frank Sinatra for having a hand in dashing LaVey's obvious dreams of establishing himself in the world of entertainment. A chance like that would never come again.
37:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, CBS doesn't want his fucking ass there. No, they really don't, man.
37:42 Speaker 05 Cause you know, I do think a lot of it has to do with how kind of unsure and bashful he was. I think that Anton LaVey. I think Anton LaVey would.
37:53 Speaker 00 Oh, he had by 89, he hadn't talked to Sammy Davis Jr. in a decade.
37:56 Speaker 05 And he'd already becoming a rotten pumpkin of himself.
37:59 Speaker 00 Yeah.
38:00 Speaker 06 Also, as a show, Anton LaVey would ruin the vibe.
38:04 Speaker 00 He really would.
38:05 Speaker 06 He would ruin the whole vibe of the whole tribute show.
38:07 Speaker 05 Nobody knows.
38:08 Speaker 06 You can't have him there.
38:08 Speaker 05 And that's the, and to be honest, that's Anton LaVey's eternal sadness. And we see that in the letters, his eternal sadness of. The fact that coining himself as the Pope of Evil pushed everyone away. And he could never get, it made him and destroyed him. And he could never get into a community of people he liked again.
38:34 Speaker 06 See, he put all his cards into Sammy Davis Jr. He should have been going to Jimmy Page.
38:38 Speaker 05 Well, he was doing a, he was sending out feelers. He was. And there, but the problem is, is that Jimmy Page was into fucking Lord of the Rings.
38:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, and I, and I think that Anton LaVey famously hated rock music. I think he really disliked it. Like, he was a fucking Calliope player. And you also remember, he's an old man. He was. Like, he, he's not, he is not a young, he was born in the twenties.
39:02 Speaker 06 That's true.
39:02 Speaker 00 You know, like, he, he's not into Led Zeppelin. You know, he doesn't care about all that shit. He thinks it's all noise. He wants Calliope. He wants organ. He wants, you know, Ring-a-ding-ding.
39:11 Speaker 05 He wants big bands, he, cause his belief is that Satanism had left the earth. Like, he's kinda had this belief a little bit of, there are, like, you can't just become a Satanist. You just are one or are not. So he is one of those where he couldn't, he was thought more people would show up. He thought more people would, cool people would show up.
39:29 Speaker 00 And he didn't like who showed up.
39:31 Speaker 06 Yeah. Also, it, it's interesting because Frank Sinatra, he kinda lost his juju when he stuck. Even he, when he went against rock and roll.
39:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:39 Speaker 06 And he would have fucking went into rock and roll a little bit. I mean, he, yes, he did his Mrs. Robinson cover.
39:44 Speaker 05 But this is a part of what I'm saying, my overarching idea of the reason why old wizards die hard is because they refuse to die first while they're alive. Gandalf the Grey had to die to become Gandalf the White in order to save everyone. And that requires self-sacrifice and it requires getting rid of the old you and growing into a third phase, which he never did.
40:08 Speaker 06 You know who did? Liam Neeson.
40:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, he did.
40:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, he did. Yeah, dude, you got to see Pamela Anderson's vagina once.
40:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
40:16 Speaker 05 That's huge.
40:17 Speaker 00 Uh, and Sinatra also came back in nineteen eighty with New York, New York.
40:21 Speaker 06 Yes.
40:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's, that's the thing. No one realizes that he didn't do that until nineteen eighty.
40:25 Speaker 05 What?
40:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
40:26 Speaker 05 New York, New York? That's from nineteen eighty?
40:29 Speaker 00 It's from a musical. Yeah, it's from, uh, uh, I can't remember what the musical was called, but yeah, it was from, I think.
40:34 Speaker 05 Get out of my face, you idiot!
40:39 Speaker 00 And so now that we've told the tale of Sammy Davis Jr. And the Church of Satan, let's turn back the narrative clock to the early 1970s, where we return our focus to the inner workings of the Church of Satan itself. See, in the early to mid 70s, that's when Anton LaVey started turning his eye more towards Hollywood. And LaVey's right-hand man and head nerd, Michael Aquino, had been just as excited as Anton and Diane about the possibilities of poor devil. But within just two years of those heady days, the schism between Aquino, the academic, and LaVey, the showman, would grow too wide to fix when Aquino disagreed with one of LaVey's new church policies. See, Aquino, and this is very important, Aquino actually believed that Satan was real.
41:24 Speaker 00 Satan is a dude that you can talk to and ask to do things for you. Anton LaVey was an atheist. This, of course, is a problem when two guys with these mindsets are trying to run a church together.
41:37 Speaker 05 Well, also, there is a difference between the inner group and then the outer group. So in Anton LaVey's inner group, he's way more willing to expand his consciousness. In the inner group, he's way more willing to be, okay, we will do these ritual activities. Because according to Michael Aquino, this is what he means, this is what it means by Satan is real. Is that what he's saying is that for Anton LaVey, when they were doing the Satanic Mass, he, Anton LaVey, is saying this is a dramatic representation. It can lead you to things or not, but largely this is just kind of a group-building activity. We're doing this. But according to Michael Aquino, when they were all together, he knows
42:21 Speaker 05 that there was something else in the room. That every single time they did one of these things, that's where it started. That there was something else in the room and that they all acknowledged it, but then all of them would become too cool to acknowledge it later on because they did not want to face what they were doing. But what they were, what was happening was that accidentally, Michael Aquino is just making Christianity again. Yeah. He's just making it again. Like, and so that's the problem. He's just replacing it with another thing.
42:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, he's actually making Protestantism. We'll get into here in a sec.
42:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, LaVey's like the show promoter and Aquino's like the historian.
42:54 Speaker 05 Yes.
42:55 Speaker 00 Now for Michael Aquino, the final insult came when he saw a draft for an article that Le Vey was planning to publish in the Church's internal publication, The Cloven Hoof. See, Aquino was already miffed at Le Vey for dismantling the grotto system.
43:08 Speaker 05 Which did not go smoothly, and it did not go like, "Oh, it's over."
43:12 Speaker 00 No, no, no.
43:13 Speaker 05 No, no, no. It was just, it was just total cockamamie horseshit. Yeah, Aquino kinda fucked that one up. They all fucked that up.
43:19 Speaker 00 And Le Vey's focus on materialism had always rankled Aquino's spiritual standards. But regardless of the purity that Aquino was wanting and expecting in the fucking Church of Satan, a man's gotta eat, and money was tight within the organization by 1975. So Le Vey decided that he was gonna simply sell initiatory ranks within the Church, which ironically could be compared to the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the 16th century. Michael Aquino, playing the Martin Luther role in this situation, believed that simply selling ranks was dishonorable and corrupt, because what was the point of doing the reading if someone could just buy their way into a magic circle?
44:00 Speaker 00 But even though Michael Aquino offered alternatives, Le Vey refused to back down on the plan. So Michael Aquino left the Church of Satan, along with a fair number of other Satanists who were also becoming disillusioned with Le Vey, to start their own movement, called the Temple of Set. Being more focused on magical ritual and practice, Setianism has been described as more esoteric Satanism, as opposed to Le Vey's rational flavor.
44:24 Speaker 05 Anton Le Vey served in the great legacy of other magical teachers simplifying the lessons, right? According to Anton Le Vey and the Satanic rituals, what he has already done is served, kinda like, put together, summarize all of the various esoteric schools into one book according to their belief system. And so, that's, he thought, "We're done. We've done this. Now, this is the set of rituals, we go." Michael Aquino is trying to say, "We're not going far enough."
44:54 Speaker 00 Yes.
44:55 Speaker 05 Because Anton Le Vey is saying, "No, the whole point of this is unleash your personal power, lesser magic. Yes, there is greater magic, which is the idea of changing the world and become..." Coming one with the godhead and doing all this stuff, but he even said, that's for fucking later. That's for your private time. That's for your own belief system, blah, blah, blah. This whole thing is to release the lesser magic, the things that you can actually control to manipulate in a one to one carny level. And Michael Aquino just refused to believe that because he had this idea that, no, there is this like burning thing inside us all that will purify us. Yeah. So Aquino is like actually crazy. Well, if you read this. Thank you for the man from the street.
45:42 Speaker 05 The Temple of Set Book is.
45:43 Speaker 00 I would say Michael Aquino is no crazier than a priest.
45:46 Speaker 05 No, no, none. Yeah, well, they're crazy. The Temple of Set Books, the reason why I don't bring those in is because those are the most boring things you've ever written, even more boring than this. Cause the thing about this book, The Church of Satan by Michael Aquino, Volume One, is that it's every single subreddit meltdown you've ever written, but they had to write letters instead of instant messages. So they literally had to spend weeks back and forth doing a mod breakdown in a Reddit group.
46:14 Speaker 00 Oh, no, the grotto system falling apart, it's just mod drama.
46:17 Speaker 05 Oh, my God.
46:17 Speaker 00 All it is.
46:18 Speaker 05 Oh, my God, is it mod drama. And honestly, and every single thing is the squeakiest wheel gets the fucking grease. Every single thing is the least important grotto and the least important people are the ones causing the most important problems.
46:30 Speaker 00 Always, always, always, always. That is always the rule.
46:33 Speaker 05 Yes.
46:33 Speaker 00 Now, within a year of his breakup with LaVey, Aquino wrote a new manifesto claiming that it was born entirely through automatic writing, just like Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law. But Aquino was a nerd who didn't have a sense of humor. So he was not prepared for all the ejaculate jokes that would no doubt be made when he named the foundational text for his new satanic religion. He named it The Book of Coming Forth by Night.
46:57 Speaker 05 Hey, man. I just don't hate being behind those first three dudes.
47:03 Speaker 06 Listen, um, your book is just like, it's your book's titles. Like what, what is it? It's just coming forth by night.
47:10 Speaker 00 The Book of Coming Forth by Night. Yeah.
47:12 Speaker 06 Yeah, no, that's fine. What? I don't get it.
47:14 Speaker 05 Where do you want it to be? It happened at night. That's not the problem, Mike. I came. I came at night. I came forth at night. Well, so. And this is the book of coming.
47:26 Speaker 00 For a horse.
47:27 Speaker 05 It's like, well, you know what it is? You know what it is?
47:30 Speaker 00 What?
47:30 Speaker 05 It's a take on the book of coming forth by day, which is in the Egyptian book of the dead. So he just stole the name of the book.
47:36 Speaker 00 No, of course he stole it, but it's, he just, you gotta, you gotta look at it and think like, okay, no, I can't do that because people are just gonna make a bunch of cum jokes.
47:45 Speaker 06 Of course. Also, like, Setiism is way dumber than Satanism.
47:50 Speaker 00 Super dumb. It doesn't, it doesn't roll off the tongue. There's no zip to it.
47:54 Speaker 05 Cause they were already mad at it.
47:55 Speaker 00 The Temple of Set sounds cool, but that's it. That's where it ends.
47:58 Speaker 05 Yes, Setian is dumb. And also the idea of, cause that was the idea is that devil, the devil appeared to him.
48:04 Speaker 00 They should call themselves Setish.
48:05 Speaker 05 Setishes. Oh, the Setish.
48:08 Speaker 00 The Setish, yeah.
48:12 Speaker 05 But he, according to Michael Aquino, the devil appeared to him and said, I want you to stop calling me by my Jewish name. And then, cause that's the whole thing is we, yes, we kind of like glossed over a lot of stuff, but in the, the Jewish idea of Sa- like Satan, the word Satan is the adversary and all this kind of shit, but it kind of served as like a lighter villain, which was what we kind of talked about. But that, the devil completely went to Michael Aquino and says, why you gotta make me so Jewish? And then they went and they changed him and he made him into Set because he's deeply into Egyptology.
48:42 Speaker 00 Well, he says that he wants to be called by his proper, original name. Like what, what we know as the biblical Satan is actually the ancient Egyptian deity Set. God of, god of storms and desert, usurper and murderer of his brother Osiris.
48:55 Speaker 05 And his belief is that the Setian Egyptian princes and kings were the most powerful. And that once they started going away from that, it included the Osiris myth, which is where the Jesus myth would come from. That is when the Egyptian, uh, world started falling apart was when they decided that the Osiris myth was the main religion. When before, when they were worshiping Set, they controlled them as all of Africa.
49:20 Speaker 00 Well, good for them.
49:22 Speaker 06 I do know that the, I do know that the Egyptians, they choose. I know that much shit. That much I do know.
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50:48 Speaker 00 Live from your grave. The Temple of Set was, against all odds, a relative success. And Aquino continued running the temple for years while maintaining rank in the United States Active Guard Reserve. Mostly, though, Aquino settled into the role of an academic, earning a PhD in political science before taking an adjunct professor job at Golden Gate University. Aquino also continued his fight with Anton LaVey, which some described as an obsession.
51:17 Speaker 05 It's 700 pages long.
51:19 Speaker 00 Besides publishing "A Scathing History of the Church of Satan," that debunked many of LaVey's claims about his own biography, Aquino also found and released divorce proceedings, restraining orders, and even bankruptcy filings that all painted LaVey in a negative light.
51:35 Speaker 06 Man, don't get in a fight with a fucking nerd who's good at paperwork.
51:39 Speaker 05 Dude, that's the problem, is the guy did all the paperwork, because the guy that fucking comes against you is just like, "Oh, God, I don't got fucking time for this fucking shit." Shut the fuck up, Michael!
51:50 Speaker 00 And you can't-
51:50 Speaker 05 Michael, shut up!
51:51 Speaker 00 And you can't fight him because he was the guy that did all the paperwork for ya.
51:54 Speaker 05 He does everything. You don't know anything.
51:56 Speaker 00 Whilst continuing the fight with LaVey, Aquino also became obsessed with Nazi occultism. See, in 1983, he went on a work trip on behalf of the United Nations to Europe, but he decided to play hooky a bit so he could drop by Wevelsberg Castle in Germany. If you'll remember, Wevelsberg was supposed to be Heinrich Himmler's headquarters for his Nazi occult Annerba Arian Knights of the Round Table. Yay!
52:24 Speaker 00 So after sneaking in, Aquino actually performed a magical ritual within the underground ceremonial space that Himmler was planning to use to hold his own rituals.
52:33 Speaker 05 You know he didn't, you know he didn't even sneak in? You know that he used his government contacts to get access to it?
52:39 Speaker 00 Well, yeah.
52:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's what he did. He went in and he was like, he got in, and then-
52:44 Speaker 00 I'm here from the UN!
52:45 Speaker 05 I'm here to, I'm here to do stuff! Whatever you want. Man, you know the UN fucking hated that shit. Oh yeah.
52:54 Speaker 00 Well, according to the Temple of Set Wikipedia page, "Out of this ritual came the second Order of the Trapposoid, which was a simple repackaging of Anton LaVey's early governing body of the Church of Satan." But since Aquino was just as big of a nerd as Himmler, he took a page from Himmler's book and decreed that his Order of the Trapposoid was going to be a chivalric Order of Knights.
53:15 Speaker 05 The trapposoid is the door to the angles. The angles are the way to the center. The center is the heart of evil.
53:23 Speaker 00 Sure.
53:27 Speaker 00 This, of course, brought accusations that Aquino was sympathetic to Nazi ideology.
53:31 Speaker 05 He was!
53:32 Speaker 00 And like all these assholes, Aquino said that, you know, the Holocaust, it's repugnant.
53:37 Speaker 05 It really is distasteful.
53:38 Speaker 00 Distasteful, repugnant.
53:39 Speaker 06 I don't like it either.
53:40 Speaker 05 It really, it rubs me, that's my thing, it rubs me the wrong way.
53:44 Speaker 00 But he also believed that Heinrich Himmler had, through occult means, summoned an extraordinary psychic force. That force, Aquino said, had been misdirected by the Nazis. Although, according to Aquino, quote-
53:59 Speaker 05 It need not have been. Whatever.
54:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:03 Speaker 05 Just say it normal, Michael. You know, I, upon rereading all of this, right? So Anton LaVey and Michael Aquino had very different views on Nazism. They did. But his view, I think Michael Aquino's view, Anton LaVey's view is opportunistically naive. And, and probably misaligned with the rest of the world.
54:24 Speaker 00 Super.
54:25 Speaker 05 Michael Aquino-
54:25 Speaker 00 We'll get into that later.
54:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, Michael Aquino is one of those guys of, the reason why I don't like neo-Nazis is because the OG Nazis would have killed them all. Because they're weak.
54:35 Speaker 00 Not tough enough?
54:36 Speaker 05 They're not, they don't do it right. The idea is that they didn't do it right, Himmler would have killed these neo-Nazis. This is his whole belief and this idea that anything, and it's like, would they, again, another thing he doesn't particularly understand is that if your magic is attached to Holocaust, it doesn't matter what good it could have done.
54:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:53 Speaker 05 It doesn't, I'm just talking as a wizard, right? I'm talking as a fake wizard on a, on a podcast, telling somebody to understand that you, even I know, anything that's connected to the Holocaust is not, the Holocaust ain't a mistake.
55:08 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:08 Speaker 05 You know what I mean? It's not just like, ooh, man.
55:10 Speaker 00 It's not a whoopsie.
55:11 Speaker 05 It's not a whoopsie doo, alright? It is a gigantic genocide machine created by a specific point of view fueled by occultism. So let's just not act like it's fucking, that it's, you can't separate the two.
55:24 Speaker 06 I just can't believe the military let him stick around.
55:27 Speaker 05 Well, you also have to remember that he was good at, quote-unquote, good at his job. And also, this is a time period, and you've, we've talked about this. World War II was a lot closer, right? So we kinda had already beat the Nazis.
55:39 Speaker 00 Mm-hmm.
55:40 Speaker 05 So there is still a little, tiny bit of a view of like, eh, even if they fucking pop up, we're kinda like, uh.
55:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, no one's really taking the Nazis seriously.
55:50 Speaker 06 Yeah, they're losers.
55:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:51 Speaker 05 Right now.
55:51 Speaker 00 Yeah.
55:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, not now, not now, but in 1983 they did.
55:55 Speaker 06 They're back in charge now.
55:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, and also, it's not like he is, you know, broadcasting that he's doing all this stuff.
56:00 Speaker 05 No, he kept it close to the vest.
56:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, a- and the, and the army also, you know, especially intelligence services, intelligence services don't give a fuck what you do outside of your own personal, outside of what they ask you to do. As long as you get the job done, they don't give a shit. They don't care at all.
56:18 Speaker 05 It's kind of the problem with them.
56:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
56:22 Speaker 00 But as Michael Aquino became a far more visible Satanist, or Setian, as he'd call it, the target on his back got larger and larger as the Satanic panic was cultivated by the same people Aquino was courting.
56:34 Speaker 06 Oh, I thought the target on his back got larger and larger as he got fatter. That too. That too. I think his shirt just got tighter.
56:44 Speaker 00 Well, Aquino appeared as a guest on not just The Oprah Winfrey Show, but also on Geraldo, and few people in the media did more to stoke the flames of the Satanic panic than Geraldo Rivera.
56:55 Speaker 06 Even though he had the same facial hair as Anton LaVine.
56:59 Speaker 00 But even though I suppose Aquino was trying the hide-and-plainsight tactic, the Satanic panic finally touched Michael Aquino in 1986, after an investigation was opened looking into accusations of Satanic ritual abuse at the Presidio Army Base's daycare in San Francisco. Allegedly, 58 children were abused at the daycare, and by 1987, Michael Aquino himself was named when the three-year-old daughter of an Army chaplain accused Aquino of sexually abusing her during a Satanic rite held at Aquino's San Francisco home. What? Yes. Yes. No, this shit happened- The man, the big man with the eyebrows, he did it to me when we were talking about the devil.
57:42 Speaker 00 It happened hundreds upon hundreds of times throughout the entire decade into the 90s, people went to prison on shit like this.
57:50 Speaker 05 It's happening right now again.
57:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, but it's, but back then specifically, it's, the idea is, you know, kids want to please. That's what, that's all a kid wants to do, is a kid wants to make you happy, and a kid wants to get a reward. So they would start asking these kids leading questions, and the kid just kept saying yes because they would get rewarded anytime they said yes. And, you know, kids of course say wild, like they just say wacky shit, like, you know, the things that don't make any sense, but the people asking the questions would take them seriously, and it would just build and build and build and build until finally you had a, an entire Satanic underground that didn't actually exist, that was basically built-
58:30 Speaker 00 by three year olds.
58:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
58:32 Speaker 06 Fucking three year old doesn't even know the English language.
58:35 Speaker 05 Well, the reason why they were weaponizing three year olds in order to prop up to either create smokescreens for their own crimes, I'm just gonna say that, they were very either covering up for themselves and they were using the innocent words of a three year old in order to do that, or they were specifically of the belief, which we saw with the West Memphis Three, that they get this idea, these like local yokels start to have this idea that I'm fighting Satan himself, because I believe that this shit is real. So if you don't believe, if you, no one would believe any of this.
59:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
59:08 Speaker 05 If they actually didn't believe in Satan himself.
59:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, and that's the, but that's the thing is that with that, I mean, that West Memphis Three, that is definitely local yokels. This is a fucking army base in the middle of San Francisco.
59:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
59:21 Speaker 00 Like, these are serious, serious accusations against people within the military itself, and people are taking it extraordinarily seriously.
59:30 Speaker 06 You know what's interesting is I always, and we see this happening now, and like, they hate something and they go at it so hard to try and take it down, all they end up doing is making it more popular.
59:40 Speaker 00 Always. And we'll actually give specific, concrete examples of that later on in this episode.
59:47 Speaker 00 Well, police raided Michael Aquino's San Francisco home and searched high and low for any sign of satanic ritual abuse, but of course, they found nothing because nobody ever once found anything ever, anywhere. Eventually, it was discovered that Aquino wasn't even in San Francisco when the abuse was supposed to have taken place.
1:00:06 Speaker 05 And you can go look that up, y'all, because I've already seen some messages about Michael Aquino. It's, we are still getting it. And that's the thing, Michael Aquino sued everybody who wrote the books about him, naming him as the suspect.
1:00:17 Speaker 00 And he won.
1:00:18 Speaker 05 And he won. And then the thing is, but guess what? It didn't do anything, because I'm still getting emails calling Michael Aquino a child molester. And it's like, he's a lot of things.
1:00:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, he's.
1:00:28 Speaker 05 But he's not a child molester.
1:00:29 Speaker 00 He's mostly just.
1:00:30 Speaker 05 An asshole.
1:00:31 Speaker 00 An asshole. Yeah.
1:00:32 Speaker 06 He lacked the physical ability.
1:00:36 Speaker 06 Barely get it up for his wife.
1:00:38 Speaker 00 I don't know. I will admit, he does have child molester body.
1:00:42 Speaker 06 Of course he does. That's why it's stuck.
1:00:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's the chubby. It's the chubby head. It's chubby face. It just screams, "Child molester."
1:00:51 Speaker 06 Yeah. It's the little eyebrows. We all know it's the eyebrows.
1:00:56 Speaker 00 So incredibly unlikable, yeah. But, and that's the thing, he wasn't even living in San Francisco when all this was happening. He was living across the country in Washington DC, provably living across the country in Washington DC. It was proven in court that he was not anywhere near San Francisco when all this happened. But, the allegations followed Aquino for the rest of his days. After years of battling the false rumors, he finally shot and killed himself with a gun in 2019 in the face of terminal cancer.
1:01:25 Speaker 06 That's a wild couple of sentences. Oh yeah.
1:01:31 Speaker 06 He had a rough end there.
1:01:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, that was, yeah, yeah, Michael Aquino ended hard. Yeah, that, that life.
1:01:37 Speaker 06 They all do.
1:01:38 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah, they really all end very hard. It is not like, no one, none of these guys die like surrounded by their grandchildren. Or by friends, or, or any, no, no beautiful ceremony. It's, it's a hard end every single time. It turns out, spending your entire life, you know, cultivating hatred and anger and fear, um, tends to just like by the get, time you get to the end of it, it's really not a whole lot of rainbows left.
1:02:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, not a lot of selling points for the hangout.
1:02:08 Speaker 00 Now, Michael Aquino was not alone in the satanic ranks when it came to accusations of sympathy towards Nazis, neo-Nazis in particular. Anton LaVey did indeed pal around with neo-Nazis throughout the 1970s and beyond, which seems at odds with his legitimate friendship with a Jewish black guy like Sammy Davis Jr. But the radical acceptance that LaVey and the Church of Satan had towards Sammy Davis Jr. That worked both ways. While I certainly don't agree with it, it seems like Anton LaVey would associate with anyone who tickled a certain intellectual curiosity, regardless of how foul their beliefs might be. But as we all know, as soon as you let Nazis inside, in any capacity whatsoever, every other Nazi sees your organization or your location as a safe space.
1:02:53 Speaker 00 But it seems like Anton LaVey was not familiar with the Nazi bar principle. Could however, also be that Anton LaVey simply found these people fascinating, because the neo-Nazis, who were supposedly friends with Anton LaVey, they were in fact, the weirdest and most pathetic of the entire bunch.
1:03:11 Speaker 05 There's one very illuminating letter in here, that made me realize what Anton LaVey was doing, which is, again, I don't think it was correct, but he, he had a motive. So it was neither, it was not intellectual curiosity, and it wasn't even like he was into the guys. He straight up, just straight up, he straight up said, Satanism needs every ally. We need everyone. We need the Nazis and the Jews. In his mind, Anton LaVey said, the neo-Nazis were never all that serious. They held their Nazism on their sleeve, and that sleeve can be ripped off. And his idea was that I can insinuate myself into these Nazi groups, and then what we do is, you start to, oh yeah, your enemies are my enemies, I hate those guys, but it's
1:03:56 Speaker 05 like, there's somebody even worse, the Catholic Church, am I right? And then eventually Anton LaVey would work his way through these, join the Nazis and the Jewish people, in a hatred towards the Christian church, and as allies to Satanism. And he doesn't understand that they're just not gonna hang out. They're just not going to. And they think it's not gonna fucking happen.
1:04:17 Speaker 00 Common ground's not there, it's really fucking stupid.
1:04:20 Speaker 05 It's not gonna happen.
1:04:21 Speaker 00 It's a pipe dream.
1:04:22 Speaker 05 He legitimately, just, because that was the thing, that everybody thinks that they're, everybody else is using everybody else. And he thinks that, oh, they'll help us, and they're not even that serious, and it's just like, no, bro, it's like, that's the problem, is that you're making them serious. When you hang out with them, you give them legitimacy, and guess what that is? Weirdly, a lack of self-esteem on your part, Pope of Satan. That's a lack of self-esteem, of you understanding how much you don't need them, and how much technically, you didn't need anybody. And you should have stuck to that, that I didn't need anybody. He was desperate.
1:04:56 Speaker 06 He was.
1:04:56 Speaker 05 And he wanted, he has the Trumpism thing of, I just want a friend. He has a con man.
1:05:01 Speaker 00 He just wants to be liked.
1:05:03 Speaker 05 The difference between the carny, and I think than any other type of person in this, is that he's a genuine entertainer. And I think that he had a vacuous hole in him that was looking for love. And I think a lot of con men are desperate for love. And then what they do is, is create a set of circumstances in which that love can be so powerful and so pervasive as that it's supernatural. That's why L. Ron Hubbard was looking for it. That's why these people look for it. It's because they're so empty.
1:05:28 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:05:29 Speaker 05 And they want love so bad. They want to be loved and unconditionally loved. So they have to create the occult to do it.
1:05:37 Speaker 06 And he really is like portraying the fucking lead character of Nightmare Alley.
1:05:42 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:05:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:05:43 Speaker 05 And he is not understanding the irony in it. Because like, that's what I mean by third phase.
1:05:47 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:05:48 Speaker 05 Is that he doesn't understand he's becoming the thing that he never wanted to be.
1:05:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's why all these guys end up bitter and alone at the end of their lives. Because they just, they refuse to change and they just become the, they just become the bitter old fuck who doesn't do anything with their life.
1:06:02 Speaker 05 He actually weaponized it into a ritual called emotional crystallization initiation. It was an ECI thing that he called it. And what he would do is, he said, "The way for a man to keep his youth was to surround himself with pictures of himself from his youth and to not engage with youth culture." He said that that is like, but it's the opposite. What he didn't understand is that he was crystallizing himself.
1:06:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:23 Speaker 05 Surrounded by, it's why James Woods go, it's why people turn MAGA. It's because, as you an older man, you get to this point. It's why older guys hit this point because you fall out of love with yourself.
1:06:34 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:35 Speaker 05 And you want to find new community and you want to find new excitement. You want to be around a bunch of people that make you feel exciting and young and fulfilled and all this stuff. And you want to remind, be reminded of when you were young.
1:06:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:06:45 Speaker 05 And it gets why fascism uses nostalgia as a weapon.
1:06:48 Speaker 00 Always. It is the most powerful weapon they have. Well, the man that's usually identified as a neo-Nazi associate of Anton LaVey is James "Hartung" Madol, who was raised in the upstate New York town of Beacon. Born in 1927 to an incredibly anti-Semitic mother who brought Madol up herself.
1:07:06 Speaker 05 You never hear that.
1:07:07 Speaker 00 You never do hear, it's like, "Boy, my mother hated Jews."
1:07:11 Speaker 05 It's never like that.
1:07:14 Speaker 00 Well, James was, to put it lightly, a massive fucking nerd. He was a lonely young boy who found refuge in science, going so far as to build a laboratory in his own home. But when he reached his teenage years, he came to see science in Faustian terms. The scientist, he came to believe, was a semi-divine mage who sought mastery of the earth and the whole universe.
1:07:36 Speaker 05 Oh, that's the guy who made Tostinos? Yeah. Yeah, I bet it. Yeah, the guy who made fart pills?
1:07:41 Speaker 00 Well, partly, Madel's ideas on science came from the science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, in which the so-called heaven-storming scientist fought against God himself. Fuck you, God, I've made rubber! And it's synthetic! I don't need your plans anymore, God! I'm free from your yoke, Lord! I made lube! I shall use these to make my pipes fit together better! God, that's only God! Madel also absorbed the authoritarian utopias and the master races that were so popular in the sci-fi of the era.
1:08:23 Speaker 00 And when you mixed in his mother's antisemitism and everything happening with the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, you had James Madel sci-fi fascist.
1:08:32 Speaker 05 Pew pew pew. Shooting Jews with lasers.
1:08:37 Speaker 06 Now, before we go too far into this, I'm just curious, like, how, where is, like, the Church of Satan on science? Because obviously, science has killed God. So, like, where?
1:08:47 Speaker 05 Oh, they're very pro-science. They are pro-science, and, but also, Anton LaVey is one of those guys that is into folk magic and, like, local cure-alls. So, he is also into that. Like, he does like science and stuff. Michael Aquino's a big, like, science guy, obviously, and then, but he also believes that there's, like, lesser magics that can help you as well.
1:09:11 Speaker 00 Let's say, let's say that they're more likely to die the death of Steve Jobs than most people.
1:09:17 Speaker 05 Maybe, yeah.
1:09:19 Speaker 00 So, in his late teens, James Madoll found other sci-fi fascists like author Charles B. Hudson. Hudson was a pre-war American fascist who, in addition to writing sci-fi stories, had caught the attention of other American fascists with his bulletin, "America in Danger."
1:09:35 Speaker 05 The Turner Diaries is a sci-fi novel.
1:09:36 Speaker 00 Yes. No, there is a massive undercurrent of fascism within the sci-fi community that's been there.
1:09:43 Speaker 05 Heinlein's always had a fucking all of that. They're obsessed with Atlantis.
1:09:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's been there since the 30s and 40s. Well, in this conspiracy-laden publication, "America in Danger", Hudson blamed the Jews for every bad thing that ever happened in American history, including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
1:10:00 Speaker 05 No!
1:10:02 Speaker 00 Anton LaVey's future friend, James Madoll, absorbed Hudson's writings, mixed it with sci-fi, and turned it into his own flavor of Nazi movement. So managing to somehow be a nerdier fascist than even Heinrich Himmler, James Madoll formed a far-right political movement based in the sci-fi community called the Anamist Party, which was announced in an issue of the Pulp Magazine, "Startling Stories." He did this in 1945, which is an admittedly ballsy year to do this, to put out that ad.
1:10:35 Speaker 05 Fascism's having a bad year, but I think that we can bring her back, boys. Let's go. Let's go. I actually thought, Anamists, didn't Anamists, don't they believe? I thought that was like a whole thing where they believe every object has a soul.
1:10:48 Speaker 00 I don't know why he called it the Anamist Party. I couldn't really find much information on what the Anamist Party, because James Madoll, like, all of his information is out there, but he is kind, he's a bit of a forgotten figure in the neo-Nazi movement.
1:11:01 Speaker 05 Good.
1:11:01 Speaker 00 But, he is also, shares a lot with the modern Nazis, you know, the modern far-right.
1:11:08 Speaker 05 And the, what the modern fake reactionary Satanist groups are doing too, like the O-N-A and those guys.
1:11:14 Speaker 00 Sure.
1:11:15 Speaker 05 You know what, also, that was specifically disproved to be connected to Michael Aquino.
1:11:19 Speaker 00 What, the O-N-A?
1:11:20 Speaker 05 O-N-A, yeah.
1:11:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, let's not get into that, too far. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:11:24 Speaker 05 I will talk about the Order of the Angles. You want to talk about a ritual? You want to get into some ritual ideas?
1:11:29 Speaker 00 Really don't want to talk about it.
1:11:30 Speaker 05 Lovecraft finding it kind of comes into this whole thing. This series will end today, Henry. I'm just saying, there's lots of stuff we can get into.
1:11:34 Speaker 00 Don't want to talk about it in any way whatsoever.
1:11:37 Speaker 05 It's about the different ways...
1:11:38 Speaker 00 To look at Satan. Pretty soon, James Madoll. Pretty soon, James Madoll.
1:11:46 Speaker 05 The trapezoid's the door. The angles are the way.
1:11:50 Speaker 00 Stop it.
1:11:52 Speaker 00 Pretty soon, James Madoll dropped the animus party and joined forces with a German American named Kurt Mertig, who founded a neo-Nazi group after Hitler's death called the National Renaissance Party. And I didn't realize how horrible of a name Kurt Mertig is.
1:12:06 Speaker 05 Kurt Mertig is a bad name.
1:12:08 Speaker 00 Until I said it out loud.
1:12:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, but also it's great. I was gonna think of it like, what a great Nazi name.
1:12:11 Speaker 00 It is. Kurt Mertig.
1:12:12 Speaker 05 Oh, fuck, here comes Mertig.
1:12:17 Speaker 05 Oh, I thought you all stopped talking, were you, because you were talking about me?
1:12:22 Speaker 00 Well, actually, Mertig was a German Ameri- he was a German American. He had spent the 30s like being basically a Hitler fanboy. He had, he was one of the founders, like, one of the first American Nazi parties. A big figure. But the group that he founded, the National Renaissance Party, it was taken from one of the last things Hitler wrote, in which Hitler said that springing forth from his death would be, quote,
1:12:47 Speaker 05 The seed of the radiant renaissance of the national socialist movement.
1:12:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. And he died.
1:12:56 Speaker 05 I love the taste of bullets.
1:13:01 Speaker 00 Gasoline, not petrol. Here, Eva, you try this first.
1:13:05 Speaker 05 God, I love to kill a woman.
1:13:08 Speaker 00 But Mertig was already an old man when he founded the NRP. So, future friend of Anton LaVey, James Madoll, he quickly took over as the leader of the National Renaissance Party in 1949. But with Madoll in charge, the NRP began exploring science fiction's other half: fantasy. But wait, I prefer fantasies. I mean, we're more of, I'm a fantasy guy, you're a sci-fi guy.
1:13:30 Speaker 05 That's how they'd get you.
1:13:31 Speaker 00 That's how they.
1:13:33 Speaker 05 I like westerns. Yeah. Where's our fat, where's our Nazi? The Westerns.
1:13:40 Speaker 00 Before long, Madol was injecting the NRP with occult ideas that were a mixture of the fantasy stories Heinrich Kimmeler had picked up from German volkriders and the speculative fiction of pulp magazines. Madol began writing occult political treatises with names like "The New Atlantis: A Blueprint for an Aryan Garden of Eden in North America."
1:13:59 Speaker 05 There's like five racist dog whistles in that.
1:14:03 Speaker 05 It's actually skilled how many different racist dog whistles are just in that one sentence.
1:14:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's a lot of guys that's gonna see that and go, "Oh, I'll pick that up."
1:14:11 Speaker 06 The real New Atlantis is New Orleans.
1:14:17 Speaker 00 Don't discount Miami, they're in a fucking race to the bottom of the ocean.
1:14:20 Speaker 05 Oh, fingers crossed.
1:14:23 Speaker 00 Well, in "The New Atlantis," Madol predicted that once fascism took over and all the Jews and people of color were eliminated in America, the Aryan race would use its principles to take their ideology to the stars. But in the real world, Madol was having a hard time putting his fantasy hierarchies into practice. Nobody except a few morons were listening to his ideas as he shouted them from the street corners of New York City. So Madol took those morons and established what he called his "security echelon." These were his "street fighters." They were supposed to be his "storm troopers." Madol and the security echelon would spend the next few decades harassing people on the streets of New York City while dressed as storm troopers. Madol himself, he gave speeches, but he always
1:15:08 Speaker 00 wore a fucking crash helmet because he got his ass kicked so much.
1:15:12 Speaker 05 God, it's great.
1:15:14 Speaker 00 Now, besides the psychic damage they caused, they were relatively harmless in the physical realm. That changed, however, in 1963 during an incident that is alternately called, and I'm being totally serious here, it was called "The White Castle Plot," or "The Siege on White Castle."
1:15:32 Speaker 06 I've done that before.
1:15:37 Speaker 05 I'm just a trench warfare inside of a White Castle.
1:15:42 Speaker 00 No, the White Castle plot is, "I'm really high, but I want some White Castle. How we gonna get there?"
1:15:48 Speaker 05 How we get there?
1:15:50 Speaker 00 Will the Uber driver stop in the drive thru?
1:15:53 Speaker 06 There's a whole movie about it.
1:15:54 Speaker 00 There is a giant, there's a whole movie, yes, that is about that, yeah.
1:15:58 Speaker 05 And then you, to be honest-
1:15:59 Speaker 00 I'm definitely, I'm talking about the burger joint White Castle here.
1:16:01 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, I also will say, this is the type of shit, let's just say, this is the type of stuff that made them not take the neo Nazis super seriously. I think that's the problem, is that they really were kinda cute for a while.
1:16:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:16:15 Speaker 05 They were just kinda stupid.
1:16:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:16:17 Speaker 06 At this point, I'm more scared of Shredder and the Foot Clan.
1:16:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, yes, it's like, they were just bad, they're bad, stupid Nazis that just yell at you and they're extremely unpopular.
1:16:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, in July of 1963, the Congress of Racial Equality, AKA CORE, they were demonstrating against White Castle restaurants in the Bronx over racially discriminatory hiring practices.
1:16:37 Speaker 05 So which is what? So CORE's good or bad?
1:16:40 Speaker 00 Good.
1:16:40 Speaker 05 Good.
1:16:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:16:41 Speaker 06 And were they only hiring white people in the Bronx to work at White Castle?
1:16:47 Speaker 00 Well, therein-
1:16:47 Speaker 05 Different time.
1:16:48 Speaker 00 Therein lies the problem.
1:16:49 Speaker 05 Different time, my friend.
1:16:50 Speaker 00 It's also 1963, you know, the racial makeup of New York City changed incredibly fast throughout like the 50s, 60s and 70s. So we're, I believe in 1963, I can't remember if Robert Moses had completely destroyed the Bronx just yet.
1:17:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:07 Speaker 00 Uh, but we're getting there.
1:17:08 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:17:08 Speaker 00 It's either right before or right after, um, but yes, you do bring up a good point. But it's a, it's a time of transition in New York, for New York City. Well, after James Madoll's neo-Nazi National Renaissance Party heard about CORE protesting at the White Castle restaurants in the Bronx, they arrived to counter protest and to literally defend the honor of White Castle. By the end-
1:17:33 Speaker 05 You can't be wrong 100%.
1:17:34 Speaker 06 Just show them what really fat horse is.
1:17:37 Speaker 05 All the managers of the White Castle being like, "I bet I can get about a thousand burgers out of that horse."
1:17:46 Speaker 00 By the end of the White Castle plot, eight members of the NRP were arrested, but not because they had valiantly battled the members of Core at a fast food restaurant in the Bronx. Instead, they were arrested because of their own incredible stupidity. See, three members of Madol's NRP had gotten their asses kicked by members of Core at White Castle, so they went to the 43rd precinct in the Bronx to report the assault. I got beat up!
1:18:12 Speaker 05 I just want to say, yes, we are Nazis, yes. But we got hurt. They slapped us. Can you please, yes, we're Nazis, we're the most powerful evil force in the world. One of them called me a honky. Can you imagine that? That's a racial slur. That's a racial attack. I mean, in the 60s, the only place you're allowed to legally fight is the Bronx.
1:18:42 Speaker 00 Well, while one detective took the Nazi statement, another went out to take a look at the truck in which the NRP had arrived, because it was obviously a very suspicious situation. The second detective saw, out in the open, a fully loaded 22 revolver, loaded tear gas guns, a crossbow loaded with a steel tipped arrow, a butcher knife, a switchblade, a straight razor, and an axe.
1:19:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, you're gonna want to throw a blanket over that. But how will we get to it?
1:19:09 Speaker 00 That's the arrogance of these guys. Like, "No, but we're white, we're the master race." Like, "These are cops, they understand what we're all about."
1:19:18 Speaker 05 Let's just say, if you're the master race, you might want a master hiding all your crimes.
1:19:25 Speaker 00 Well, Madol was picked up later that day, charged with conspiracy, and sentenced to two years in prison. But all that's to show you that the neo-Nazis that Anton LaVey kept company with, they were a bunch of fucking morons. And, you know, today's alt-right... Pretty close to what Madol was like. They're specifically, they're really into Warhammer 40k. Unfortunately, they're big Dune fans.
1:19:47 Speaker 05 I know, I know.
1:19:48 Speaker 00 The current alt-right.
1:19:49 Speaker 05 Well, that's just because they just don't, they don't understand the actual sacrifice that Lido II makes. And that is actually the key. Again, it's lack of understanding. Yes, there are certain parts about it, but also, how in the fuck are you possibly a neo-Nazi and anti-Dune when it's literally against the Ubermensch, the concept of the Ubermensch? Mitch McConnell looks like a sandworm.
1:20:10 Speaker 05 We know the best part about Mitch McConnell is that hopefully soon, he'll be eaten by a bunch of dirt worms.
1:20:17 Speaker 05 That'll happen soon, right? He'll be dead soon.
1:20:19 Speaker 00 No, these are, these are a lot of the guys that they love Star Trek, but like, Darth Vader was right. You know, they're the ones who love the Empire instead of the Rebels.
1:20:29 Speaker 05 They're inherently wrong.
1:20:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, and they all hate Star Trek because they'd say, you know, because Star Trek is too woke, as they say.
1:20:34 Speaker 05 Darth Vader killed the Emperor.
1:20:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:36 Speaker 05 Darth Vader didn't like being Darth Vader. You missed the whole fucking thing. You missed the whole fucking thing. Darth Vader hated being Darth Vader. He was upset. He was upset. He was a slave.
1:20:48 Speaker 00 He made the wrong choice.
1:20:48 Speaker 05 He was a slave. It was the wrong choice for him. And he knew, and the only thing he freed was his staff. And that's the whole ending of fucking film.
1:20:56 Speaker 06 Can I piss people off real quick?
1:20:57 Speaker 05 Please, please.
1:20:58 Speaker 06 Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars movie.
1:21:00 Speaker 05 Not, you are, you're almost, I love Empire, obviously, I love Empire.
1:21:04 Speaker 00 And, I mean, A New Hope is easily the best.
1:21:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:21:07 Speaker 00 It starts off good.
1:21:09 Speaker 05 Believe me, I still.
1:21:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a plus.
1:21:11 Speaker 05 It is.
1:21:11 Speaker 00 It's a big plus. The Ewoks are supposed to be wookies.
1:21:15 Speaker 05 They're supposed to be, they were, but also. Baby wookies? But I'm one of those. On Axis and Allies, when we play it, I always play Axis. Yeah. Alright, I'm one of those guys. Mm-hmm. Alright, even I get it.
1:21:24 Speaker 00 No, it's understandable. Sometimes you just shouldn't, you know, build your entire political philosophy around it.
1:21:29 Speaker 05 No, you're dumb if you do that.
1:21:31 Speaker 00 Indeed.
1:21:31 Speaker 05 You're stupid.
1:21:32 Speaker 00 Now, concerning Madol's friendship with Anton LaVey, it was mostly their hostility towards Christianity that aligned their movement with Satanism.
1:21:40 Speaker 05 That's the idea.
1:21:40 Speaker 00 By Camilla Befora, Madol was looking for pre-Christian pagan sources of the so-called Aryan religion, which of course never existed. But even so. His search for knowledge led him to Anton LaVey. Apparently, Madol and LaVey met frequently at the NRP office and at an occult bookstore in New York City called The Warlock Bookshop. They started meeting sometime in the 1970s. Madol thereafter erected a large satanic altar in his apartment and also played recordings of LaVey's Black Masses at several NRP meetings. Now, we don't know exactly what Madol and LaVey discussed, but a letter from 1974 does exist between Madol and a Church of Satan member
1:22:20 Speaker 00 in which Madol asked if a small group of Satanists could help introduce NRP officers and members to, quote, "more advanced concepts of occult philosophy." But from what it seems like, the NRP and the Church of Satan, they were both fringe groups who were seen by society at large as evil. As one scholar of the far right put it, their cordial relationship was basically networking. The hated hobnobbing with the hated to see if they could gain something from one another.
1:22:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:22:49 Speaker 00 One's trying, one is always trying to use the other one, and so nothing gets done.
1:22:53 Speaker 05 There was another group called the Order of the Black Ram that did something like this too. And so Anton LaVey wrote a letter to them, which has always kind of been like the Church of Satan's official stance, which is this idea of like, he wrote this letter being like, "We cannot join forces because Satanism does not choose allies carefully." Like, it chooses its allies carefully, "But I will stand beside you in the fight against the church." Like, it's that style of horseshit.
1:23:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:23:18 Speaker 05 Now, the NRP is so old, they're called the NNRP.
1:23:23 Speaker 00 It's pretty good.
1:23:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's not bad. I like it.
1:23:26 Speaker 00 Actually, NRP died real quick after James Madol.
1:23:31 Speaker 05 Oh, of course, of course.
1:23:32 Speaker 00 As far as the fate of the NRP went, it died with James. When Madol succumbed to cancer in 1979, his mother turned over all of the NRP's so-called records to a staunch French-Canadian Madol loyalist named Jean.
1:23:48 Speaker 00 Jean. Madol's mother handed over all the documents at the memorial service for her son in New York City. But Jean, perhaps distraught after attending his friend's funeral, he struck a concrete abutment in the highway while on his way home. Jean was killed instantly and the records Madol's mother had entrusted to Jean blew away like so much litter. Thus ending the National Renaissance Party within days of James Madol's death. That's fucking great. It literally ended up as fucking New York City garbage. That's awesome. In 1979, just more shit in the street.
1:24:23 Speaker 06 I could see like his mom at the funeral was like, "I'm looking for Gene."
1:24:28 Speaker 05 Yay, he's Gene, you know?
1:24:30 Speaker 06 Wallow, hello, my you put a very memorable.
1:24:33 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah, Gene, James left a message that I'm supposed to give you all these boxes that are full of his, it's his things.
1:24:40 Speaker 06 That is his most wonderful thing I've ever seen in my life. Where I will take on.
1:24:46 Speaker 00 Now, from what I can tell, the 1970s truly were the last time that Anton LaVey had any fun with the Church of Satan. In 1980, the FBI and the Secret Service raided the Church of Satan's Black House on Halloween. Choosing the date, I'm sure, in an attempt to catch LaVey doing something dirty. But the FBI did have a reason for being there because an informant had told the FBI that Anton LaVey was involved in a plot to murder Senator Ted Kennedy.
1:25:14 Speaker 05 See, this is the type of shit he got really sick of dealing with.
1:25:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, well, from what I can tell, LaVey was supposed to be the go-between on the murder, delivering eight kilos of hash to a Chicago mafia boss as payment for the hit on Senator Kennedy. The informant said that he himself was a member of the Church of Satan, and he was actually planning to instigate a gunfight during the handoff that would have resulted in LaVey's death and hopefully in the death of the mobsters as well. And when the smoke cleared, the informant said that he was gonna walk away with the drugs and walk straight into the Church of Satan to become its new leader. But possibly to get out of some other charge, the details are unclear. The informant was coming to the FBI with all of this information instead.
1:25:59 Speaker 00 All of this information was, of course, utter and total horseshit. Not even a single ounce of it was true. It's a good story. It's a great story. It's a really, it's a really great story. But the authorities having no idea what actually happened inside the Church of Satan. Of course not, and they think it's evil. They think he's evil.
1:26:19 Speaker 06 They're probably terrified.
1:26:20 Speaker 00 Oh, they think they're going against the devil himself. Yeah. They set up a massive operation to catch Anton LaVey. The FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, they set up a blockade at Chicago's O'Hare Airport to meet all incoming flights in the days preceding Halloween 1980. They were convinced that LaVey was gonna arrive any day with a briefcase full of hash. LaVey, of course, never did. Instead, when agents raided LaVey's house on Halloween, he was just sitting there, hanging out. Yeah, he's an old man. Yeah, he told the FBI that he had the highest regard for Senator Kennedy and his family, and that he would never have any involvement with drugs because he was morally opposed to them. That was actually the truth. He was morally opposed to drugs.
1:27:05 Speaker 00 He didn't do drugs.
1:27:06 Speaker 06 I just see the FBI showing up, guns drawn, like, this is actually just kinda sad.
1:27:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, like, oh, wow. You should be more evil than this. In 1980, he's, uh, Anton LaVey's 50.
1:27:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:27:18 Speaker 00 You know, he's 50 and circling the drain.
1:27:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, he's getting fat and old.
1:27:23 Speaker 06 Watching TV with the helmet, no shirt, gut hanging out.
1:27:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, man.
1:27:29 Speaker 00 You're like, fiddle faddle? You're up there for a minute, freaking, we're like, fiddle faddle.
1:27:38 Speaker 00 But part of the reason why the FBI might have taken the allegations again about Anton LaVey so seriously is because earlier that year, the book that kicked off the Satanic Panic, Michelle Remembers, was released, and it was taken incredibly seriously. Now, Michelle Remembers claimed to be an autobiographical account of a woman who had been raised by Satanists who belonged to Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. These Satanists had allegedly exposed this woman to satanic ritual abuse so horrifying that she had repressed all the memories until a psychiatrist helped her recover them. Now, again, it is all bullshit.
1:28:16 Speaker 05 Anything attached to the Satanic Panic movement is not real.
1:28:20 Speaker 00 It is not real. There is not a single ounce of proof for any of it in any way whatsoever.
1:28:26 Speaker 06 Should be called Michelle Misremembers.
1:28:27 Speaker 00 It really should be. Let's get her fucking ass. Let's dig her up. I wanna-
1:28:33 Speaker 06 See your fucking bones.
1:28:35 Speaker 00 But Michelle and her psychiatrist, they were fucking great talk show guests. They were amazing. So the satanic panic began to spread. Then came the McMartin preschool case in 1983, which featured 300 allegations of satanic ritual abuse that were completely and totally unfounded. Again, not a single bit of evidence for any of it. Martin only resulted in wasted time, money, and energy. But while no convictions were obtained, the trial lasted seven fucking years.
1:29:07 Speaker 05 It ruined everybody's life.
1:29:09 Speaker 00 I believe it was the longest trial in California history, maybe even one of the longest. I think it still is one of the longest trials in American history. And it attracted constant and frantic media coverage.
1:29:21 Speaker 06 So it probably just took whatever money they had left.
1:29:24 Speaker 05 Everything. They just drained every, just drained every single person that was attached to it. It's one of the, it's just a fucking, nothing but tragedy and pain.
1:29:31 Speaker 00 Every person involved in the McMartin preschool trial, like they were just people who ran a daycare. And those that, they were, they liked kids and they got caught up in all of this shit. And their lives were ruined. Hundreds of people had their lives ruined because McMartin's just one. It's one of dozens that happened all across the United States for 15 years at least. Most often, the media sided with the prosecutors and the Church of Satan was often singled out as a main culprit. The news show 2020 made things even worse in 1985, when they accused Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible of being responsible for America's supposed rash of child daycare ritual abuses.
1:30:10 Speaker 06 Are you slandering Barbara Walters?
1:30:15 Speaker 00 If she was involved in this story, then I'd say that Barbara Walters was wrong. And it's not slander, it's an opinion.
1:30:21 Speaker 05 It's an opinion. She was, she is wrong. And she had a big head and a tiny body.
1:30:30 Speaker 00 Now, you'd think that Anton LaVey would have had something to say about all this. But judging from his reaction, LaVey was all but done with being the boogeyman by 1985. And it's at this point in the story. That Anton's daughter Xena, recipient of the world's first satanic baptism, returns.
1:30:47 Speaker 05 Obviously also, we know Xena LaVey is the DNA basis for the clone that is Taylor Swift. And Taylor Swift was built by Nazi scientists in order to sway the public. Because when she switches-
1:30:59 Speaker 00 Not Xena LaVey, Xena Shrek. She changed her name many years ago.
1:31:01 Speaker 05 You're right, but Tina, but just know that Taylor Swift is going to make a fascist turn. She's going to destroy the world. And I just want you to remember that. I'm saying this right now. She's gonna make a fascist turn, and we're gonna have to probably sacrifice her or something. I just know that as a group. Just, just keep your eyes open for that. Just know that. Just remember that.
1:31:21 Speaker 00 Alright. Now, Xena was just 22 years old when 2020 ran the story maligning the Church of Satan. But when she called her father, Anton, and asked him, "What's your media strategy for this?", he had nothing. As far as he was concerned, he didn't have anything to worry about. And he certainly wasn't gonna go out in the public to say anything.
1:31:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, he just rotted on the vine.
1:31:43 Speaker 00 Now, Xena was rightfully convinced that the situation was only gonna get worse if they didn't respond at all. Because silence could be seen as an admission of guilt, or at the very least, you know, it left open speculation. And when speculation is open, that's when lies start to come in. And that's when people start deciding what the truth is for themselves.
1:32:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, and this was also shit about child rape.
1:32:03 Speaker 00 Oh, shit. People are being arrested and charged with crimes against children. This was absolutely something to take incredibly seriously.
1:32:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, to get in front of. You spent so long writing letters about like, some of the letters in this fucking book are about like, them arguing about the enamel distributors that they got for the Baphomet medallions. Like shit like that, that he was all over all of this shit. And then when it comes to this, he's just nowhere.
1:32:31 Speaker 00 Well, he's just gone.
1:32:32 Speaker 05 He's defeated.
1:32:33 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, finally, LaVey admitted to his daughter that he actually didn't have anyone to deal with interviews or media appearances anymore because Diane Higarty, co-founder of the Church of Satan, she was fucking gone by 1985.
1:32:46 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
1:32:47 Speaker 00 In 1984, after years of emotional and physical abuse, Diane Higarty left Anton LaVey. She claimed that he had screamed at her frequently and had once knocked her unconscious with a headlock.
1:32:59 Speaker 05 All that started happening after he got old, too. It was like in the second, like, the latter half of their marriage. It seemed, it seemed to really ramp up.
1:33:07 Speaker 00 It definitely ramped up. I mean, it was known that he had anger problems privately. But the 1984 split was the first time that these allegations were made public.
1:33:16 Speaker 05 They viewed him as like a prickly grump, though. Like, it was like that kind of thing. And then he just got angrier and meaner and, you know.
1:33:23 Speaker 00 According to Anton and Diane's grandson, the abuse against Diane had only grown in the last few years that they were together. In other words, Anton's outward abuse seems to coincide with a realization in the early 1980s, this is as far as the ride was gonna take him. He also didn't give a shit about what was happening in the outside world.
1:33:42 Speaker 05 That's the ECI.
1:33:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. Nor did he care what happened to anyone else as a result of the Satanic panic. Xena, however, she did care. So she offered to help as the church's spokesperson temporarily until Anton found someone permanent. This temporary spokesperson role, however, would last far longer than Xena wanted because Anton LaVey could be a very, very lazy man.
1:34:06 Speaker 05 Nothing illustrates this principle more than the Church of Satan book because the, all of the letters are from Diane. So all of the correspondence would, like, Anton would write letters when he was specifically kind of moved by something or whatever, but Diane was the one doing it all. Diane was micromanaging the newsletter. Diane was micromanaging all the different grottoes.
1:34:28 Speaker 00 Not micromanaging, just fucking managing.
1:34:30 Speaker 05 With Michael, Michael Aquino, right? She was doing it every, she was doing every bit of it. I honestly feel like she was the one with most of the passionate opinions about things. And that Anton, because she'd speak on behalf of Anton, right? Where it'd be like, oh, Anton thinks this, Baba thinks this. And she's like, no, you're just writing a letter.
1:34:49 Speaker 06 Yeah, and also, like, Xena's like, you're dying, but this is the rest of my life.
1:34:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, now it's, now it's on me.
1:34:55 Speaker 00 And he's not even dying. He's like 54. He's 54 years old. He doesn't have any sort of like-
1:35:02 Speaker 05 But he does not look good for 54.
1:35:04 Speaker 00 He looks very bad for 54, but he doesn't have a terminal illness. He's just done. He's done with life. So, as the Church of Satan's official spokesperson, Xena appeared on every show from Phil Donahue to Sally Jesse Raphael, debating Christians while spreading the word about Satanism in an effort to put out some of the fires of the satanic panic. Ironically, Xena's TV appearances caused membership numbers in the Church of Satan to skyrocket throughout the 80s, which never would have been possible if all those Christians hadn't made up all those stories about satanic ritual abuse.
1:35:36 Speaker 05 Cause she's a beautiful woman, and she made that perfect example.
1:35:39 Speaker 00 She was very eloquent.
1:35:40 Speaker 05 Cause also, if you look at all the pictures in this book, guess what it all is? Ugly men with incredibly hot women. It's the entire group.
1:35:49 Speaker 06 This is why you like this so much.
1:35:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, buddy. That was the whole fucking point. The whole point is that it allows nerdy idiots to hang out with the hottest chicks in the fucking city.
1:36:02 Speaker 00 Sure.
1:36:04 Speaker 06 So what's the deal? I mean, ugly girls had to have been Satanists too.
1:36:07 Speaker 05 Honestly, very few. Well, cause you know what part of-
1:36:09 Speaker 06 Cause they all think-
1:36:10 Speaker 05 No, no, I would say, you know, it's not about that. It's not about, it's not ugly or pretty. It's feminine. And one of the satanic principles is high masculinity, high femininity. So the women, if you were to come to, there was like dress codes and there's other rules that we didn't get into in the actual nitty gritty of it, but he would say in it, being like, if you're coming as a woman, I wanna, I want them up, tits up, makeup, hair, like it's the idea of, I want you high, high, high femme.
1:36:42 Speaker 00 Yeah. Sure.
1:36:44 Speaker 06 Alright.
1:36:45 Speaker 05 That's some telling truth.
1:36:46 Speaker 06 Yeah, alright Satan.
1:36:49 Speaker 00 Whatever you say, Satan.
1:36:53 Speaker 05 And the guy's gotta wear suits.
1:36:55 Speaker 00 Well, yeah, there, because you're famous for your suits.
1:36:58 Speaker 05 It's different now. Now I'm not doing it. I'm not going to his house. I'm trying to wear more suits. Trying to wear more stuff.
1:37:03 Speaker 00 Well, as it turned out, Xena was actually one of the people who helped put the satanic panic to bed. She worked with law enforcement agencies to set the record straight because before Xena opened the books, so to speak, law enforcement knew next to nothing about actual Satanism. For the cops, they'd watch the devils reign and think it was real, which is like scientists basing theories of time travel solely on Back to the Future. But thanks in part to Xena, the FBI issued a report in 1992 refuting all the criminal conspiracy theories concerning satanic ritual abuse. But by 1992, Xena had already resigned from the Church of Satan and had renounced her dickhead father two years earlier.
1:37:45 Speaker 00 Because while Anton LaVey still wasn't what you'd call a good guy during the 60s and 70s, he became an absolute piece of shit in the 80s and 90s. And so by 1990, all of the people who'd been with Anton LaVey in the Church of Satan's heyday, they were gone. Diane had left six years earlier. Michael Aquino had left 15 years earlier. And after Xena's dust up with her father, she'd left LaVey and Satanism for who else but Michael Aquino's Temple of Set?
1:38:15 Speaker 05 Oh, man.
1:38:18 Speaker 00 Immediately became a high priestess in the Temple of Set. Became one of the people that like ran it. Big fuck you to dad.
1:38:24 Speaker 05 Oh, my God. Aquino must have loved that. Oh, he stole the whole thing. He stole the whole crew. He stole the head of the Lilith Grotto. He stole the head of the Yogith Crew. He stole the head of the Babylon Crew. He stole every important Satanist.
1:38:38 Speaker 00 Yeah. Now, lawsuits over the ownership of the Church of Satan and all its properties, they lasted throughout the 80s. It was between Anton LaVey and Diane Higarty. But when LaVey was summoned to court over a restraining order filed by Diane Higarty in 1984, LaVey claimed to have taken revenge. on the world using magic. He said that he wrote a letter announcing his magical intention for all hell to break loose when he got the summons. And sure enough, at the very hour that LaVey was supposed to be in front of the judge in San Francisco, tragedy struck nine hours south in the California town of San Ysidro. This was the day of the infamous McDonald's massacre, which was one of America's first major mass shootings.
1:39:21 Speaker 05 Ship was crazy. Yeah.
1:39:22 Speaker 00 A man, and we're definitely, we're gonna do a full series on this. It's a fucking fascinating story. But a man named James Huberty opened fire on a McDonald's with a machine gun, killing 22 and wounding 19 more. LaVey, however, believed that the similarity between Diane's last name Hegarty and the shooters, Huberty, that wasn't a coincidence. So he took credit for causing the massacre with his magic spells.
1:39:48 Speaker 05 Fucking schmuck. You know, it just, but it is interesting. It, when you're in the magic world.
1:39:53 Speaker 00 This was a stretch.
1:39:54 Speaker 05 This is a huge stretch. It was flailing. Yeah. I mean, he's, you know, I wanna give him.
1:39:59 Speaker 00 The only, the only thing that the, that the name shares is that they start with an H and then with a Y. There are other coincidences in Anton LaVey's life that are incredible.
1:40:08 Speaker 05 No, but now he's trying.
1:40:09 Speaker 00 Now he's, he's reaching. He's obviously losing his touch in every way, and it doesn't in there. In 1984, when Anton was 54 years old, he entered into a relationship with a 17 year old girl named Blanche Barton, who'd written him a letter from college. The two of them immediately got in a sex magic BDSM and quite a bit of piss, all while Anton was still married Diane.
1:40:31 Speaker 05 When you're old, that's the last thing that goes.
1:40:34 Speaker 06 It's like, come on, you weren't gonna do that with Sammy Davis Jr., but you're gonna do it now at the end of your life and ruin your marriage, you fucking idiot.
1:40:42 Speaker 05 You know what, though? But if you look at it, it's, it's exactly the problem. Is that it's arrested development. This is an example of him trying to dial back the clock and thinking that he can, he can regain something else by like, how many times do we see an old man marry a almost child? Cause literally they're just trying to feel something again, which is not how it goes.
1:41:05 Speaker 00 Nope. Well, after Diane left, Blanche Barton stuck around and eventually wrote Anton LaVey's official biography. It is absolutely filled with easily disproven lies. But Barton still repeats these lies in every interview she gives as if they were gospel truths, including an interview I saw in the special features on the Devil's Rain Blu-ray disc. Like, she's, to this day, man. But for all his former infamy, Anton LaVey simply faded into the background of American culture in the last decades of his life. Even though he died in 1997, his last notable appearance in the public eye had been 10 years earlier, after the arrest of serial killer Richard Ramirez, who was, of course, a committed theistic Satanist.
1:41:48 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. His own batch.
1:41:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's call it bespoke Satanism.
1:41:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, boutique.
1:41:55 Speaker 00 Yeah. See, before Ramirez had killed anyone, he'd driven to San Francisco so he could meet and talk with Anton LaVey. Reportedly, Ramirez stopped Anton in the street and politely asked if they could chat about Satanism for just a few minutes. LaVey, however, brushed Ramirez off and told him to write a letter instead.
1:42:14 Speaker 05 It's probably because he smelled like shit and looked like a fucking chupacabra. He was awful, like, I could tell exactly. You know Richard Ramirez. So him going like, "Hey, man, you wanna, I wanna talk about seeing you for a while." And he's looking at him and just being like, that's the height of his abilities. And he's like, "You're not a hot chick. I'll see you later."
1:42:31 Speaker 00 You need to get out of here.
1:42:32 Speaker 05 Write me a letter.
1:42:33 Speaker 06 You should have been nice to him. Could have saved some lives.
1:42:35 Speaker 00 Well, I don't think he would have.
1:42:37 Speaker 05 I don't know, not with Richard Ramirez, yeah.
1:42:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, not with Richard Ramirez, because as soon as Richard Ramirez returns to that sweet, sweet mainline cocaine, it's all over from there. It's much more the mainlining cocaine than it is the Satan.
1:42:49 Speaker 05 It did help, yeah.
1:42:50 Speaker 00 When it comes to Richard Ramirez. That's really what drove a lot of it.
1:42:52 Speaker 06 He could have straightened him out. Cocaine's bad, LaVey's.
1:42:55 Speaker 05 Honestly, I wish.
1:42:59 Speaker 00 Now I'm back on your side.
1:43:00 Speaker 05 I wish.
1:43:01 Speaker 00 Now I'm, now I, yeah, now I'm there. Well, Ramirez apologized for bothering LaVey. He wished him a happy solstice and more. walked away. But after Ramirez was arrested and branded as the most evil serial killer in American history, Anton LaVey saw an opportunity to press that outrage button one more time. When the press reached Anton LaVey for comment about Richard Ramirez, LaVey said that Richard was quote,
1:43:27 Speaker 05 "The nicest, most polite young man you'd ever want to meet."
1:43:32 Speaker 00 And I guess to Anton LaVey, he was.
1:43:34 Speaker 05 He was. In that moment, he wasn't killing him and his wife. I had gunpoint.
1:43:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, it wasn't scooping her eyes out and leaving them on the dresser.
1:43:42 Speaker 05 No, not there. Yeah, no. God, he just wanted attention so fucking bad.
1:43:47 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:43:47 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:43:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, and it's so interesting that the Satanic Panic really, like, it should have been his moment. You know, like, that it really should have been his moment to shine, to come out. I mean, Xena took the mantle and she made it happen, but that should have been his, you know, his moment. But I think, really what I think it is, is I think Diane was the one who got him out of the house. And without her, he's just some lazy fuck that doesn't feel that, "I'll get to it tomorrow."
1:44:17 Speaker 05 I don't think he's intelligent enough. Well, it's not, you know what? It's not about, I actually think he is quite intelligent. It's self-conscious and able to change. That is the main issue. He purposely froze himself in place. When you, you have a responsibility as a fucking wizard. Like, I know it's ridiculous to say. He had a responsibility. He looked on what Aleister Crowley did, and he looked at Helena Blavatsky. He'll get all these things, and they all fail. They all eat shit. And the reason why they all fail and eat shit is because instead of what I was saying in the beginning, becoming Gandalf the White, getting rid of the old you, becoming the new you.
1:45:02 Speaker 05 The first half of your life is spent. Changing the world. The second half of your life should be spent having the world change you. Because you are now in it. You've done it. You've made your mark. Now it's like, where does my mark go? How can this come back and change me? And then how can I be here for all of you? Because I set this up. So I am responsible for this fucking thing. That's how I view it. He should have been like, I'm responsible for the Church of Satan. I'm there to save it. I'm gonna end it or do whatever I want with it, but it's mine. And I'm gonna protect it. And I'm gonna do what needs to be done to protect it. And I'm going to advance it. I'm gonna do all these things. But he just didn't do it. And it led to his demise.
1:45:42 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's why I'm enjoying Flea's jazz album.
1:45:48 Speaker 00 It's really good.
1:45:51 Speaker 06 I love that album, man.
1:45:54 Speaker 00 Unfortunately, the end of Anton LaVey's life was pretty much defined by his legal fights with Diane Higarty, who even filed restraining orders claiming that she feared for her life. By 1993, LaVey had lost everything, including the Black House. But a friend of LaVey's bought the Black House from Diane, and he allowed Anton to finish out his years amongst the remains of his former groovy life. Because that's how Anton LaVey's, he existed at the, uh, he existed at the allowance of other people.
1:46:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:46:26 Speaker 00 Didn't care. By the 90s, LaVey had stopped doing interviews and was hospitalized time and again in the last six months of his life. He died on October 29th, 1997 of respiratory failure. But LaVey had arranged for his death certificate to say that he had died on October 31st, Halloween, proving even with his death, that it was his belief that there was no reason why the truth should get in the way of a good story.
1:46:52 Speaker 05 God, goddamn. And there's lessons to be learned here, man.
1:46:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's a lot of lessons to be learned.
1:46:57 Speaker 05 There's a lot of lessons. And I think that's why it's so even important that we did this series in that way. Because it's like, I want to expand as I get older. I do not want to narrow. Hey, you fucker, I'm out. I'm bulking. I'm bulking. But I wanna fucking get better. I wanna get better as I get older. I wanna be the best I've ever been by the time I'm 75. I wanna, by the time I'm 75, I wanna have like, taken all lessons that I've learned and try to, try to do something else with it. And I feel like these stories are important to hear because, yeah, they went, made their mark on a world, but then they just left it at that.
1:47:30 Speaker 06 Well, the difference is you have a quest for knowledge. He thought that everything he thought was gospel.
1:47:35 Speaker 05 Yes, and then it was done.
1:47:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:47:37 Speaker 05 And then the thoughts were done.
1:47:38 Speaker 00 And you know, he, and he could've done so fa- like, in 1980, he could've come right out after Michelle Remembers was released and said, "No." And, and he could've opened up the Church of Satan to the world. He could've showed people like,
1:47:49 Speaker 05 Everybody.
1:47:50 Speaker 00 Like, "Look, li- look, it's a fucking social club. We, we do magic rituals that are kinda magic, but not really."
1:47:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:47:55 Speaker 00 All of this shit that they're saying isn't true. And he could've headed the fucking Satanic panic off at the pass.
1:48:00 Speaker 05 Oh, you'd be like, "Look here, the main tenet says, 'We don't fuck kids. We don't fucking rape anybody. We don't do that.'"
1:48:05 Speaker 00 He could've done that. And, and the, and the thing is, is that the Satanic panic was partly caused by him founding the Church of Satan.
1:48:11 Speaker 05 Yes. Oh, no, he did it.
1:48:13 Speaker 00 He did it, yeah.
1:48:14 Speaker 05 That's what I mean. He was responsible.
1:48:16 Speaker 00 He was responsible, and he completely and totally left all responsibility to everybody else.
1:48:21 Speaker 06 It's so weird, cause he like, championed a life of like, adversity, but then, the moment conflict shows up, he just gives up.
1:48:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, that is an example of, of what we gotta, like, I've been saying this for a little bit, about how like, good guys gotta beat bad guys, right? Good guys gotta win. Satanism's supposed to give you that edge. That is what nice, and that's what I'm taking on to it. I'm reminding myself all the time. This is about the independent, wild spirit inside of humanity that wants us to be free. And there is something about that, that I try to remember at all times. And then every single time, these kinda forces want you to choose one thing or another, it's like, "Fuck it, I'm a free, I'm free. Like, you can't make me choose." And so I think that if, uh, I'm gonna keep that and keep changing and going, and then use that aggressiveness to fight people I don't like.
1:49:12 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:49:13 Speaker 05 That are legitimately, uh, bad guys. I will fight the bad guys.
1:49:16 Speaker 06 Have to.
1:49:17 Speaker 00 Got to.
1:49:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:49:19 Speaker 00 Patreon.com slash Last Podcast on the left is where you can go see our stream and support us financially directly. You can also watch us on Netflix. We have all of our episodes newly recorded up on Netflix itself and you can follow us on all of the bullshit socials at LP on the Left, TikTok and Instagram. It's the only ones we got.
1:49:42 Speaker 05 That's all the only ones we will have. We got, except we are on Fat Life as well, but you'll have to find us on there.
1:49:48 Speaker 06 We got three JK Ultra dates left. That's June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and July 18th, Oklahoma City. It's got, man, I'm fucking, this has been such an amazing show. I'm so happy that we did this and like it is ending. It is time for, put this baby to bed and I can't wait to move on to something else with you boys.
1:50:09 Speaker 05 And I love it and I'm gonna miss it, but it'll be fun.
1:50:12 Speaker 00 I'm gonna miss it too, but come on out and see, see this show because after, after Oklahoma City, I am not going to be back out on the road for a good long while because my brain is about to fall out of my ass.
1:50:26 Speaker 05 But Eddie and I will be shucking our fat asses across this goddamn country, making you laugh anywhere you'll allow us. And also go to available, our new show, Eddie and I Movie Stories on Sirius XM Podcast Plus. And the video is on Patreon every Thursday. So if you join the Patreon, you could see it on there as well.
1:50:45 Speaker 06 Yeah, that's right. Also, Henry and I got a new show on October 24th, Side Stories at the Mateo Community Center. We're going back to fucking Humboldt.
1:50:55 Speaker 05 We're coming to Humboldt for Halloween.
1:50:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, I might come along on that.
1:50:59 Speaker 06 That's gonna be a blast.
1:51:00 Speaker 00 Now that I'm smoking weed again, I want to go to Land of Weed.
1:51:04 Speaker 05 Oh, you're gonna like this. So we're gonna do, we're gonna announce that, but we're gonna make, we're gonna really beef that up. I don't know what we're gonna do with that show, but we're doing something Halloweeny with it.
1:51:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, make sure you show up in costume like you did last year. You all looked fucking amazing.
1:51:17 Speaker 05 It was awesome.
1:51:18 Speaker 06 Had such a good time. And then I'm also, I'm not taking the break that Marcus is taking. I'm taking a full 22 hours off, but then on July 19th, I'll be in Plano, Texas.
1:51:27 Speaker 05 Oh my God.
1:51:28 Speaker 06 Yelling at all those motherfuckers.
1:51:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, and I got lots of cities on my schedule, so go to eddytunes.com if you want to come see me live and do my stand-up show. Phoenix was amazing. Thank you to everyone who came out.
1:51:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, that Plano Club's great. Like I said, that's where I saw Mitch Hedberg when I was in college.
1:51:43 Speaker 06 Fuck, yes.
1:51:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:51:45 Speaker 06 Talking to That's cool.
1:51:46 Speaker 00 Indeed.
1:51:46 Speaker 06 All right. I love you guys. Oh, HGX2. Watch it. The finals were last night. I hope you fucking loved it. The whole thing's available. Season two of HGX2. I told you. Yeah. What are you talking about? I fucking crushed your wife. I crushed your fucking wife, bitch, man.
1:52:04 Speaker 00 I beat her with my hands.
1:52:09 Speaker 06 Oh, we love you guys. We'll see you next week.
1:52:11 Speaker 05 Hail Satan.
1:52:12 Speaker 00 Oh, no, Gene.
1:52:13 Speaker 06 Hail, um, hail Xena. I liked her. No? She's interesting. Didn't say anything bad about her.
1:52:20 Speaker 00 No, well, I didn't. There's a lot. There was a Nazi thing.
1:52:24 Speaker 06 Oh, well, fuck Xena.
1:52:26 Speaker 00 I mean, come on. It's obvious. Our man Sammy.
1:52:29 Speaker 06 Hail Sammy Davis Jr. Yeah, you can also probably just give shrimp. Satan's got nothing to do with any of this. You hailed him already. I'm not hailing him again.
1:52:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, you don't need that.
1:52:37 Speaker 06 Satan was just hanging out. Whatever. No, nothing for Taylor.
1:52:41 Speaker 05 Taylor Swift's an Aryan fucking evil general.
1:52:44 Speaker 00 It's just Sammy. Come on, Sammy. It's Sammy Davis Jr.
1:52:47 Speaker 06 Yes, hail Sammy. I'm gonna say hail Klugman. Hail Jack Klugman. Me Klugman. Me Klugman. Klugman, Klugman. Klugman.
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