Pod Insights Last Podcast On The Left Episode 666: Anton LaVey Part I - Hail Satan About this episode This week, the boys celebrate Episode 666 with the only subject worthy of the number: the Dirty Pope himself, Anton Szandor LaVey - founder of the Church of Satan and father of modern Satanism - tracing the strange road that led from medieval Satan to carnivals, world’s fairs, burlesque, hucksters, and the early life of the boy born Howard Stanton Levey.
Transcript 20,189 words · 7 speakers
0:03 Speaker 00 Oh, look. You just got added to a meeting. About coordinating another meeting. To prepare for the pre-meeting. Ahead of the follow-up meeting. Which will, of course, require a recap meeting. And then, another meeting. Hit your booking point? Book with Southwest, and enter airplane mode.
0:30 Speaker 01 Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So, do like I did, and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com/switch.
0:49 Speaker 02 Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. There's no place to escape to. This is the last.
1:05 Speaker 03 On the left.
1:09 Speaker 03 That's when the cannibalism started. Who was that?
1:19 Speaker 04 Yes!
1:24 Speaker 04 Yes! It is the most evil, domed, shape, molten lava cake in the world! Only, uh, remember only the people watching on Netflix can see it. We have a cake here in front of us. There's a cake with a horn that keeps falling off. I'm too elated to care, I'm not too audio slave! And it's celebrating our, the episode 666. 666! 666!
1:51 Speaker 04 The fucking beast and it's Is that, is that what that means? Yes. Oh, okay. See, I never learned six, six, six. We never talked about the You never got to that level of elementary school. No, no, no.
2:06 Speaker 04 Oh, blow the candles out. I get one satanic wish. Yeah, okay. Yeah, Henry, you should do it.
2:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, you should do it.
2:16 Speaker 04 Oh, you don't get nothing.
2:17 Speaker 05 Terrible radio.
2:18 Speaker 04 God damn.
2:19 Speaker 05 God, this couldn't be.
2:20 Speaker 04 You can't, how, are these trick candles or is he just that horrible?
2:24 Speaker 05 They were not trick candles.
2:24 Speaker 04 Bad radio. Sorry, we did though.
2:26 Speaker 05 Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everybody. They were not trick candles and it took Henry a full fifteen seconds to do it, which is an eternity on radio.
2:33 Speaker 04 I had to reach across my laptop. It's episode six, six, six. I'm excited. What the hell am I supposed to do here? We can't follow. We're all in the GD radio book.
2:41 Speaker 05 My name is Marcus Sparks. I'm here with resident Satanist Henry Zebrowski.
2:46 Speaker 06 Yes, I carry the burden. I carry the burden of being the most sovereign of us all.
2:51 Speaker 05 Immediately want to start making fun of you.
2:53 Speaker 06 I know what it's like to be, to walk around being wiser and more moral than everyone else.
3:00 Speaker 04 That's really the key. He has a pitchfork made out of forks.
3:06 Speaker 04 It's just three forks.
3:07 Speaker 05 And we have the man with no affiliation whatsoever, Ed Larson.
3:11 Speaker 04 I'm an atheist and proud. Good work. I am here as the devil's lawyer. Yeah. That is my, literally his advocate. That's nice. Yes, that is my goal. Advocate. I had this, well, that is honestly, that's why Anton LaVey started this whole fucking thing, Eddie. I saw the devil's advocate on my, at a birthday party for myself in freshman year of high school and I was a hero because there are boobs in it.
3:34 Speaker 00 That sick fuck has got you jumping from one foot to the next. Look, but don't touch. Touch.
3:40 Speaker 04 But don't taste.
3:41 Speaker 00 Taste, but don't swallow. And that sick fuck.
3:45 Speaker 04 Fucking asshole is laughing his ass.
3:48 Speaker 05 Actually, for Henry's birthday this year, I got him a bumper sticker that said,
3:53 Speaker 04 "She's got a hu-"
3:55 Speaker 06 "She's got a huge fucking ass and you got your head all the way up in it." Yeah, honestly, it's like, and that was an improv line.
4:01 Speaker 05 It was, yeah, and everyone on set reportedly had to keep themselves from laughing.
4:07 Speaker 06 Of course, it's incredible. He's an amazing actor, except when he does a British accent.
4:10 Speaker 04 Woo! You ever see Paterno? Jerry!
4:16 Speaker 04 Jerry, you fucked those kids, Jerry! Who are? What's his chair doing in here? Oh, you got it? You can't tell me.
4:24 Speaker 05 You may not tell me. You had that kid where? Inside of what? Jerry, you can't go around calling yourself the tickle monster.
4:35 Speaker 05 So for this, what we assume to be our 666th episode, we decided that we would fully explore the life of the father of Satanism and the creator of the Church of Satan itself, Mr. Anton Sandovalay.
4:52 Speaker 06 And I already got my defensiveness out in our production call.
4:55 Speaker 04 Nice.
4:57 Speaker 05 About an hour of it.
4:58 Speaker 06 But we did it, though. We did it good because this is obviously very close.
5:02 Speaker 04 So you like him?
5:03 Speaker 06 Like is, there's no like here.
5:05 Speaker 04 Okay.
5:06 Speaker 06 It's not about like.
5:07 Speaker 04 It's about respect?
5:08 Speaker 06 No. He gave me the permission to not like or respect him.
5:13 Speaker 04 Oh, that's very nice of him.
5:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:15 Speaker 06 He freed me. Like Charles Bukowski did. Honestly, yes, for some people.
5:20 Speaker 05 You know, I'm gonna go ahead and say up top that it is our aim to not get too bogged down in philosophy during this three-part series, because while Anton LaVey is certainly one of the most important occult figures of the 20th century, he's also one of the most important cultural figures as well. So while today, any of you can go to a Last Podcast live show and yell, "Hail Satan!"
5:41 Speaker 04 Hail Satan!
5:42 Speaker 06 Yeah!
5:43 Speaker 05 You can yell that in unison with 2,000 other weirdos of like minds just because it's fun. You don't have to be a Satanist or anything like that. You just wanna join in. It's important to remember that the last witch trial in America- Was held less than a hundred years before Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco. I think it was held in Salem in, I think, like 1878. Pretty fucking late.
6:06 Speaker 06 Yeah. Wow. So there was already, slavery was already done.
6:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. And they're still doing witch, like one, let's get one last witch trial in there.
6:13 Speaker 06 Hey, listen, we don't get to do anything fun anymore. All right. I don't get to have a man as property. I don't get to beat him to death. I mean, I gotta burn a woman. Witch trial, that trial.
6:28 Speaker 05 There wolf.
6:31 Speaker 05 For almost the entirety of the first two millennia of Western Christian society, nobody in their right mind openly said that they were a Satanist. Being a Satanist was not something you claimed. It was something that was accused. And more often than not, an accusation was a direct precursor to a horrific and painful execution. But as the Western world began to rapidly evolve into a more secular society in the 20th century, especially in places like San Francisco, where Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan, enough of a balance existed between secular living and religious belief, where something like the Church of Satan could both exist and serve a purpose in the culture at large.
7:11 Speaker 05 Therefore, the story of Anton LaVey is not just the story of the world's most successful circus carny, although that is certainly a massive part of it.
7:20 Speaker 06 Almost, almost all of it.
7:22 Speaker 05 This is also the story of just how much culture began to speed up in the second half of the 20th century, and how Anton LaVey matched and at times surpassed that acceleration. But because American culture did change so quickly, this is also the story of the reactions people had to those changes in the decades after the founding of the Church of Satan, both in the secular and religious worlds. Christians who took Anton LaVey seriously destroyed countless lives during the Satanic panic that crept into American life in the decades after the founding of the Church of Satan. While Satanists like Richard Ramirez, who completely misunderstood Anton LaVey, they committed horrific murders. In Satan's so-called name.
8:07 Speaker 05 Both, of course, completely missed the point of Satanism, or at least Satanism as I personally see it. For me, Satanism is like the carnival from whence Anton LaVey came. The whole thing is set up to be a little unsettling and a little scary, but it's also supposed to retain an element of goofiness, an element of play. If you don't believe me, contrast the sinister Church of Satan black masses in the 60s with the silly little red devil outfit that Anton LaVey sometimes wore while he was doing them. Point is, just like a night at the carnival, Satanism is supposed to be all in good fun. Important, but not serious. But that's just my opinion, and for the record, I'm not a Satanist. If you ask five Satanists what they think Satanism is, you'll get five different answers.
8:52 Speaker 05 And if you think your way is the only way, then again, for the best of my understanding, you've missed the fucking point.
8:59 Speaker 06 Honestly, thank you, Marcus, because that's the big issue here that we're gonna be covering in this whole series is what is the point of Anton LaVey?
9:07 Speaker 05 Sure.
9:08 Speaker 06 Right? Like, what is the point of covering him? Because even Aleister Crowley, his like, direct predecessor, is like, he was way more of a poet, scholar, writer.
9:17 Speaker 05 Mountain climber.
9:18 Speaker 06 All of that, right? He was way more of a serious student. Anton LaVey picked up the golden path and said, "This shit's dumb. I know a way to do that's better." And there's just something about this that it holds true for every Satanist. And that's why what I love is that we're gonna do this topic, and we're gonna get angry emails no matter what, because it's the him. It's him, it's on episode, and it's also, it's him. And other Satanists argue, and that's the kind of the whole idea, is that he's trying to tell you, "Here's the stuff, now go." Even me, as the pope of the Church of Satan, it's not that serious of a fucking role.
9:53 Speaker 05 Exactly.
9:53 Speaker 04 I always saw Satanism as like, a form of atheism.
9:57 Speaker 06 Well, he actually then, I re-clarified, because I've always kind of said this as a shorthand, and that's a way to say it as a shorthand. But I know that within, if you reread the Satanic Bible, you see that-
10:07 Speaker 05 Reread?
10:08 Speaker 06 Yeah.
10:10 Speaker 06 Takes a couple of times.
10:10 Speaker 05 It's a really bold assumption you just made there with Edward.
10:13 Speaker 06 If you reread it.
10:18 Speaker 06 Well, he specifically says, this is a separate from God and all this shit. This is specifically, as we'll get all into it, the Church of Satan, Levian Satanism, is all about making fun of the bastards.
10:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a, it's a lifestyle more than a religion.
10:33 Speaker 06 Yes.
10:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, a philosophy.
10:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:35 Speaker 06 It's an asshole lifestyle.
10:36 Speaker 04 Now, you called him success, was he successful? Like, did, was he, did he have money?
10:40 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
10:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, he, he had money. He lived a pretty good life throughout. Uh, and when I say successful, I mean more notorious.
10:48 Speaker 06 Okay.
10:48 Speaker 05 You know, like, successful is in he had the goal of bringing the Church of Satan to the world. He wanted to, like, he is, I would call Anton LaVey the most successful local character in the history of the world.
10:59 Speaker 06 Okay.
11:00 Speaker 05 Cause that was his, his, really, cause we're gonna get into that far more in the second episode, but really, his main goal was, he wanted to be the weirdest guy in San Francisco. And he was-
11:08 Speaker 06 That's weird.
11:09 Speaker 05 Exactly. It's like, Big Lebowski puts him in the running for weirdest guy in the world.
11:13 Speaker 06 Yeah.
11:14 Speaker 05 You know, and it just kinda grew from there. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grew to the point where, like, Anton LaVey, well, he's a little bit lazy. Like, to the point where he's like, I don't wanna deal with this anymore.
11:26 Speaker 06 Well, it's never supposed to be all that fucking serious. And then it got serious. And then it got unserious. And it got serious again. And it got unserious. And now we're back in a serious point, which is why we're covering it in the fucking first place.
11:38 Speaker 05 No. Now, as is befitting a man sometimes known as the Dirty Pope, Anton LaVey was what you'd call a complicated character. He wasn't a shiny beacon of morality. He was the founder of the Church of Satan. Did Anton LaVey hobnob with neo-Nazis in the seventies? Absolutely. And we'll cover those incredible idiots in full on the next episode, along with the reason why Satanism was attractive to said neo-Nazis.
12:03 Speaker 06 And how that disease of thought will also go on to fuck up the whole thing to begin with.
12:08 Speaker 05 Additionally, was Anton LaVey a bad husband, partner, and father? Yes, yes, and yes. But again, he's the founder of the Church of Satan. He's not gonna be Pedro Pascal.
12:19 Speaker 06 Oh, he should be.
12:21 Speaker 05 No one's saying that we should be modeling ourselves after Anton LaVey. But shortcomings aside, Anton LaVey is still an incredibly important figure in the cultural history of the 20th century. His is an important tale to know if you want to get closer to understanding the modern world. How did we get here? That's always the question. And but even besides that, even after you factor in the many, many lies Anton LaVey told throughout his life, his story is still utterly fascinating.
12:51 Speaker 06 There's no reason to let facts get in the way of a good story.
12:53 Speaker 04 Yeah. Is that his quote?
12:55 Speaker 06 Oh, no, that's just, that's just truth.
13:00 Speaker 05 But before we get into the full live story of Anton LaVey, I think it would be helpful. And also, you know, it's episode 666.
13:07 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:07 Speaker 05 Let's do a short history of Satan.
13:09 Speaker 06 Satan!
13:09 Speaker 04 This is what I want.
13:11 Speaker 05 Satan. It's just so everyone has a full concept.
13:14 Speaker 04 Old Louis!
13:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, old Louis, old scratch. I love old, old scratch. And, you know, but this is also to give everyone a full concept of just how transgressive the founding of the Church of Satan was when Anton LaVey hung up a shingle in San Francisco in 1966. It was a big fuck, it was a, I would call it a big leap. So the image of Satan as a red devil with horns and a pitchfork, it's a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 20th century, Satan could appear as green, yellow, blue, or black. He could take the form of a serpent, a beast, a goat, any manner of monster, depending on which artist was painting him during what time period.
13:52 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's the guy going, "I'm sick of painting goats. Now is the bad."
13:58 Speaker 05 While most images of the devil throughout the second millennium often came from painters working on the behest of a church, the little red devil image of Satan is thought to have come from the street puppet shows of the late 18th century. Puppeteers gave Satan a flashy color that made it easier for children to pay attention to the story they were telling in their puppet show. I mean, you know how it is with the kids, like, "Oh, no, it's the devil!"
14:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:24 Speaker 05 Yeah. Now, when you combine that red coloring with the mustachioed Mephistopheles character from the 18th century play Faust, you had an image that looked great in print once color printing became common in the 20th century. And so, the red pitchfork wielding Satan with a little curly mustache, he became a popular character in advertising. He popped. That's where the Red Devil comes from. It comes from advertising.
14:49 Speaker 06 Yeah.
14:50 Speaker 05 And the Red Devil therefore took his place as simply the latest iteration of Satan, going back through a history that was about 1,000 years old. But, it seems like Satan as the goat, this is just my personal opinion.
15:01 Speaker 06 Yeah.
15:02 Speaker 05 Seems like Satan as the goat is made a big comeback.
15:04 Speaker 06 It is.
15:05 Speaker 05 Again, because of shifting mediums.
15:06 Speaker 06 The witch.
15:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, we went from static images to moving ones. And, you know, Red Devil Satan looks fucking stupid on, on screen, except for maybe insidious. That Red Devil's cool.
15:16 Speaker 06 Yeah, it was fucking.
15:17 Speaker 04 It does look stupid, though, but it's still scary somehow.
15:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's, it looks stupid and scary, but Goat Satan looks fucking awesome on screen.
15:26 Speaker 06 Has anybody seen Hexen?
15:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:28 Speaker 06 If you've seen Hexen, you know, like, that devil.
15:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:31 Speaker 06 That's the devil.
15:32 Speaker 05 That's incredible. And the return of the goat is also due to Anton LaVey. But Baphomet will not appear in this series until later.
15:39 Speaker 06 You know, like, it's just funny, because as we'll get into it now, Satan was not even that big deal to Christianity in the very beginning.
15:46 Speaker 05 For about the first 1,000 years.
15:48 Speaker 06 Yeah, like, he kinda got retconned into the villain.
15:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:52 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
15:52 Speaker 04 Because he hated heaven.
15:54 Speaker 06 Well, there's many ways, he's, again, he's a great foil to God.
15:59 Speaker 05 Yeah. And we're, and actually, that thing, the whole, about him hating heaven and all that, we'll get into that here in a second.
16:04 Speaker 06 Okay, cool.
16:05 Speaker 05 There's a, there's a whole set, like, it's, that's, I find, personally, I find the history of Satan as a figure fucking endlessly fascinating.
16:12 Speaker 06 Because you know how I view it? Like, when you see it, like, you really see, because I was reading about Irving Berlin's writings about Satan, he wrote several songs about Satan, there's a couple of things, and every one of those songs are like, these old pieces of material, before the modern inclination of Satan, kind of positions Satan as people. Like, hoi polloi. Like, the people of the street. And there's something about that, he's always been connected back to us versus like the ruling class.
16:38 Speaker 05 Well, not always, really since the late 18th, early 19th century, we'll get to that here in a bit.
16:43 Speaker 04 I always looked at Satan as a figure that existed to make sure that Christians were scared into morality.
16:51 Speaker 05 Well, we'll also get into that, because this, this whole thing is an evolution. It took, seriously, it took thousands of years for it to get to this point.
16:59 Speaker 06 To me!
17:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:01 Speaker 06 And I'm the very end of the process!
17:03 Speaker 05 Now, if you look at Satan as he is actually portrayed in Christian history, he has no set form, even in the Bible. He's a shape changer. He's positioned to oppose God as a serpent, a dragon. Sometimes he's a everything creature with bird feet, lizard hands, short, sharp claws.
17:20 Speaker 06 Sells apples.
17:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
17:22 Speaker 06 Love that shit! I fucking love that fucking shit!
17:25 Speaker 05 One of my favorite late medieval depictions, Satan showed up as a hideous green monster with unusable bat wings and a face on his butt. You know, he's trying to tempt Saint Augustine. He's got a book of vices and he's showing it to Saint Augustine going like, "You like that one? You like that one? You want that one? You like that?" How about I blow you with my ass?
17:45 Speaker 06 Hey! I'd kiss my mother with that ass!
17:48 Speaker 05 And Saint Augustine is holding up his hand like, "No, no, no, no, no, no! I will not give in to your vices, devil!"
17:53 Speaker 06 As cool as you are!
17:54 Speaker 05 And the face, of course, represented the belief that witches had to kiss the devil's anus in a sort of heretic homage. In the earlier days of Christianity, Satan was actually portrayed as somewhat of a bumbling buffoon. He was the Washington Generals to God's Harlem Globetrotters. Satan would try time and again to tempt man, but because he was such a buffoon, he would fail in the face of God's great power and man's unbreakable faith. He was a trickster at best.
18:22 Speaker 06 And we also, you gotta get tricked into a contract, like that's the thing too. Mark Twain would use him as a kind of funny character.
18:29 Speaker 05 But even way before Twain, way before Twain.
18:31 Speaker 06 Because then you could probably connect them to the same other mischievous characters of all those kind of folklore, like Ananzi and these other types of things that were like Loki, like this idea of, of chaos, of something coming that's like both it, because the chaos is tempting.
18:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, of course, and you know, he's also linked to, you know, the satyrs of Greek mythology, you know, the horny goat man and all that shit. Like, there's a lot of different characters came together to kind of, and Loki, of course, is a good one too.
18:57 Speaker 06 Just made me think of 100 days of, 120 days of Sodom.
19:02 Speaker 06 Let's read it together.
19:05 Speaker 06 When did he learn the fiddle?
19:08 Speaker 06 That was actually-
19:09 Speaker 05 1973, I believe.
19:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, but honestly, it was after his period playing the clarinet. As we all know, the most evil woodwind.
19:18 Speaker 04 You know the difference between a fiddle and a violin? Fiddle's played by a racist.
19:22 Speaker 06 Yes, I've heard that. I have heard that. I thought it was just because I was too fat to play the violin.
19:30 Speaker 05 Now, eventually, the church recognized that Satan was being wasted as a simple foil, as someone who was just like, "Yeah, God's great, Satan sucks, whatever." It took about a thousand years, but the church realized that Satan was far more useful as an adversary, because if Christianity had a villain, someone actively working against God on earth, then the church could attribute man's actions to Satan himself.
19:55 Speaker 06 Because I believe, didn't Judaism at the time, before all of these things that kind of came out of it, they didn't have a set devil? From what I see, from what I know from my cursory research, they never-
20:04 Speaker 04 The Gollum was what I was always told.
20:07 Speaker 06 Well, the Gollum is like an anti-reality, it's like someone's making, someone's being God in the face of God by creating a man out of dirt. That is what a Gollum is.
20:17 Speaker 05 A homunculus.
20:18 Speaker 06 A homunculus.
20:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, I know, in Islam, like, their devil is like shaitan,
20:25 Speaker 06 Yeah, shaitan.
20:26 Speaker 05 Which is more of a genie, like a jinn.
20:27 Speaker 06 A white man.
20:31 Speaker 06 White devil, white devil.
20:32 Speaker 05 White devil, white devil. Let me guess.
20:36 Speaker 05 Well, if the church could make people believe that Satan was meddling in earthly matters, then it made criticism of the church or its members far easier to dismiss as the work of the devil. It seriously took them a thousand years to come up with this idea.
20:50 Speaker 06 And that evil fuck who came up with that idea got the bonus of the year. Pope was like, "Oh, fucking shit, Francisco." "Here's a bunch of boys."
21:02 Speaker 05 It also made Christianity a more active religion because Satan gave people something to do. It's something to fight against, which is the same principle, of course, that led to the rise of QAnon, which also is centered around Satan. But from identifying people as Satan's agents on earth, it wasn't too much of a stretch to convince people that anything allied with the devil was too dangerous to live and must therefore be executed. What that meant was that before the 20th century, hell, before the mid 20th century, fucking nobody willingly identified as a Satanist. If people did confess to Satan worship, they were either insane or they'd been coerced
21:44 Speaker 05 into confessing through torture or the threat of execution. And often, they'd be fucking executed anyway, even if they did confess, because punishments kind of varied from panic to panic, judge to judge. It's kind of up to the guy.
21:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, you can burn, you get hanged, you get squished.
22:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, even in Salem, there were some people who confessed that lived, some people who confessed that still died.
22:04 Speaker 06 Interesting.
22:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's really up to the whims of whoever. It's almost like none of it's real.
22:10 Speaker 06 It's almost like it's all made up. It's almost like they just did it to kill people they didn't like.
22:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, and in Salem, you know, a lot of times it was, and it also became very useful for people. Um, like in Salem, for example, like, I want that guy's land, he's not going to sell it to me. Call him a witch, call his wife a witch.
22:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, so I'm consorting with the devil at night.
22:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I'm consorting with the devil. Uh, and then, you know, that guy's dead, you buy the plot of land from the town, all good.
22:38 Speaker 06 See, I would just be like, you saw the devil? Wow!
22:40 Speaker 05 Now, that's all to say that Satanism didn't really exist until Anton LaVey created it, at least as a religion. But what's extremely interesting about all this is that LaVeyan Satanism isn't really based on the biblical Satan, because relatively speaking, there's not a lot of Satan in the Bible. In fact, the word Satan is used less than 60 times in the King James Version of the Bible, which is insane for someone who is, according to the church, supposed to be one of the main characters of the story.
23:11 Speaker 06 This is when like they lied to us. Like Drew Barrymore in Scream, or like when they do that thing where they show the guy like in the, in the trailer. And they're all like, oh man, Benicio del Toro's gonna be amazing as Magneto's brother. And then he's fucking shot in the head in the first scene. And you're like, what the fuck?
23:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, they barely even used him in the sequel to the Bible.
23:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, very little. Yeah, it was just, actually, I think it was one scene, you know, when Jesus is out in the desert, the forty days and forty nights.
23:37 Speaker 06 And even that was a hangout. That was like a hangout. That was a loose, long discussion where they were just chilling out. Oh, yeah. Then he sucked his thorny cock.
23:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, and even in the Old Testament, it's just, you know, him, you know, tempting Eve with the apple and then the bet that, like, him and God gambling over Job.
23:59 Speaker 06 And also, God was scary enough.
24:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, God was fine. So, instead of using the Bible, Anton LaVey drew far more inspiration from Satan as he was depicted in arguably the best piece of fanfiction ever written, Paradise Lost by John Milton. Basically, LaVey taking from Paradise Lost, it's no different from someone who, like, say, if this week, started a religion based around Neil Gaiman's depiction of Lucifer and Sandman. It's the exact same fucking thing.
24:27 Speaker 06 You don't think that fucking happened? You don't, really don't think that somewhere deep within the folds of Tumblr, that there is not an entire society devoted to that?
24:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:38 Speaker 04 So this is the Milton that Donald Sutherland's talking about in Animal House?
24:42 Speaker 05 Yes.
24:42 Speaker 04 Yeah. I'm with you guys.
24:45 Speaker 05 You got it. You're coming along, man.
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28:22 Speaker 05 So in Paradise Lost, Satan wages a war against God and loses. But Milton expanded the story of Satan far beyond what's mentioned in the Bible. In Milton's version, Satan makes the best of his punishment after being sent to hell. Instead of suffering for eternity, Satan transforms hell into a place where it is, quote, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
28:44 Speaker 04 Fuck yeah, dude! He's like fucking John Taffer from Bar Rescue.
28:51 Speaker 04 You can't reign in hell, because then they'll put out all the fires.
28:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
28:57 Speaker 05 That sort of comes into the, you know, the movie The Devil's Reign, which is personally my, one of my favorite, uh, like satanic exploitation movies. Anton LaVey was actually a, uh, I believe he was a consultant in that movie.
29:09 Speaker 04 It's the only movie he's ever consulted on for Satanism.
29:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's incredible. Ernest Borgnine plays a satanic cult leader. He's fucking awesome.
29:18 Speaker 04 And Ernest Borgnine then disavowed the movie.
29:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
29:21 Speaker 04 From then on, because he was such a, like, it was this thing. He got scared by what he did in the movie and by hanging out with Anton LaVey. Because just the idea of Ernest Borgnine and Anton LaVey hanging out. I want to smoke cigars and I want to hang out with him and drink bourbon with him all night.
29:38 Speaker 05 Well Milton's version of Satan is so influential that lines like the rain and hell one, they're often thought to be from the Bible. A lot of people think that this shit that was written about in Paradise Lost, or like fucking Dante's Divine Comedy, the idea of like the circles of hell, people think that that's from the Bible. It's not.
29:55 Speaker 04 It's all fiction.
29:56 Speaker 05 It's all fiction.
29:56 Speaker 04 Like the Bible.
29:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, the circles, the circles of hell, that's from the Divine Comedy that was written in the 14th century.
30:03 Speaker 04 This is really helpful, actually, because I really didn't want to read the Bible.
30:08 Speaker 04 This is all you gotta know. It starts wet, ends hot.
30:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, this stuff isn't from the Bible. I mean, all this stuff about raining in hell, it comes from a blind Puritan dictating verses to his daughters in the 1600s. Now, even though John Milton was indeed a Puritan, his reworking of Satan in Paradise Lost was a great inspiration to writers in the Romantic Age like Byron and Shelley, who wrote poems in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, reimagining Satan as a Romantic figure who is opposed to God, but not opposed to humanity. They used Satan as a way to criticize the power of churches and governments while championing the values of reason and liberté, which is very much in line with modern Satanism. This is what you'd call non-theistic Satanism,
30:56 Speaker 05 where it's all about myths and symbols, rather than it being a religion where God and Satan are actual supernatural beings who meddle in our affairs. In Levain Satanism, Satan is not real. He's not some guy, which is something that I cannot fucking stress enough.
31:12 Speaker 06 No, it is the spirit of human potential. That is kind of how he puts it all together. What Satan stands for is humanity, and our freedom, and our ability to be free from all of what we assume are built-in hierarchies to reality. Like, that's kind of what this is all about. The story of the Garden of Eden, it's about releasing two pets to the street. That's what it's about. It's about the snake saying, "You understand that your pet's here, right?"
31:45 Speaker 05 And it's like, and yeah, life's better as a pet. And it really sucks being out there in the fucking world, but you have freedom. You have the freedom of choice, you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do.
31:56 Speaker 06 You get to fuck.
31:57 Speaker 05 Yeah.
31:58 Speaker 06 Like literally, you get to fuck, you get to eat, you get to play music, you get to do all of the things you want to do.
32:03 Speaker 04 But then you also gotta go to work.
32:05 Speaker 06 Yes.
32:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:06 Speaker 04 Tell me fucking about it. Tell me fucking about it.
32:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's a lot of bad shit that goes with it. It's very, it's very difficult, but the point is like you're so, and, and Satanism also kind of gives a bit of a framework of like, well, and here's how we all do this together.
32:21 Speaker 04 Can I ask a dumb existential question that obviously doesn't have a real answer?
32:25 Speaker 05 Okay.
32:25 Speaker 04 Is hell on earth?
32:29 Speaker 04 Heaven's a place on earth.
32:33 Speaker 05 You know what that's worth.
32:37 Speaker 04 Like, like, all right, so if hell exists and it's like a part of like humanity, does like, if there's like a, another like planet with a bunch of aliens, do they have the same Satan? Or do they have a different Satan?
32:50 Speaker 06 Oh my god, Eddie.
32:51 Speaker 04 We're fully, and I don't know. And I've read all the side stuff. I've read all the books. I've read the Peter Gillmore books. Honestly, they hit it in half the school.
32:59 Speaker 05 Wasn't that the plot of an episode of Pretty Face? Doesn't an alien go to hell?
33:03 Speaker 04 That is literally, yes, because it, it gets abducted, we take the alien, it comes down to hell, then the alien gods come and pull it out.
33:11 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, because he dies on earth and he doesn't know what it is, just anyone who dies on earth, it doesn't, yeah, it's great.
33:17 Speaker 06 According to the early, early Christians, they apparently, there was a place that there, that this could have been. There was like this, apparently some valley that they were kind of like, they pinpointed it for a while saying, hell's over there and, but no, does not. Technically, according to all of this, you would leave planet earth.
33:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:39 Speaker 06 Okay. And you'd go to another realm.
33:40 Speaker 05 Yeah. Now, ideally, you know, concerning morality, concerning the rules about what you do when you're out and about, out of the, out of the Garden of Eden. Satanists like Anton LaVey in the symbolic vein are supposed to do as little harm to others as they can possibly manage in their pursuits of pleasure, knowledge and power. One of the central tenets is that you're not supposed to hurt anyone else unless they hurt you first.
34:02 Speaker 04 Never cross into another man's.
34:03 Speaker 05 It's territory. But when Anton LaVey brought the worship of Satan into modern society, even if it was just as a symbol, he also introduced the possibility that one might interpret worshiping Satan as worshiping the concept of evil itself as Christians see it. LaVey, therefore, accidentally also gave birth to a whole crop of theistic Satanists who believe in Satan just as fervently as a Christian fundamentalist believes in God. These are people like serial killer Richard Ramirez, who did harm in Satan's name because he believed that's what Satan wanted. It must be said, however, that theistic Satanists are incredibly rare. Evil Satanists committing ritualistic
34:46 Speaker 05 murder that happens in novels, TV, movies, they're portrayed by Christopher Lee or Ernest Borgnine. But Christians committing murder in the name of Jesus? Well, that's just the history of the Western world.
34:57 Speaker 04 Whoa, Marcus, come on! I just called how they won!
35:02 Speaker 05 Whether it be the Crusades, manifest destiny, the Spanish conquest of South America, the Spanish Inquisition, the Iraq War, the murder of gay people in Africa, or millions of smaller atrocities throughout the last 2,000 years, far more people have stained humanity with blood spilled in Jesus's name than Satan's. This, of course, is partly why today's fundamentalist Christians are working so fucking hard to prevent your kids from learning our actual history. Satan is still an incredibly useful scapegoat for the people in power, and he's still an extremely effective boogeyman to use when people are questioning why they're being told to kill other humans. For a worryingly recent example, we can go
35:41 Speaker 05 to our latest war in Iran. Earlier this year, over 200 American soldiers across all branches of the military reported that they were being told by their superiors in the United States military that the Iran War was a precursor to Armageddon, that they were there to trigger the final battle between God and Satan. What this tells me is that Satan as a real enemy is primed to make a big fucking comeback. And whether you're Christian, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, or- Whatever, you really aren't gonna like the world that's made when these people start using the battle against Satan as an excuse for their actions. Never forget that most of the people executed as witches at Salem were themselves committed Christians
36:26 Speaker 05 who pled their innocence and faith, right up till the moment the rope wrapped around their necks by their good Christian neighbors ended their fucking life. It has happened before, and it can happen again.
36:38 Speaker 06 And that's why I, as the resident troll fucking shithead of this show, still call myself a Satanist, because we are at the precipice of another religious war within the United States of America. It is happening right now, just like we said before, and we have to really think about this. Because yes, there is evil theistic Satanists, we're not gonna go into right now, Order of Nine Angles, or 764, or these other things. That's still, that's kind of modern, but the real shit is the fact that several hundred million people believe in another fake character called God that is killing the rest of us. And so that's why I kind of think the scales are not even here.
37:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, Satan never killed everyone on Earth.
37:23 Speaker 06 Never, not once, not once.
37:26 Speaker 05 Again, we are in the middle of history right now. Like, that's why we're talking about this, is because Satan has always been a very powerful figure, at least has been for the last thousand years. Satan has been extraordinarily powerful figure, and we're about to see how powerful that figure really is again.
37:42 Speaker 04 So if the war against Satan and God in Iran is supposed to bring on Armageddon, does that mean we're gonna lose to Satan? Or do we, God wins and still end the world?
37:52 Speaker 06 We trigger Armageddon and God kills everybody. Except for the super religious, and he turns them into ghosts.
37:58 Speaker 04 So we should, in that theory, be on Satan's side?
38:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, we have to kill God. We need to get the Lance of Longinus. We need to dig up Lilith. I know how to do it. I've been watching Alec Elliot again. I know how to do it, it's in the rebuild.
38:14 Speaker 05 Alright, cool, alright. Call my friends.
38:17 Speaker 06 I'm gonna stab God in the heart.
38:20 Speaker 05 Now, part of what Anton LaVey was trying to do with the creation of the Church of Satan was to banish the superstition around God and the devil, so we could avoid such whoopsie do's as the Salem witch trials. Of course, it had the exact opposite effect. LaVey recognized that the modern world acquired an evolution of religion, because Christianity had become too brittle and restrictive to serve any actual purpose in making our lives better in any meaningful way. "I don't know about you, but the church never did jack shit for me besides give me nightmares and make me feel guilty about masturbation. Didn't stop me from masturbating. Fuck, my brother Thomas still calls me Little M in my goddamn 40s because I masturbated so much in my youth. But because of the church, I would beg Jesus for forgiveness
39:04 Speaker 05 so I wouldn't go to hell every time I did it, which was a lot. And that was a lot of wasted energy. And the church gave me the bonus fear of being terrified about just the possibility of being gay, because I knew being gay wasn't a choice, but if it wasn't a choice, then that meant that being gay was a guaranteed ticket to hell. So even having a fluid thought was absolutely fucking terrifying. In other words, the modern Christian church can really fuck up a kid with even half a brain who has an interest in things outside of their immediate sphere of experience. The modern world does not fit with the modern church." So, I absolutely get what LaVey meant when he said an evolution was needed.
39:42 Speaker 06 The church actively hurt my family. It actually forced my mother out of it, and they shamed her for the divorce after her first husband beat the shit out of her. They shamed her for it. And then I'll always remember when I went to the priest and I was trying to ask him what his purpose was, and that was the first time anybody ever called me a little devil. And you wonder why I'm fucking like this.
40:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, the bishop at my church that I was an altar boy for, he ended up banging a bunch of boys.
40:08 Speaker 05 Sucky, funky, sucky, funky.
40:09 Speaker 04 And then they fired him or moved him up to Michigan. And then I found out recently, because I looked up the story, and the guy they replaced him with, he fucked a bunch of kids.
40:21 Speaker 06 Not broke.
40:24 Speaker 04 Now, are you sure the M wasn't for Marcus?
40:27 Speaker 05 It was both. He was very, it was, uh, it was what you'd call a double entendre.
40:32 Speaker 06 He was a pretty funny brother joke.
40:34 Speaker 05 Very funny, it was a very funny brother joke. It was both little Marcus and little masturbator. Don't worry, he clarified.
40:40 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah, sure. I can't wait to hear it again, because I know we'll hear it the next time I see him.
40:45 Speaker 05 You will. Now, what's interesting is that Satanism is a self-declared religion, defined by an intentional, religiously motivated veneration of Satan. That did not exist in any meaningful form until Anton LaVey created it in 1966. That's part of what, it sounds like it's not true, but it is.
41:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
41:04 Speaker 05 And it's what makes Anton LaVey such a fascinating character. I mean, yeah, he could be a little douchey. He was certainly abusive, and he was definitely too comfortable with fascism for my personal taste.
41:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, he started a religion.
41:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:17 Speaker 05 But he also pushed culture into exploring its darkest corners by shining lights into areas not normally seen. In other words, he was a Lucifer, a light bringer, and for that, his story certainly deserves to be told.
41:31 Speaker 06 And honestly, I also know people, I'm already hearing my history people scream about the Cathars and other, and he's like, listen, we're talking about actual Church of Satan put together. The Cathars were a weird branch of Gnostics. The Gnostics also believed in a devil god that created this physical realm, but that's taking us back to a context level in which we will all starve to death.
41:56 Speaker 06 If we continue to go, if we start from the beginning of thought,
42:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
42:00 Speaker 06 we could talk about it.
42:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, I chose, I looked at it and I said, no, we don't need it.
42:07 Speaker 04 So Satanism is younger than Scientology?
42:10 Speaker 05 Uh, Satanism is older than, or younger, yes, because Scientology is the 50s, Satanism is 66.
42:15 Speaker 06 You probably learned a lot from Scientology, to be frank. I know that he did go, he, well, we'll get, we'll get on to a lot of different. I don't know about him and Elrond.
42:22 Speaker 04 He got hubby-dubby?
42:23 Speaker 06 I actually don't think he, to be honest, I don't think he ever met with Elrond. I don't see any of that.
42:28 Speaker 04 They would have been buddies.
42:29 Speaker 06 No, honestly, I don't think they would have.
42:30 Speaker 05 They would, I think they, it would have been two opposing forces, like very, they would have hated each other.
42:36 Speaker 06 I think they literally would have gotten into a physical fight.
42:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, a good bitch slap fight.
42:40 Speaker 06 Oh, that's right.
42:43 Speaker 06 Hey, hey.
42:44 Speaker 05 Now, before we get into the full story, let's acknowledge our sources today. Our main two were The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton and Born with a Tale by Doug Brode. Out of the two, go with Born with a Tale. It does a fantastic job of sifting through Anton LaVey's many exaggerations and lies. And in fact, we'll probably talk to Doug Brode on an, in an interview here soon.
43:03 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah. Also, read Nightmare Alley.
43:05 Speaker 05 Yeah. Oh, yeah. We'll get to Nightmare Alley later on. So without further ado, let's get into the life of the Dirty Pope, the Black Pope, the Devil's Pope himself, Anton Sando LaVey.
43:18 Speaker 06 I just wanna say, Regia Satanis, welcome to today's black mass. It's truly one of the most evil diabolical things a one can do. Anton LaVey is so funny.
43:30 Speaker 05 Yeah. His accent is stunning.
43:32 Speaker 06 Hey, Regia Satanis, hey, you wanna listen to the Clapie a little bit? Yeah, I know, it's this called, this is called Clown's Lament. You know what we have? This is called Clown's Lunch Order.
43:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm just sitting here and, you know, I got a lion and I love my lion and all of my, all of my neighbors are saying, "Oh, the lion's too loud." And I'm saying, "There's a lion."
43:51 Speaker 06 Why are you fucking mad? Okay, let me just guess. Hey, hey, hey, nice to meet you. Let me guess. 195 pounds, right?
43:57 Speaker 05 Yeah. That's amazing.
43:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, I'm really good. I'm really fucking good.
44:02 Speaker 05 Now, like almost every occultist in modern history, Anton LaVey's life prior to his fame is difficult to parse, because almost every popular 20th century occultist was, at some level, a showman who knew that a bit of self mythology is important.
44:15 Speaker 06 I would put it on a scale, right? Because then I'd put him, because Aleister Crowley was sort of like, Aleister Crowley, H P B, a little bit more on the serious side. He's way on the other showbiz side.
44:25 Speaker 05 He's on the circus side.
44:26 Speaker 06 Oh, very much so.
44:26 Speaker 05 We're gonna get into that. Like, he is a fucking carny.
44:29 Speaker 04 Yeah. I know that Mr. LaVey does not sound as good in the song.
44:32 Speaker 05 No.
44:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, it doesn't work.
44:38 Speaker 05 Well, a bit of self mythology, it gives these guys, it gives their ideas a bit of a hook. Cause humans, for one reason or another, they're far more likely to listen to someone if they believe that person has led a special and unique life. Americans love the chosen one. And so Anton LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levy on April 11th, 1930.
45:01 Speaker 06 No, you never called me Howie. Never called me Howie, I damn you to hell, like, but 19 curses on you.
45:07 Speaker 05 He had a full head of black hair, strange amber eyes, and an actual tail, which sounds like we're starting with a lie, but in this case, the wild claim is actually true. Some people are born with an extra vertebrae at the end of their spine, something called a caudal appendage. It appears to be a tail. And while most people today just remove it, Anton LaVey kept his tail throughout his formative years. In those early days, Anton was called Tony by friends and family, Tony Levy, which is a very normal name. Likewise, Anton LaVey's parents were fairly normal, middle-class people from Chicago, named Gertrude and Michael. LaVey, however, claimed that his maternal grandmother, Luba Colton, would
45:50 Speaker 05 regale him with tales concerning the mysteries of her Eastern European homeland. LaVey described his grandmother in the Satanic Bible as a so-called gypsy who told him tales of the vampires and witches who populated her homeland of Transylvania.
46:09 Speaker 06 I love Transylvania.
46:10 Speaker 05 Although we now know that she was from Ukraine. She was not from Transylvania.
46:15 Speaker 04 Also, it's close. If you're gonna write a Bible, you can't put your grandma in it.
46:19 Speaker 06 It's not really a Bible. That's the thing. We'll get all into it, Eddie. I'll explain it all.
46:25 Speaker 05 Well, Luba Colton's brother was known as Anton Sandor, and it was this name that little Tony Levy would take years later, after also tweaking his last name just a little bit. He had to sound a little more evil, a little less nerdy, cause no one is following Howard Levy into a black mass.
46:43 Speaker 06 Honestly, the balls. I would have loved to have heard. Obviously, you need a magical transformation. That's a part of what this is too. He knows you need a magical transformation in order to appear to people like you've had a magical transformation. So you have to change your name and look. It's kinda like, it's just boilerplate. But Howard Levy? The Pope of Evil Howard Levy such, it's like almost more powerful.
47:05 Speaker 05 Yeah.
47:06 Speaker 06 Hey, hello, everybody. It's enough egg salad for everyone, but no one bowl of it is poison.
47:13 Speaker 04 I love that, that great comedic actor Eugene LeVey.
47:16 Speaker 06 Oh.
47:19 Speaker 06 If his name was Eugene LeVey, he would have been eating too much pussy in order to be an actor.
47:24 Speaker 06 That's the problem.
47:25 Speaker 05 Oh yeah, Gene LeVey.
47:26 Speaker 06 Yeah.
47:27 Speaker 04 Hi, Gene, hi. Oh, boy.
47:30 Speaker 05 Gene LeVey sounds like a man who invents a pussy eating machine.
47:33 Speaker 04 Hey, here we go. It's Diesel.
47:40 Speaker 06 Same brain.
47:45 Speaker 05 Since Anton LeVey was indeed the founder of the Church of Satan, one of his earliest childhood experiences that he wrote about years later had everything to do with the development of his sexual fetishes. Namely, Anton LeVey was a committed urophiliac, meaning his fetish was urination.
48:03 Speaker 06 He liked it a pee pee, man.
48:04 Speaker 05 He loved it a pee pee.
48:05 Speaker 06 We are part of a urination.
48:10 Speaker 06 Hi, I'm Pee Pee Abdul.
48:13 Speaker 04 It's Janet, aw.
48:19 Speaker 05 Well, Anton claimed that when he was five years old, a little girl coaxed him into her bedroom at a birthday party. But when the girl's mother caught them and scolded the girl, she peed her pants, which LeVey claimed set him down the, quote, fetishistic sexual path towards water sports. LeVey further wrote that he believed that men born in different eras would have different fixations. LeVey's type, for example, came from the beauty standards of the 1940s. He wrote that if he had a type.
48:46 Speaker 06 If I had a type? It was a fleshy, heavily made up maul with pale translucent skin. Who pissed the panties?
48:56 Speaker 05 When he wrote, he purposely put a period after translucent skin with pale translucent skin. Who pissed her panties?
49:08 Speaker 06 He, he would talk about it a lot. Like, if you look at him too, cause it's true.
49:13 Speaker 04 There are so, there are so many other romantic ways to write it.
49:16 Speaker 06 I know.
49:17 Speaker 04 And he's just good, he's like, I know, I just like it too much. Pale translucent skin.
49:25 Speaker 04 Get your piffed in a pants.
49:28 Speaker 05 It's not the only time either, he's like, "And then when I was 11, I was collecting ball fools, and I saw a lady's bathroom, and there was a hole in the wall, and I watched the women urinate."
49:38 Speaker 04 He did.
49:39 Speaker 05 He did. Now, while Anton LaVey was born in Chicago and spent a lot of time moving around the American West during the first 10 years of his life-
49:46 Speaker 04 And we all know Chicago women piss the thickest. I know that for a fact.
49:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's actually what Malort is.
49:53 Speaker 04 Yes.
49:55 Speaker 04 It is natty light piss.
49:58 Speaker 05 Despite all this, Anton LaVey was more or less a San Francisco native. In 1940, when Anton was 10, his family moved into 18 Redwood Avenue, where his father sold car parts and his mother worked as a typist, which is hardly a recipe for evil. In fact, LaVey would later describe his parents as people who were completely devoid of religion, people who held no strong opinions about anything. He called his mother a flibbertigibbet.
50:23 Speaker 04 Oh yeah, flibbertigibbet.
50:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, I love that word. She was always rearranging furniture, making her family move house constantly, even though his father hated moving. LaVey, meanwhile, was a bookish child who hated sports, which comes as a surprise to no one.
50:37 Speaker 04 What do you mean? What are you saying? The coolest guy in the world? He had to stay away from places where he'd get beat up. Piss their panties.
50:47 Speaker 05 Unfortunately, his head was shaped like a football, so if he got near a field, just start kicking him.
50:54 Speaker 04 Get Charlie Brown, yeah.
50:56 Speaker 05 He was a strange-looking boy who grew into a strange-looking adult, has big ears, narrow eyes, that football-shaped oval head, but instead of being ashamed, LaVey said that he took pride as a young boy in being an outcast. Strangely, he said that the one place where he found community in his youth was the Boy Scouts of America.
51:17 Speaker 05 Specifically the Cub Scouts. Love the Cub Scouts. He earned his bear badge. Always had fantastic things to say about scouts.
51:24 Speaker 06 You know what I'll say about Satanists and LeVey and Satanists in particular, that is a, it is considered to be a, like, a positive attribute, is being very handy.
51:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
51:34 Speaker 06 Being very self-sufficient.
51:36 Speaker 05 Being independent, yeah.
51:37 Speaker 06 So the idea of being able to like tie knots and do something, I feel like that's kind of like a, every single test of Anton LeVey's life is like, every single way he learned it, instead of like learning to be a part of society, it's like he saw it all and he saw like the bits and parts of society he kind of wanted to adhere to. Like, he very much immediately understood as a little boy, like, I'm gonna guide myself and I'm gonna do whatever the hell it is I want to do.
52:04 Speaker 05 He was a brilliant person. I mean, and that's, that is one of the things that you see throughout history, like especially in like cult leaders. I mean, Anton LeVey wasn't a cult leader. Uh, but you see like people who understand systems, especially humanities, humanities like just societal systems, those are the people who change things. You know, or those are the people, they either change them or they use those systems to get laid, like Keith Renary.
52:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
52:30 Speaker 05 You know, he understood systems perfectly. Anton LeVey also understood systems and how society worked, but he used it to figure out how to be independent and then to tell other people how to do the same. And to see pee pee and panties.
52:40 Speaker 06 He did like the pee pee and the panties. And he did get to touch Jane Mansfield's boobies.
52:46 Speaker 05 He did, he did.
52:47 Speaker 06 That's a huge gap.
52:48 Speaker 05 Really? Pretty massive. Oh yeah, we're, we're gonna get into the whole Jane, yeah, he, he took cred, not credit, but he, uh, he felt that he accidentally killed her.
52:57 Speaker 06 Really?
52:57 Speaker 05 Long story. Long story, we'll get into it later.
52:59 Speaker 06 Alright, alright, alright.
53:01 Speaker 05 Now, since Anton LeVey was comfortable being himself, he had no trouble making friends. His house was always full of kids whom LeVey would organize into secret societies with mock military orders. And he would become enraged when other kids broke character or lost interest.
53:15 Speaker 06 I don't wanna like, obviously say that I have a lot of similarities. But this is literally the shit I did.
53:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
53:25 Speaker 06 This is all the shit that we did. We only got together and made little clubs. Like me and my boys, we'd get together and like, my couple of girls, we'd make these like monster clubs and we had like all these like mystery clubs. And it was always that, and I was always the evil president.
53:37 Speaker 05 Yeah. This is so, it's better than-
53:39 Speaker 04 You know, being similar to the Toy Box Killer. You know, yeah, except I wish I had a boat.
53:46 Speaker 05 Well, basically throughout his childhood, Anton LaVey did whatever he wanted. He didn't like school, but he loved studying. So he ditched class to study his own interests by focusing particularly on biographies, history, adventure novels, and crime. That's more, that, I would say that's what I, um, relate to more. It's just like, yeah, school, fuck school, I'm gonna go do my own shit.
54:08 Speaker 04 I was just better at it. I was better at the stuff I read that wasn't math and science.
54:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was real bad at that.
54:13 Speaker 04 I was bad at those.
54:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, real bad.
54:15 Speaker 04 I actually did, I was like, I was like fine at math in the beginning, and then it was like, I, once we got to like abstract concepts like calculus and stuff, I was like, oh, this is not gonna, I'm not gonna, this is not gonna be a part of my future.
54:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was so bad at it that I, I like, I suspect my father may have bribed one of my teachers.
54:34 Speaker 04 Oh, you're, oh, you're, I gotta say, you're, your mother certainly cares about your schooling. Yo, man.
54:44 Speaker 04 I can see your father fucking your teacher. I give him your teacher's sexual favors.
54:49 Speaker 05 It was either that or everyone in my class was so fucking stupid that she just passed all of us. I think that was far more likely.
54:56 Speaker 04 I fucking, I did real bad at school, and I understand this completely. And now you write term papers for a fucking half your living. I feel like I've learned more in the past two and a half years than I did in high school.
55:07 Speaker 05 Yeah. I'm not a bad teacher.
55:09 Speaker 04 He's cool.
55:11 Speaker 05 Well, by the end of it, LaVey had made heroes from wildly disparate corners of human history. People that LaVey would later call de facto Satanists. These people are extremely important to the development of Satanism as a religion. They included Al Capone, Rasputin, Friedrich Nietzsche, uh, Louisiana politician Huey Long, adventure novelist Jack London, and a fairly obscure character from the Ottoman Empire named Basil Zayharov. Known to his friends as Zed Zed, Zacharias Basilius Zacharoff was a Turkish arms dealer who first showed up in history as a pimp at a Turkish brothel in the 1860s.
55:50 Speaker 04 Do you like her hairy or too hairy?
55:54 Speaker 04 Are you like, are you like, you want to see face or not?
55:59 Speaker 04 No face. Hey, tricks on you, it is a bag of salt.
56:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, do anything you like.
56:08 Speaker 05 But at the end, free Africa!
56:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, oh, help you bind, it bind your loose.
56:16 Speaker 05 Well, at the same time as Zed Zed was working as a pimp, he was also making money in the Istanbul Fire Brigade as an arsonist, who would set fires at mansions. The brigade would then extort money out of the wealthy owners before the fire brigade would put out the fire that they had started themselves.
56:34 Speaker 06 It would be such a strange, bad day for the fire to not be put out, huh? Kinda crazy how the fireman, he brought it in a fire basket. Don't know how it happened, son. Yes, name Zed Zed. Yes, yes, I'm fake at everything, I'm mad at everything.
56:53 Speaker 05 By the 1880s, Zed Zed was an arms salesman, trying to unload second-rate, multi-barreled machine guns and steam-powered submarines.
57:03 Speaker 04 That actually doesn't make sense.
57:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, hey, they kinda worked.
57:07 Speaker 04 Yeah?
57:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, no, the earliest submarines-
57:08 Speaker 04 They're a hole in the top.
57:10 Speaker 05 The earliest submarines were used in the Civil War. The American Civil War.
57:14 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, the Monarch and the Meramec. Those are steam-powered?
57:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
57:17 Speaker 04 There's a dude with coal, like, shoveling in the bottom of-
57:20 Speaker 05 Most people onboard would faint.
57:21 Speaker 04 Where did the steam go?
57:23 Speaker 05 The big pipe.
57:24 Speaker 04 Oh, so it still, it had like a snorkel?
57:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not going that deep. But when I say submersible, I mean it just like, goes right underneath, yeah.
57:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, this is, they aren't going against like the U-boats. You know what I mean? Like, this is very early submarine technology.
57:37 Speaker 05 Not Red October, no, no. These early submersibles would get so hot that the crew would faint. But Zed Zed still managed to sell six steam-powered 19th-century submarines to the Greeks, the Turks, and the Russians. Now, as an arms dealer, Zed Zed truly was an evil individual, even if he didn't often hold the gun that did the killing. It's said, Zed Zed, and you know, every idea has to, gotta have someone who did it first. Because always gonna be one guy who comes up with the evil idea first. And Zed Zed was the guy who came up with the idea to sell arms to both sides of the conflict, conflicts that he himself would help provoke.
58:14 Speaker 06 You know, there's a lot of people that say, there's nothing innocent in war. But I tell you, there is. The gun.
58:23 Speaker 06 It has no mother, it has no father. The gun goes to the home in which the gun needs to go. There is no gay gun flag. You know, you say, you say, you see.
58:38 Speaker 05 Did indeed sell weapons for three decades to every side of every conflict in Europe, Asia, and South America from like eighteen ninety up until like nineteen twenty. Like ZZ was there in all of them, and that's a violent time in human history.
58:55 Speaker 04 That's the best. You can just like wait for everyone to kill them, kill each other, and then go collect all the guns, sell them again. Yeah. Yeah. You got it. Put it all together.
59:03 Speaker 05 In World War I alone, ZZ sold millions of machine guns. He was a true merchant of death. His zeal for selling weapons, I would describe it as almost manic. His greatest ability was the instinctive understanding of when to offer bribes and who to offer them to, and his wheeling and dealing made him the modern equivalent of a billionaire by nineteen twenty. Now, to me, ZZ is no different from the DuPonts. He just has a lot more fun with it. So, Henry, what is it about ZZ that makes him a de facto Satanist? How does he influence the development of Satanism?
59:37 Speaker 06 I think that when he's reading it, the reason why it becomes attractive to Anton LaVey in the terms of Satanism is that that very central evil idea is actually also about freedom, right? So, yes, obviously, it is the opposite side of freedom. It's like, you know how we always say, like, the internet's truly neutral.
59:57 Speaker 05 Yeah.
59:57 Speaker 06 You cannot call it good or bad because it just exists. It is the collection of our subconscious. I kind of view it as the same way when he sees somebody pluck an idea like that out of the air, which that is a societal loophole. Like, he sees this thing that is a loophole that no one else is, is, is, kind of is considering, and he's making all of the money off of it. And in his mind, I am just a, I've arrived because war has given me a purpose.
1:00:27 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:00:27 Speaker 06 Like, I am not here. I wouldn't be here if there wasn't war. And if these guys aren't all willing to buy these guns for me, I wouldn't be here. So, there's like, for me with Satanism, there's a lot of that. Satanism, there's a lot of...
1:00:40 Speaker 05 Like breaking the system.
1:00:41 Speaker 06 And they don't evangelize.
1:00:43 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:00:43 Speaker 06 It's about you choose it. You know what I mean? You go make it, you go choose it. So there's a little bit of that.
1:00:48 Speaker 04 Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
1:00:50 Speaker 06 Yes.
1:00:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. And, and, and so Anton LaVey saw that this guy had taken advantage of a loophole in the system. And it's not necessarily that he admired all of the death that ZZ brought.
1:01:00 Speaker 06 I bet he did as a young man. I think he thought it was kind of cool and fun.
1:01:02 Speaker 05 Probably.
1:01:03 Speaker 06 Yeah, but he also kind, but he viewed the idea of someone who was like, I don't have a country.
1:01:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:01:07 Speaker 06 I'm a billionaire between all the lines.
1:01:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. He, he was fond of saying like, hello, my name is ZZ and I have 16 millions dollars.
1:01:16 Speaker 06 Yeah. All he wants to do is be ZZ.
1:01:18 Speaker 05 Yeah. Now, out of all the influences that led to the creation of a church of Satan, the one thing that Anton LaVey credited for his success in creating the church was the showmanship he learned from the many world's fairs and exhibitions that his parents took him to see in his early years. Fairs and exhibitions were massively popular throughout the first half of the 20th century. I mean, the ruins of world's fairs dot this entire country. The wig sphere in Knoxville.
1:01:45 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
1:01:46 Speaker 05 You know, like the, uh, the big globe in Queens.
1:01:48 Speaker 04 Yeah. Or the two things from the Men in Black movie.
1:01:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:01:51 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:01:52 Speaker 05 Also in Queens.
1:01:52 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:01:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. No, the, the, our country, the, the skeletons of these things are still everywhere. And Anton LaVey believed that basically he was in the right place at the right time to absorb all of this. Of all the fairs he attended, it was the 1939 Golden Gate International Expo held on San Francisco's Treasure Island that had the most lasting influence. There Anton LaVey had what he called his first satanic awakening. While he was at an exhibition called Sally Rand's Nude Ranch.
1:02:25 Speaker 06 Yeah, baby.
1:02:27 Speaker 05 It's not the type of awakening you would think it. I mean, yeah, sure, probably some kind of awakening, but.
1:02:32 Speaker 06 You know, but it shows to me how serious we're supposed to take Satanism. It's always remember, these are the influences.
1:02:39 Speaker 05 Yeah, they are. Now, that's a very good point.
1:02:41 Speaker 06 A ranch in San Francisco?
1:02:45 Speaker 05 On Treasure Island, no less.
1:02:46 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah.
1:02:49 Speaker 05 Now this awakening did not come solely from the topless cowgirls who spun lariats and pitched horseshoes for the crowd, although the nude ranch show itself was indeed one hell of an affair. In fact, it was led by one of the 20th century's greatest opponents of censorship, a woman named Sally Rand, who is another of LeVey's de facto Satanists.
1:03:09 Speaker 06 I mean, you know, a lot of times you look in the past at a person and you're like, oh, you know, like, you know, standards were different. Sally Rand was fucking hot.
1:03:17 Speaker 05 Fully modern person.
1:03:18 Speaker 06 Yes, a modern hot woman.
1:03:20 Speaker 05 Yeah. Sally Rand had gained fame in the 1920s and 30s for popularizing the fandance, playing peekaboo with her audience while teasing them with massive fans made from ostrich feathers. Starting in burlesque, Sally Rand became even more well-known when sound was added to film, which made her fandancing act a national craze, because, yeah, she could do the fandance on film, but it's not as good unless you have the you have the music to go along with it.
1:03:53 Speaker 06 Butt fucking was invented to that music. And think about that, like, this type of dirty sex was invented, you're like
1:04:01 Speaker 04 I thought butt fucking was invented in Greece.
1:04:03 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:04:08 Speaker 05 But Sally Rand was most famous for appearing nude in public to make a point. Six years before LeVey saw Sally Rand's nude ranch in San Francisco, Rand had made a splash at the opening day of the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago after she was hired to make an appearance as Lady Godiva at the Chicago Artist's Ball Dinner.
1:04:28 Speaker 06 She's white!
1:04:31 Speaker 05 It's chocolate.
1:04:32 Speaker 06 Oh, it's chocolate. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.
1:04:35 Speaker 05 Goddamn it.
1:04:36 Speaker 06 That's Mrs. Godiva.
1:04:39 Speaker 05 Well, it had become a tradition at World's Fairs to have Lady Godiva processions. Lady Godiva processions, of course, come from an 11th-century legend in which a noble named Lady Godiva rides naked on a horse through the streets to protest the oppressive taxation levied by her own husband. And so Sally Rand was paid $25 to take part in the World's Fair as Lady Godiva for the artist dinner. But Sally took it upon herself to ride a white horse naked through the fairgrounds themselves on opening day. And this is an important lesson, since she did it with so much confidence, the security guards just assumed that she'd gotten permission. And they just let her do it.
1:05:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, you just, that's how I got into plenty of places. You remember how we just walked into that con where we just said, we're talent?
1:05:30 Speaker 04 Walk right in.
1:05:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, Sally Rand made it all the way to the hotel where the dinner was supposed to be held. She even tried her luck one more time. She tried riding the horse into the building. But hotel staff refused to let her in on the horse, so she had four artists carry her inside, still nude, on a table lifted above their heads. Fantastic press. Huge spectacle made Rand even more famous. And while she was convicted of indecent exposure, she had the conviction overturned a year later on the grounds of free speech, which made her an early and important opponent to censorship.
1:06:05 Speaker 04 Wow, I hope she still got paid.
1:06:07 Speaker 05 She did. Actually, Sally Rand did really, she got even more famous after that. She started touring, I think with like Bolero or something like. She actually had a fantastic life and a great career. Just being a, basically like an activist and an entertainer at the same time.
1:06:24 Speaker 04 I never heard of her before, but I looked her up when you said she was hot and I definitely recognize her face.
1:06:28 Speaker 06 Yeah, sure, sure.
1:06:29 Speaker 05 We all see her face. Now, how is she a de facto Satanist?
1:06:32 Speaker 06 So, number one, Anton LaVey, despite what he would do to his wives and his daughter, worshipped women. Loved women that weren't his wife and his daughter. And he saw, truly, Sally Rand is an example of what would be the satanic ideal of a woman's body. And I think largely, Anton LaVey even said this, if you read The Satanic Witch, you start to understand that Anton LaVey projected himself in his own mind outwards as a busty woman. Like, he viewed, in his mind, like, you know, I said that big tit energy?
1:07:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, he had, was that a cape on?
1:07:05 Speaker 06 Yeah, sure, right? But he viewed himself as like... My powers as a man can only be harnessed if I imagined myself as a busty woman.
1:07:15 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
1:07:15 Speaker 06 And use the same wiles as a busty woman, but as a man. And so would he-
1:07:19 Speaker 05 It's actually great advice.
1:07:20 Speaker 06 It's really great advice. It is. That's what the Satanic Witch is all about. And so would he, when he first saw Sally Rand, I think it was the first time he saw how a woman's just presentation was so transgressive and so powerful. She had not to say anything, no, nothing political, nothing. The whole crowd snapped and watched, and watched this woman, totally free and nude, ride a big animal, which is also heavily into Satanism. Like, the idea of, like, that we're all animals, we're no bit, we're like, we are just literally primates, there is no real-
1:07:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, sometimes, sometimes better, sometime, most of the time worse.
1:07:56 Speaker 06 Most of the time worse.
1:07:56 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:07:57 Speaker 06 So, I feel like when he saw that, it's this idea of, like, he's looking at his mother.
1:08:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:01 Speaker 06 She's not Sally fucking Rand. Like, the first time he sees, he's like, that's the first time he saw, what's the first time you saw a woma? Like, you saw that woma that changed the thing inside your brain.
1:08:12 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
1:08:13 Speaker 06 That's how I view Sally Rand, and then that just kind, it became like, sort of this ideal for him of, like, look at the inherent power she just has.
1:08:21 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:22 Speaker 06 Just living.
1:08:23 Speaker 05 Makes a great point, like, if you'd, like, the whole stupid, awful, like, alpha male shit, like, you do go for that, the masculine thing, all you're gonna attract are other awful men.
1:08:32 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:08:32 Speaker 05 But with the, if you have, like, the big tit energy, feminine, you attract everyone.
1:08:37 Speaker 06 Yes, yes, it's about making, so essentially, Satanic Witch is a whole long thing about, sort of, well, I, I, don't do this to me.
1:08:44 Speaker 05 Sure, no, no, it's fun.
1:08:45 Speaker 06 I'll get there, I'll get there, I'll get there.
1:08:46 Speaker 05 It's fun, it's, it is kinda fascinating.
1:08:47 Speaker 04 Do you think that when Sally Rand was on the horse, she had to change her name to Sally Ride?
1:08:55 Speaker 06 And then she blew up? And then she fucking exploded? That's Christopher Cola! That's the other woman.
1:09:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, Sally, Sally Ride-
1:09:02 Speaker 06 She made it? She made it, yeah, she died recently. Oh, well, then she didn't make it. Well, she had suicide. Oh, well, that's a start.
1:09:09 Speaker 05 I guess.
1:09:10 Speaker 06 The earth's so small.
1:09:12 Speaker 05 She did commit suicide, didn't she?
1:09:14 Speaker 06 No!
1:09:16 Speaker 04 How much am I supposed to know? I don't know. I was like, what'd she see on the moon?
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1:11:08 Speaker 05 By the time of the San Francisco Fair attended by a young Anton LaVey, Sally Rand had been fighting censorship for years. In February 1939, she had already led hundreds of scantily clad women on horses in formation through downtown San Francisco and her new Rand. Should have been somewhat of an extension of that performance. This, of course, is where Anton LaVey saw Sally Rand. And just seeing Sally Rand was amazing in itself. But that was not the so-called Satanic Awakening. LaVey saw Sally Rand, but he also saw his Sunday school teacher seeing Sally Rand at said nude ranch. LaVey later wrote that after seeing his Sunday school teacher enjoying topless cowgirls,
1:11:52 Speaker 05 despite this Sunday school teacher's oft-repeated claims of higher morality, LaVey saw the hypocrisy of Christianity, which was his first so-called Satanic Epiphany.
1:12:02 Speaker 04 I love his Satanic Epiphany came from some dude go,
1:12:09 Speaker 04 "That's the greatest set of batteries I've seen since I left Michigan."
1:12:18 Speaker 05 I mean, yeah. Admittedly, this seems like incredibly basic stuff in 2026. It's the sort of thing that any of us could have pointed out when we were kids. And that makes it easy to dismiss. In fact, you could easily make the mistake of dismissing all of this as childish or a little too edgy for its own good.
1:12:34 Speaker 04 Yes.
1:12:34 Speaker 05 But you have to realize that this was not a common way of thinking in 1939. Wasn't even really a common way of thinking in 1966, when LaVey actually founded the Church of Satan. It is basic, but it was people like Anton LaVey who laid the groundwork that birthed a more modern way of looking at the world. Basically, Anton LaVey is the duck soup of edginess. Here's what I mean. Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers movie from 1933. It was so funny that everyone who came after copied everything about it. So what was once an entirely new way of doing comedy, it soon became the standard. So this thing that changed everything, it came to be seen as hack,
1:13:15 Speaker 05 even embarrassing, because it is seen as so obvious in the modern world, in the wake of everything that came after it, such as the paradox of Satanism.
1:13:24 Speaker 06 The way I'd even put it, which will, as we will cover this, Satanism is an introductory...
1:13:31 Speaker 06 Philosophy. It's the first thing that should get you going. It's inherently for, even Anton LaVey even kinda says this. It's why the Satanic Bible is so simple.
1:13:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:13:41 Speaker 06 Is that he wrote it for 15 year olds to read.
1:13:44 Speaker 05 It's super easy to, it is very, very easy to understand. It is such a quick read. But yeah, you're supposed to move on from it.
1:13:49 Speaker 06 You're supposed to expand.
1:13:51 Speaker 05 Yeah. Now Sally Rand's Nude Ranch was not the only event at this fair that influenced Anton LaVey.
1:13:59 Speaker 06 Sorry, I gotta get that out.
1:14:02 Speaker 05 Alright, now we can go. Another exhibit that LaVey said was full of Satanic undertones was the full display of babies in incubators on the midway. These were live, premature babies.
1:14:12 Speaker 04 Live, tonight. Premature babies on the main stage. They don't goo goo, they don't gaga, but you will, seeing these live premature babies.
1:14:27 Speaker 06 Oh my God, you can see that one grow an arm.
1:14:32 Speaker 05 When I went yesterday, I saw four die.
1:14:35 Speaker 04 Oh yeah, wow, what a wonderful preemie explosion. I mean, it sounds like a crazy thing, but they, these events, that these exhibits existed because there weren't incubators in hospitals.
1:14:46 Speaker 05 Well, there were incubators in hospitals. This was to show off the new incubator technology. You know, they, this happened a lot. They would do like guys in iron lungs. When they first put people in iron lungs, they would just treat that as a freak show. And people would pay money to go see the guy just sitting there in an iron lung.
1:15:02 Speaker 04 So fuck it, do something to fuck it. Just him being like, "Take me home." No, I'm sorry, you're the show.
1:15:12 Speaker 05 But no, these were live premature babies in incubators in a modern hospital setting. But it was housed in a whimsically themed building in the middle of what was basically a large entertainment complex. It's like putting a cancer ward in the middle of Tomorrowland at Disney.
1:15:28 Speaker 04 I'll go though, don't do it. I hate, I hate to have to get the lightning lane for it.
1:15:33 Speaker 05 It really is. It's like, imagine walking into a room at Disney and it's just a bunch of people in chairs getting fucking chemotherapy treatments. Same shit.
1:15:41 Speaker 04 I mean, it would make sense though, for Tomorrowland, if it was an advancement. It's kinda like The Adventures of Inner Space.
1:15:46 Speaker 06 Also, um, just know you, you just called what hospitals are gonna be, by the way. Just so you know that.
1:15:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:15:51 Speaker 06 You've just, we have just put into the zeitgeist, what's gonna happen.
1:15:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:15:55 Speaker 06 And eventually, people are gonna be getting their chemo at Disneyland. Can you imagine Donald Duck giving you your chemo?
1:16:02 Speaker 05 Yes, I can. And it's the only way it's gonna happen.
1:16:05 Speaker 06 Dude, character meet and greet chemo.
1:16:08 Speaker 06 Has that not, how is that not a thing? Dude, write it down.
1:16:11 Speaker 05 Write it down.
1:16:12 Speaker 06 Spider-Man.
1:16:12 Speaker 05 Write it down. I'm writing it down.
1:16:14 Speaker 06 Brings you chemo.
1:16:14 Speaker 05 I'm mailing it to myself.
1:16:15 Speaker 06 Doctor Strange brings you chemo.
1:16:17 Speaker 05 Copyright.
1:16:18 Speaker 04 We should get Eleven to do it, since we're on Netflix, you know?
1:16:22 Speaker 06 And it's great, cause she's got, she's, um, um, let's continue.
1:16:26 Speaker 05 I wanna get one of the guys from Dark to do it. That's my favorite Netflix show.
1:16:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, super weird. I wanna get that one with the Dear Zachary. Can we get that lady?
1:16:35 Speaker 05 And also, that's why I chose Tomorrowland instead of Toontown.
1:16:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
1:16:38 Speaker 05 It's not gonna make sense in Toontown.
1:16:39 Speaker 04 No, it doesn't make sense.
1:16:40 Speaker 05 And in front.
1:16:43 Speaker 06 If you fucking tell me for a second that Roger Rabbit's my oncologist.
1:16:47 Speaker 04 You ever played the Dear Zachary drinking game?
1:16:50 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah, yeah.
1:16:51 Speaker 04 Beer Zachary?
1:16:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beer Zachary. Where you drink a beer and blow your brains out?
1:16:56 Speaker 05 Well, as Anton LaVey saw it.
1:16:58 Speaker 06 Beer Zachary. We have to do something with Beer Zachary.
1:17:04 Speaker 06 Just pouring fucking beers on a dead baby. Every time you get sad drinking. I started drinking before.
1:17:12 Speaker 05 As Anton LaVey saw it, this incubator baby display, it made a mockery and a spectacle of the most delicate and vulnerable life forms on earth. These were babies on the cusp of death. You think premies are bad now? Imagine a preemie in 1939 trying to survive at the fair.
1:17:29 Speaker 06 Yeah. Give him more lead.
1:17:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, this baby is weak. He needs more lead injections.
1:17:33 Speaker 04 Not lead, lithium. It's lithium that makes a baby grow.
1:17:37 Speaker 06 I already gave him all the mercury we had.
1:17:41 Speaker 05 I mean, they basically made dying babies a freak show. And Anton LaVey absolutely loved the contrast for him. This was Satanism writ large. And when Anton LaVey hit puberty himself, the freak show element he'd enjoyed as a child wasn't quite so funny when he realized that he would have to show his vestigial tail to the other young boys in gym class. Again, not surprisingly, Anton LaVey hated gym class.
1:18:06 Speaker 06 Hey, uh, listen, I don't do, uh, I don't do jumping jacks, okay? That is one of the most joyful single exercises. I refuse to do it. I mean, I'll hang a rope.
1:18:18 Speaker 05 He also began developing a hatred towards jocks, and this is a direct quote.
1:18:22 Speaker 06 Young men who found themselves unusually well endowed.
1:18:26 Speaker 05 Just had, it's like, I hate boys with large penises.
1:18:30 Speaker 06 They do whatever they want. They do whatever they want. The rest of us are normal. The rest of us have to think of other creative ways to use their penis. Make it longer, make it appear longer.
1:18:42 Speaker 05 Mostly, though, Anton was nervous about showing his tail to the other boys. The tail had become even more of a problem when it became inflamed when LaVey was 12 years old. He supposedly had to have it drained of fluids to relieve the pain. This, of course, did not endear him to his fellow children.
1:18:59 Speaker 04 In college, my roommate had to get his tail drained, and he had to, he had to sleep on his stomach for a week, and then I had to, like, give him bong hits from over the side of the bed. It was kind of fun. That's really fun.
1:19:08 Speaker 05 It's a good friend.
1:19:09 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
1:19:09 Speaker 05 It's a real good friend.
1:19:10 Speaker 04 That's great.
1:19:11 Speaker 05 Now, Anton LaVey was too old to be a boomer, but too young to serve in World War II. He was only nine years old when the conflict began, and he was 11 when America joined the war as a full participant. By the time the war's end, though, Anton LaVey was 15, and one of his uncles had been hired to rebuild airstrips for the army in post-war Germany. Since Anton looked up to his uncle, and since this was 1945, he actually joined his uncle on the trip overseas. Like, yeah, fuck it, go to Germany. And there, LaVey was exposed to German Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Nosferatu.
1:19:47 Speaker 06 And that, that'll change ya.
1:19:49 Speaker 05 It will. No, it very-
1:19:50 Speaker 06 Especially going from here to there and seeing how different it is.
1:19:53 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm, yeah, and also just being in post-war Germany, just the devastation of it and the destruction of it. It was, it was, post-war Germany was, uh, nightmarish in every way. But these films, they were masterpieces of ritual and occultism. I mean, you look at the ri- like, look at Metropolis, the rituals of Metropolis, the occultism of, yeah, Nosferatu.
1:20:14 Speaker 06 Yeah, that was the first sequel.
1:20:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:20:17 Speaker 06 Nosferatu. Oh, sure. I hated Nosferatu.
1:20:23 Speaker 05 Uh, the jagged angles, the harsh lighting, the dark shadows, all that stuff that typified German expressionist film. Those would become massive inspirations when Anton LaVey began constructing his own satanic rituals. And when he began, pretty much putting together the aesthetic of the Church of Satan. Now, besides his interest in film, Anton LaVey was also a fantastic musician.
1:20:45 Speaker 06 He's almost musician first up, in terms of abilities.
1:20:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, he learned brass, woodwinds, strings, and keyboards at a young age. Quite appropriately for a lord of hell, he taught the accordion, which had exploded in popularity in the 20th century. It's, and I'll, I, as someone who has tried to learn the accordion, like, it's hellish for the person playing the accordion. Even, I love accordion, I love how it sounds, but it is maddening.
1:21:10 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah. My father tried to teach me and I didn't take. I wish I had done it. I wish I had fucking learned.
1:21:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:21:15 Speaker 06 Wasn't he one of those guys that could just, like, hear a song and then play it?
1:21:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. But since LaVey was such a natural talent, he dropped out of his junior year of high school soon after his return from Germany to play oboe full-time for the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.
1:21:28 Speaker 06 That's awesome.
1:21:29 Speaker 05 He also threw himself into the study of painting, classical music, philosophy, and of course, magic. But lest you start bullying him now.
1:21:37 Speaker 06 What's there to bully?
1:21:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, if there was a bully, he wouldn't exist.
1:21:41 Speaker 06 No, I know. This is perfectly normal, healthy boy behavior.
1:21:46 Speaker 05 LaVey, yes, playing second, being second-chair oboe in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.
1:21:51 Speaker 06 Healthy growing boy.
1:21:53 Speaker 05 Levay attempted to counterbalance his extreme nerdiness, because he did have this idea very early on. He knew that he had to counterbalance that. Like, that he did have these very nerdy interests that one could see as weak. He counterbalanced it with appearances. You know, that's also another important satanic thing.
1:22:13 Speaker 06 Well, Satanism and appearances are one and one. That is the idea, is that appearances are everything. So it's like, the fact that he even understood that, like, that's a huge, that takes self-consciousness to understand you're a nerd.
1:22:25 Speaker 04 You see the Satanist that started with the eyeliner?
1:22:28 Speaker 05 Yes, probably.
1:22:29 Speaker 06 Probably.
1:22:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, I would say, I would say so.
1:22:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, most of the cathars had something like it.
1:22:37 Speaker 05 Well, Levay attempted to counterbalance his extreme nerdiness by letting his hair grow long. He dressed in leather jackets. He wore the infamous zoot suits of the time. And with his new look, Anton Levay intentionally sought out the reprobates of San Francisco, the gamblers, the pimps, the prostitutes who populated the Bay Area's pool halls and bars.
1:22:56 Speaker 06 Cool guys. Cool, fun guys.
1:22:59 Speaker 05 This was Anton Levay's uncle's crowd, his Uncle Bill. Although Levay gave no details, which means he could be lying about all of this, Levay supposedly traveled with his Uncle Bill to the newly established desert oasis that was Las Vegas when he was a teenager, to see how him and Uncle Bill could make their way in Sin City. Supposedly, Uncle Bill had been a bootlegger in Chicago for Al Capone during prohibition, and Uncle Bill also allegedly had connections to the infamous Vegas gangster Bugsy Siegel. Anton said that in Las Vegas, he watched criminals exploit the natural foibles and vices of other men for fun and profit.
1:23:37 Speaker 06 That's why it's great.
1:23:39 Speaker 05 That's why Las Vegas is fantastic. These criminals, Levay claimed, taught him that everything is a racket, including the church. "The crafty man," Levay wrote, "figured out how to work the rackets himself, so he didn't wind up as a slave to the crooked politicians and the bosses of our modern world." He wrote about this in the 60s, still true today. "The crafty citizen refuses the routine of going to work, where he stagnates at a deadly dull job, having his lunch when he's told, all to draw a wage that is barely enough to sustain this hondrum existence of factories and offices and commutes."
1:24:16 Speaker 06 Burn it to the ground!
1:24:18 Speaker 04 I mean, it makes a lot of sense.
1:24:22 Speaker 05 And so, instead of living the life of his father, his mother, or even his criminal uncle, Anton LaVey took a fourth route. He took inspiration from one of those people he read about when he was a kid, and he joined the circus.
1:24:38 Speaker 06 Very good, very good, guys.
1:24:46 Speaker 05 That song's called "Blazes and Flames."
1:24:47 Speaker 06 Oh, that's fucking awesome. You know, I actually just met a guy who ran away to the circus.
1:24:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:24:52 Speaker 06 At the Zach Bagans Haunted Museum.
1:24:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:24:54 Speaker 06 It was in this freak section, and he literally was like, he told his whole story. He's like, "I was 16, I needed to get out of my fucking parents' house, and I left, and I joined the circus." In fucking 20, like, 30 years ago.
1:25:06 Speaker 05 Was he an exhibit, or...?
1:25:08 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah, he was in it, as an exhibit.
1:25:09 Speaker 05 I thought he was just a guy hanging out.
1:25:11 Speaker 06 No, he was doing like, the nail in the nose bit. But he was like, I was like, "Man, that's right." You can still just fuck off and join the circus.
1:25:18 Speaker 05 Oh, is he one of those Jim Rose guys?
1:25:20 Speaker 06 Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
1:25:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, probably, I remember them. Now, there are two men from the world of circuses, sideshows, and carnivals that are incredibly important to the development of Satanism. Men who are both at the top and the bottom of this particular entertainment ladder. So, let's start with the man at the top, the great showman of the 19th century, P.T. Barnum.
1:25:40 Speaker 06 Yeah!
1:25:41 Speaker 05 Barnum was, of course, another of LaVey's de facto Satanists. Born in Connecticut in 1819, P.T. Barnum was the eventual co-founder of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, but that actually came near the end of his life. Barnum had a massively influential and fascinating career prior to that, in which he had a hand in shaping America's image of itself. But since P.T. Barnum was a reflection of America that reflected itself right back, his story is far darker than what you're probably expecting.
1:26:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, I feel like P.T. Barnum could've had his own series.
1:26:14 Speaker 06 Oh, yeah, dude. Like, honestly, he is, he is, I actually wonder if he's worse than Anton LaVey. As a person, you know?
1:26:22 Speaker 04 He's definitely got more depths on his hands.
1:26:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, he's got a fair amount of depth on his, yeah, P.T. Barnum is a... Yeah, there's a lot going on there.
1:26:30 Speaker 04 True American.
1:26:33 Speaker 05 He really was. Now, P.T. Barnum got into the sideshow business at the age of 25, and his first attraction was an elderly enslaved woman. In 1835, long before the Emancipation Proclamation, Barnum was offered the purchase of a black woman named Joyce Heath, who was supposedly 161 years old. Barnum had been told that Joyce Heath was George Washington's nursemaid, born in the 1670s. And Barnum figured that he could sell this lie, even though Joyce was probably no more than 80 years old. Because Joyce could actually tell a pretty convincing story when he got her in front of a crowd. That was the whole, that was the whole thing. That was the crux of it, is that Joyce could sell it.
1:27:15 Speaker 04 Oh, so she was like the first time an artist was, got their art stolen from them. He would have been a great record producer.
1:27:23 Speaker 05 No, he was a manager, 100%. No, all I mean, the, the people who managed attractions in the 1800s, that's where the fucking management for art, for actors and musicians, that's where it comes from.
1:27:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:27:37 Speaker 05 Barnum was living in New York City at the time, where purchasing a human being was illegal. So he quote-unquote "leased" Joyce Heath from the man who had enslaved her for the price of $500 for one year. Joyce, however, would not survive that year-long lease.
1:27:52 Speaker 04 Kind of like my Rav4.
1:27:57 Speaker 05 Fucking awful.
1:28:00 Speaker 04 Just had to get in a Rav, had to get a Rav4 joke in there. Has had to do it.
1:28:10 Speaker 05 See, Barnum considered Joyce to be too vigorous to convincingly play a 161-year-old woman. So he put her on a strict diet of eggs and whiskey until she appeared to be no more than muscle and bone. Barnum also decided that there's no way that a 161-year-old woman would have any teeth left. So he decided that Joyce should have all of her teeth removed. He convinced her to agree to having her teeth pulled while she was drunk on whiskey. Then, a few days later, Barnum removed all of her teeth under the guise of, "No, no, but you said yes. You were drunk, but you said yes, so we're pulling all your teeth out now."
1:28:47 Speaker 04 Let's have Hugh Jackman sing a song about that.
1:28:51 Speaker 05 Let's just say this storyline was not in The Greatest Showman.
1:28:56 Speaker 04 It wasn't?
1:28:57 Speaker 05 It was not.
1:28:57 Speaker 04 This is Hugh Jackman's part?
1:28:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, and guess, yeah, he played PT, it was a fucking life story of PT Barnum. Yeah.
1:29:05 Speaker 04 I didn't even know that.
1:29:07 Speaker 05 This was cut. This was all cut.
1:29:09 Speaker 04 That's so funny, because if you even look at him, he's so fucking battle tone. You know what I mean? Like, he's so gross, he's so ugly, that's so funny.
1:29:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it gets worse from here.
1:29:22 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
1:29:23 Speaker 05 This is before he even took her out on the road. Like, this is just getting her ready for the show. With his attraction ready, Barnum flooded New England and New York with ads about Joyce Heath, claiming that she was raising money to purchase her great-grandchildren out of slavery. He made her perform 14 hours a day for a never-ending stream of yokels, which naturally caused her health to fail within just a few months. Because even if she's not 161, she's still probably about 80, 85.
1:29:51 Speaker 06 And just know she's still working, because she certainly has a great deal of great-grandchildren. So unfortunately, you're gonna have to pull the night shift.
1:30:00 Speaker 05 But instead of slowing it down, when Barnum realized that she was probably gonna die, he announced a final death tour at an increased ticket price.
1:30:09 Speaker 04 What did you say, PT?
1:30:10 Speaker 05 Last chance, last chance to see George Washington's nursemaid.
1:30:14 Speaker 04 What do you mean, last chance? I'm here, why is it last? What do you mean this is my final tour?
1:30:21 Speaker 05 Is that a tooth in the back of your mouth?
1:30:23 Speaker 04 No, no, no, it's a, it's a sin.
1:30:27 Speaker 05 Barnum, at the same day that he was announced on the final death tour, he also sent an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper claiming that Joyce was an automaton made of whalebone, springs, and rubber. This brought out even more people.
1:30:41 Speaker 06 Did you hear, Joyce? You're an automaton!
1:30:45 Speaker 04 No, no, I'm, I'm Joyce!
1:30:48 Speaker 06 I'm Joyce. No, no, no. You're a robot. Alright? Don't be confused. You're a robot, alright? I'll come back and put some batteries in your ass.
1:30:56 Speaker 05 When Joyce, of course, died a few months later, Barnum charged 50 cents a ticket for Joyce's public autopsy, which was held in a Manhattan bar where 1,500 New Yorkers shuffled past to see if Joyce really was an automaton. And by the end of it, Barnum had made-
1:31:13 Speaker 06 Yeah, when they find out.
1:31:14 Speaker 05 Um, that she was a lady.
1:31:15 Speaker 06 Oh, fuck.
1:31:16 Speaker 05 Skin and bone. Uh, they found out-
1:31:18 Speaker 04 Not one person was in that line. It's like, "Listen, it's, it's just a lady." I'm the whole part of the ticket.
1:31:25 Speaker 06 Oh, hey, spoilers.
1:31:27 Speaker 05 No, that was the fucking 18th century, 19th century version of spoilers.
1:31:31 Speaker 06 Hey, buddy, we're all online here, okay? I wanna see that old black woman's viscera. I know it's a lady. Obviously, it's a lady. Nah, you still think it's a robot. That's 'cause you're hopeful, man. And that's why we're doing this.
1:31:49 Speaker 05 By the end of it, Barnum had made the modern equivalent of 1.5 million dollars off of Joyce Heath. And this is when Barnum was 25. That's, this is how Barnum, this is how P.T. Barnum got his start. Everything came from Joyce Heath. Now Barnum never did say the phrase that is most often attributed to him, that "there's a sucker born every minute." What he actually said was that the American people liked to be humbugged, which is to say that Americans liked being tricked.
1:32:16 Speaker 06 No.
1:32:17 Speaker 05 Barnum, therefore, made a lifelong career out of fucking with the American public. He called himself "The Prince of Humbugs." Where Barnum really made a name for himself, though, was in Manhattan, where he opened his infamous American Museum, which was basically a collection of oddities, freak shows, and general entertainment. It was not what you would consider a museum museum.
1:32:37 Speaker 06 It was a Ripley's. Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it wasn't stupid and boring. It was fun and cool. Yeah.
1:32:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, it is, it is actually one of those, like, it's in my top five, like, they asked, like, if you could time travel to any time and see anything, Barnum's American Museum is in my top five.
1:32:52 Speaker 06 Oh, I'd be there in a fucking, I'd be in a fucking heartbeat.
1:32:55 Speaker 05 Yeah. After tracking down oddities like a plaster copy of the Cardiff Giant, a working replica of Niagara Falls, and a monkey torso glued to a fishtail that he called the Fiji Mermaid-
1:33:05 Speaker 06 God, I love her.
1:33:06 Speaker 05 Barnum began advertising free rooftop concerts at the American Museum to attract crowds. He also hired the worst musicians to play these concerts, which caused the crowds to spend money to get into the museum to escape the noise. Once inside, a customer would see posted signs saying, "This way to the egress", which, and of course, everyone wanted to see what the fuck the egress was. The customer would then walk past all manner of exhibits to go through a doorway that finally promised the egress, which would of course lead them outside the museum. Because most Americans had no idea that egress was simply the Latin word for exit.
1:33:44 Speaker 06 Yeah. That's what you men fuckers, you fucking idiots. I mean, it's, that's what you fucking get, you fucking idiots.
1:33:52 Speaker 04 It is one of those things where it's like, what a fucking asshole, and that's hilarious.
1:33:56 Speaker 05 See, that's the thing. After seeing the egress, the customer was then forced to pay another entry fee to get back in. And while you'd think this would really piss people off, those who fell for it would oftentimes tell friends who were going to Barnum's for the first time that if you did nothing else at the American Museum, you had to see the egress.
1:34:15 Speaker 06 It's just too fucking good.
1:34:17 Speaker 05 He was right. Americans love, we do like being tricked.
1:34:20 Speaker 06 We do. We like, we like it. And the reason why he's a de facto Satanist is because of that. If you listen to P T Barnum, like, a lot against, uh, personal choice. He didn't make it mandatory that you showed up at the 161-year-old, like, woman fucking tour, right? He just said, "I got one", right? And everybody showed up.
1:34:44 Speaker 05 Well, I would say the American Museum, his later stuff is more the Satanist stuff than the, uh, you know, slavery, the slave-owning stuff.
1:34:53 Speaker 06 Well, yeah.
1:34:54 Speaker 05 That's not good.
1:34:55 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's bad look. That's what you mean. Yeah, it's bad optics.
1:34:59 Speaker 04 This trickery still happens. I mean, you go to the magic castle, they trick you into eating a really expensive shitty meal.
1:35:04 Speaker 06 It is a bad meal, but the close-up magic otherwise is.
1:35:07 Speaker 04 Good, they don't touch your wife. It's actually really nice in there.
1:35:11 Speaker 06 Like, he's a de facto sadist because in his mind, I am providing only what people are asking for.
1:35:18 Speaker 05 It's showmanship. Again, it's big showmanship.
1:35:20 Speaker 06 You wouldn't, you wouldn't need me if you guys all didn't like this stuff.
1:35:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:35:27 Speaker 06 That's a P T Barnum point of view.
1:35:29 Speaker 05 And he turned things around a little bit.
1:35:31 Speaker 06 He tried.
1:35:31 Speaker 05 Even though Americans might like to be humbugged, they really don't like it as much when people brag about it. And P T Barnum almost lost everything when he wrote an autobiography in the 1850s, detailing exactly how he had tricked, betrayed, and swindled his audiences over the years.
1:35:46 Speaker 06 That must have been so much fun for him.
1:35:47 Speaker 05 It really, it was a lot of fun, but when people read it, they were very angry.
1:35:51 Speaker 04 Magicians shouldn't tell their secrets.
1:35:53 Speaker 05 They really shouldn't. And that was another, I think Anton LaVey learned that.
1:35:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, because look at somebody, you know, you look at, every time somebody breaks character, as soon as they break character.
1:36:02 Speaker 05 They're done. But Barnum knew that Americans also loved money. So he gave a series of lectures called The Art of Money Getting, which turned his reputation around so hard that people convinced him to run for office. Barnum actually ran as a Republican in the lead up to the Civil War and advocated for the citizenship of black men and women. And while one could cynically say that he was changing with the times, Barnum actually became a staunch abolitionist in his later years, who I would like to think was trying to atone for his youthful evils.
1:36:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, he could have doubled down.
1:36:33 Speaker 05 Evil, evil son of a bitch when he was a kid.
1:36:35 Speaker 04 I think he probably just saw the writing on the walls and he was just trying to stay in charge.
1:36:40 Speaker 06 But I'll say, honestly, that, it wasn't that popular of a view.
1:36:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:36:45 Speaker 06 Like, it really wasn't.
1:36:46 Speaker 05 It was a gamble.
1:36:46 Speaker 06 Being an abolitionist was like, was still like an intense point of view. I think it's just P T Barnum liked the thrill. I think he likes being on it, but I do genuinely, in my heart of hearts, I think that there was like, because he said this in a quote about like, if I could give anything back at the end of my life, I will. So he rebuilt Bridgeport, Connecticut, he did all these things. And so he kind of like did this thing being like, hey, I am trying.
1:37:12 Speaker 06 Like, at the very end of his life, which is the most you could say about most human beings.
1:37:16 Speaker 05 It really is. He fought, he fought against the
1:37:18 Speaker 06 He's a bad person, either way he do, but then in the end, he tried to say I'm sorry and then he fucking died.
1:37:22 Speaker 05 And yeah, in the last, in the last 20 years of his life, he did try to turn things around, uh, which yeah, which honestly is more than we can say for almost anyone we've ever talked about on this fucking show. Uh, people liked what Barnum was selling when he ran for office and he served as both a member of the Connecticut Legislature and the mayor of Bridgeport. He died in 1891, having become personal friends with Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, who fucking loved freak shows. Queen Victoria loved them.
1:37:48 Speaker 06 She was the naked one, right?
1:37:49 Speaker 05 No, no, no, no.
1:37:51 Speaker 06 Was she the sex crazed one?
1:37:51 Speaker 05 No, Queen Victoria was the absolute office, opposite. She was the most buttoned up, sexless.
1:37:57 Speaker 06 That, I'm sorry, which one was the, which one was the super horny one?
1:38:01 Speaker 04 Sally Rand.
1:38:04 Speaker 05 The super horny queen?
1:38:05 Speaker 06 Wasn't there a super horny queen?
1:38:07 Speaker 05 Not in England. I don't think in England.
1:38:09 Speaker 06 Side stories, L P O T L, gmail.com. Send me a list of the corniest queens.
1:38:12 Speaker 05 I think you're thinking of Catherine the Great out of Russia.
1:38:14 Speaker 06 Yep, that's exactly what I'm thinking of.
1:38:15 Speaker 04 Freddie Mercury.
1:38:16 Speaker 06 So, send me pictures, side stories, L P O T L, gmail.com. Send me pictures of the horniest queens. Thank you.
1:38:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, and also, uh, Abraham Lincoln, good friends.
1:38:26 Speaker 06 Oh, I thought you were gonna say horniest queen.
1:38:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:38:33 Speaker 05 Abraham Lincoln, also a super horny queen, cannot be denied at all.
1:38:42 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
1:38:42 Speaker 05 Yeah, okay.
1:38:43 Speaker 04 Catherine the Great?
1:38:44 Speaker 06 That's the horny one, yeah, yeah.
1:38:45 Speaker 04 Okay, good for her.
1:38:47 Speaker 05 It says, the AI is telling us that Queen Victoria was super horny.
1:38:50 Speaker 06 It's because we asked about horniness and AI is gonna lie to you.
1:38:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's gonna lie to you. It's gonna tell you what you want to hear.
1:38:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:38:56 Speaker 05 Now, that's P T Barnum. That's the guy at the top that influenced Anton LaVey. On the complete opposite end of the carnival spectrum, Anton LaVey was also greatly influenced by a 1946 novel, which explored the dark side of show business as it was in the mid 20th century. This novel, filled with carnies, femme fatales and grifters, was known as Nightmare Alley. Also made into a movie a year later.
1:39:20 Speaker 06 Don't watch the Bradley Cooper one. Watch the black and white one.
1:39:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, the 1947.
1:39:24 Speaker 06 Yes.
1:39:25 Speaker 04 I did like the Bradley Cooper.
1:39:26 Speaker 06 It's fine, but if you want, if you read, you gotta read the, watch the old one and read the book.
1:39:29 Speaker 05 I'll watch it. Well, the author of the novel was a man named William Lindsey Gresham, who'd volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1938. Very much an Ernest Hemingway type, looking for action. But after Gresham's fighting was done, he had a chance meeting while waiting to be sent back to America. He had drinks with a mysterious man, who told Gresham about a very real and very disturbing carnival attraction called The Geek, the most disturbing attraction of all. Usually, and again, this is very real. Usually, The Geek was an alcoholic who had been driven so low that he was willing to be put in a pit, day after day, or a cage sometimes, usually a pit, where he would bite the heads off chickens and snakes for the carnival-going public in exchange for booze.
1:40:13 Speaker 05 Usually while dressed as some sort of wild man. Geeks were worryingly common amongst carnivals and sideshows across America for decades.
1:40:23 Speaker 06 They were very popular.
1:40:24 Speaker 05 Extremely popular, yeah.
1:40:26 Speaker 04 I wonder how that like ended up translating into being a nerd?
1:40:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I think at one point like geek was more of a, uh, just a person who was unpleasant to look at. Like nerds were smart and geeks were just like unpleasant people.
1:40:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
1:40:42 Speaker 05 Uh, in the beginning at least, but they soon became conflated. It's funny, and I'm just talking out of my ass there, I might be totally wrong.
1:40:48 Speaker 06 It's interesting, because it comes from an old term for just a clown, a German clown called a geek, meaning a fool or simpleton. And then eventually it turned into the geek, which then became a term for an ugly person. Really geek means ugly, pin-headed, eyes too close, fucking mouth too big, arms too long.
1:41:08 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:41:08 Speaker 06 He's gross.
1:41:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:41:10 Speaker 04 That's cool.
1:41:12 Speaker 06 But he stole the story from a strong man that he had met, and he took the entire thing. Now, I, with about Nightmare Alley, it's not just about show business.
1:41:22 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:41:22 Speaker 06 It's about the literal world of magic.
1:41:25 Speaker 05 Yes.
1:41:26 Speaker 06 Of actual ritual magic.
1:41:27 Speaker 05 Oh, God, yes.
1:41:28 Speaker 06 Which is the thing about Nightmare Alley that makes it really interesting, because what Anton Lavey realized, much like happens at the end of Aleister Crowley's works, you realize that he says, "It's not from out there, it's from anywhere."
1:41:40 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm. Now, the story of the geek haunted Gresham after he returned from Spain. And this was in addition to everything he'd seen in the Spanish Civil War, which was pretty goddamn grisly all on its own. But when Gresham's inner demons couldn't be cured with psychoanalysis, he became obsessed with tarot cards, all while he worked as a writer churning out true crime stories for pulp magazines. Put all this together, and you got the makings of Gresham's novel about carny life, Nightmare Alley. Now, Nightmare Alley captures the occultism of carny life, specifically the fortune-telling trade. As such, it became an obsession for many occultists. The magic of the carnival is, of course, the bait and switch, where talented tricksters use their gifts to part the vulnerable public from their hard-earned cash.
1:42:23 Speaker 06 But they also give them something in exchange, Marcus.
1:42:25 Speaker 05 They give them hope.
1:42:26 Speaker 06 And lessons, and entertainment, and it filled their hours. That's what the Nightmare Alley is supposed to be about. Is that you get into this idea, but it's really, you have to make sure you don't start to believe.
1:42:39 Speaker 05 Exactly.
1:42:40 Speaker 06 That you are fully in charge.
1:42:42 Speaker 05 Really, like, the phrase for entertainment purposes only is very important to surviving the modern world.
1:42:47 Speaker 06 Very much so.
1:42:48 Speaker 04 And they also sold popcorn, I think.
1:42:51 Speaker 06 He did. They did.
1:42:53 Speaker 05 Well, just like the spiritualists of the 19th century, 20th-century carny fortune-tellers offered hope, but they also offered a gamble. A fortune teller might change your life for the better. They might make things worse, or they might leave you right back where you started. But that was only if you said yes to what the carny was offering. And that's another satanic thing. You gotta say yes.
1:43:16 Speaker 06 You choose.
1:43:16 Speaker 05 Yeah. Now, Nightmare Alley blew the lid off what carnies were really up to. Because before this novel, there was very little literature about cold reading. Well, I mean, cold reading is pretty common knowledge nowadays. It's when a fortune teller appraises a person by their body language and their clothes to make a quick judgment on how to gain their trust and pull them further into the fortune teller's game. A lot of the, what do you call it? Like, you know, cold reading is said to be very common amongst, like, the... What's that guy's name? John... Crossing... John Edwards. Crossing... Crossing Over.
1:43:49 Speaker 06 Well, cold reading is the hard... Of all occult.
1:43:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:43:51 Speaker 06 Cold reading is the heart of all occult ritual and enchantment is cold reading. And Nightmare Alley is all about cold reading.
1:44:01 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:44:01 Speaker 06 Which is the, no one wants to, was, that's like what H P B did naturally, that's what Aleister Crowley did naturally, that's what L R H did naturally.
1:44:08 Speaker 04 Yeah, and that's why there's so much of it in Long Island, because they're all fucking judgy pricks.
1:44:14 Speaker 06 What do you mean?
1:44:14 Speaker 04 There's a lot of cold reading in, uh, in, and, uh, the, what do you call it?
1:44:19 Speaker 06 Well, you're talking about the Long Island medium.
1:44:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, but there's, it's not just them.
1:44:22 Speaker 06 Well, yeah, that's just for.
1:44:23 Speaker 04 Am I crazy?
1:44:24 Speaker 06 Yes.
1:44:24 Speaker 04 It's everywhere.
1:44:25 Speaker 06 It's for, you know who it's for, Eddie, it's people like my mother.
1:44:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, my mother's, yeah.
1:44:29 Speaker 06 Former Catholic women that have become witches.
1:44:32 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm. Well, in Nightmare Alley, the main character is a man named Stanton Carlyle, who learns cold reading and passes himself off as the Great Stanton. He naturally charms the rubes out of dollar after dollar. When Anton LaVey read Nightmare Alley, he found himself spiritually connected to this character, not least because Anton's given middle name was Stanton. Furthermore, in the novel, Stanton Carlyle eventually becomes a religious figure, Reverend Stanton, pastor of the Church of the Heavenly Message.
1:45:02 Speaker 06 But also, what's important about Nightmare Alley is it begins with the geek, because Stanton looks at the geek and he feels pity, revulsion at the geek. And he watches, and he's an alcoholic himself, but then he meets this woman and they, they go up and he, he becomes this reverend and all this kind of stuff. And guess where it ends? He's right back in the pit.
1:45:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:45:20 Speaker 06 He's the geek.
1:45:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, I saw the movie, it was nominated for an Oscar.
1:45:23 Speaker 06 Yep, but the reason why, but that's the key here, is that what happened is that the wizard crossed the Rubicon, died in the Chapel of Mysteries, and then was left because he wasn't prepared. He wasn't prepared to cross the Chapel Mysterious.
1:45:40 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm. Well, Anton LaVey thought Nightmare Alley was fucking awesome.
1:45:44 Speaker 06 He did.
1:45:45 Speaker 05 He did not see it as a, a warning in any way whatsoever.
1:45:48 Speaker 06 The warning's the very end.
1:45:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. Well, Anton LaVey, after reading Nightmare Alley, he quit high school, he joined the circus as a roustabout and a cage boy, supposedly, and began working with gigantic deadly cats, supposedly. And it's with LaVey's time in the circus, his supposed career as a crime scene photographer in San Francisco, his distinction as America's first Ghostbuster, and the development of the Church of Satan itself, that we'll return next week for part two of our series on Anton LaVey.
1:46:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, fuckers! Hell, Satan! Six, six, six. Yeah, yeah. Fucking, man, I'm gonna listen to the, oh, we gotta put fucking, um, butthole surfers on. Yeah.
1:46:31 Speaker 06 Really?
1:46:32 Speaker 04 Satan, Satan, Satan!
1:46:39 Speaker 06 Honestly, great work, Marcus.
1:46:40 Speaker 05 Thank you.
1:46:41 Speaker 06 I think that we-
1:46:41 Speaker 05 You as well.
1:46:42 Speaker 06 I think that-
1:46:43 Speaker 05 You comported yourself nicely.
1:46:47 Speaker 06 Didn't I?
1:46:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:46:49 Speaker 06 I feel really good about me.
1:46:50 Speaker 04 Yeah, you've been excited for this for all of time.
1:46:53 Speaker 06 I was nervous.
1:46:54 Speaker 04 Yeah?
1:46:55 Speaker 06 Yeah, of course.
1:46:55 Speaker 04 Really?
1:46:56 Speaker 06 Because there's a lot, because we're about to, Wade, you'll see, we're now, we're putting ourselves out there, as you said before, you're gonna call yourself a Satanist, you expect to get punched in the face.
1:47:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:47:05 Speaker 06 All right, and that's a part of what we're gonna do, we're here celebrating Satanism for a couple more weeks.
1:47:10 Speaker 05 No.
1:47:10 Speaker 06 We're gonna eat this cake, lady in the tramp style that Rob has just brought back. Anally, um, what plugs do we have?
1:47:19 Speaker 05 Uh, go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left if you want ad-free episodes, uh, and if you wanna watch the stream, last stream on the left, every Tuesday at, uh, 5:00 PM PST, we moved it a little bit earlier, uh, and if you wanna see video episodes of the show, you can watch it if you got a Netflix subscription. We're all on Netflix right now.
1:47:41 Speaker 04 We're all on Netflix. Also, the stream ends up on YouTube every Thursday at 6:00 PM, and then directly after that is HGX2.
1:47:50 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:47:51 Speaker 04 Yes, that's right, we're in the playoffs, baby!
1:47:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:47:53 Speaker 06 And I'm playing a win.
1:47:55 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:47:56 Speaker 06 I'm playing a fucking win.
1:47:58 Speaker 04 Other YouTube channels we got is Someplace Underneath, LPN Romancy, Who's the Bee, The Foreign Report, No Dogs in Space, LPN TV, and The Brighter Side LPN. Go check those out. Subscribe to that shit and we're keep putting stuff there. And we are hitting the road. We only got four shows left of JK Ultra. Um, the last, for next one's gonna be tonight in Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Music Hall of Oakland.
1:48:23 Speaker 06 We're here having fun in Iron City. Join ourselves. We're gonna, we're gonna go down the Stillers. We're gonna go, you know how, you know, we'll see you out there. Right? Come on.
1:48:33 Speaker 04 Saturday, June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the GLC Live at 20 Monroe. Friday, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kane's Ballroom. And Saturday, July 18th, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Tower Theater. Go check those shows out. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And of course, Side Stories is gonna be in London, Ontario on June 28th.
1:48:53 Speaker 06 To Rio.
1:48:54 Speaker 04 That's gonna be a lot of fun. And then you wanna come see me do stand up, just go to eddytunes.com and you could find all the dates there.
1:49:00 Speaker 06 And we will be having more information about our Halloween Sound Effects album, Frank Janson's Revolting Repository, the Gasly Sounds, Volume 1 and 2. The first printing sold out very quickly, but there is going to be, dare I say, a second pressing.
1:49:14 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:49:15 Speaker 06 And so.
1:49:17 Speaker 05 Just wait. Don't, don't, don't buy the secondary market on Discogs just yet.
1:49:21 Speaker 06 Don't just do it.
1:49:22 Speaker 05 There's gonna be a news pressing soon.
1:49:23 Speaker 06 And we're gonna have announcements about that very soon.
1:49:25 Speaker 04 Hell, yeah.
1:49:26 Speaker 06 Thank you all for selling it out.
1:49:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, thank you.
1:49:28 Speaker 06 And that incredible band, Mass for Trash, I wonder where they came from?
1:49:31 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
1:49:32 Speaker 06 I wonder who those people, one of those incredible mysterious people.
1:49:35 Speaker 05 Incredible songwriters and screamers.
1:49:37 Speaker 06 I don't know who those people.
1:49:39 Speaker 05 I screamed. It was fun.
1:49:40 Speaker 06 Yeah, it was great. He was the lead singer.
1:49:42 Speaker 05 Well, Ash is the lead singer. I, I, I assisted.
1:49:45 Speaker 06 I just wrote it.
1:49:46 Speaker 05 Well, we all wrote it.
1:49:48 Speaker 06 I'm part of the think tank.
1:49:49 Speaker 04 Ash Gordon, of course.
1:49:50 Speaker 06 Yes, of course. And Isaac Hansen.
1:49:51 Speaker 05 Ash Gordon, yeah, and I, and I knew when Rob, uh, did was Googling who was the horniest queen, definitely brought up a Drag Race story.
1:50:01 Speaker 06 Of course, they always do. They always do. You know, and they're, a lot of them are very rarely horny because of how much their penis is hurt.
1:50:07 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:50:08 Speaker 06 I don't know.
1:50:09 Speaker 05 I don't, I really don't remember them. It's season eight.
1:50:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's a long, that was a different person ago.
1:50:13 Speaker 05 I'm rewatching it, you know, right now, or, you know, we just started season six.
1:50:16 Speaker 06 Holy shit.
1:50:17 Speaker 05 Well, funny, season five.
1:50:18 Speaker 06 Who's the best season ever?
1:50:19 Speaker 05 Best season ever. Fantastic.
1:50:21 Speaker 06 But we all know this. Well, hell Satan, everyone. Patreon, pat.com.
1:50:24 Speaker 05 Noggin.
1:50:25 Speaker 06 Give me stuff.
1:50:26 Speaker 04 Hell Satan again.
1:50:27 Speaker 06 Hell Satan verse 666. You know what? In the name of Satan, give me your money, give me your fucking families. I don't care, just give it, just give it to me, I'm gonna take it, I'm gonna do with what I need to do with it, okay?
1:50:38 Speaker 05 I wanna, I wanna eat a dish of chocolatey.
1:50:40 Speaker 04 Alright, do it. Hey, daddy, it's amazing, it's amazing what you can do when you have a big piece of brown. That's what I like, is a big piece of brown.
1:50:54 Speaker 05 That's delicious.
1:50:55 Speaker 06 Yeah?
1:50:56 Speaker 05 That's really good.
1:50:57 Speaker 06 Um, if the name's on the thing there.
1:50:58 Speaker 05 Tusamazures?
1:51:00 Speaker 04 Thank you, thank you, thank you.
1:51:02 Speaker 05 That's actually incredible.
1:51:03 Speaker 06 It's really good.
1:51:04 Speaker 04 It's okay. It's like Satan made it himself.
1:51:08 Speaker 05 Oh no.
1:51:09 Speaker 06 Oh, it's filled with shit.
1:51:11 Speaker 05 I was gonna go to heaven and now I'm not.
1:51:15 Speaker 06 No, you're going to fucking hell, dude.
1:51:16 Speaker 04 No one needs to see this.
1:51:17 Speaker 06 Hmm.
1:51:18 Speaker 04 Bye, bye fuckers. Leave us alone. Leave us the fuck alone.
Previous Side Stories: Cannibal Cats & Dubious Dogs Next Side Stories: Tootsie Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated