Episode 666: Anton LaVey Part I - Hail Satan

Summary

Last Podcast On The Left

Episode 666: Anton LaVey Part I - Hail Satan

Date: May 29, 2026
Host: The Last Podcast Network (Marcus Parks, Henry Zabrowski, Ed Larson)

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Overview

In celebration of their landmark 666th episode, the hosts kick off a three-part deep dive into the life, legacy, and larger cultural role of Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. Drawing on key biographies and a raucous, irreverent approach, Marcus, Henry, and Ed explore both the myth and reality behind one of the 20th century’s most infamous occultists. This episode focuses on the origins of Satanic symbolism, the intellectual and cultural context of Satanism, LaVey’s formative years, and the carnivalesque spirit at the movement’s heart.

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Main Themes

• The origins and evolution of Satan as a symbol in Western culture
• The distinction between actual Satanism and its misrepresentations
• Anton LaVey’s upbringing, motivations, and early influences
• The blending of showmanship, carny culture, and occult ideas
• The legacy and controversy of the Church of Satan and modern Satanism

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Celebrating Episode 666: Tone & Intent (02:24—04:43)

• The hosts set a playful, irreverent tone, joking about "the most evil domed-shaped molten lava cake" and the significance of 666 ("the number of the beast").
• The team makes clear their focus: "To not get too bogged down in philosophy during this three-part series," highlighting the cultural impact over the metaphysical claims (05:11).
• Henry: "You can go to a last podcast live show and yell, 'Hail Satan!' just because it’s fun. It’s important, but it’s not serious." (08:25)

Why Cover Anton LaVey? (08:51—11:30)

• Marcus: "What is the point of Anton LaVey? Even Aleister Crowley…was way more of a serious student. Anton picked up the Golden Path and said, 'This shit’s dumb. I know a way to do this that's better.'" (08:58)
• Henry frames LaVey as a pivotal, flawed but fascinating cultural figure: "He wanted to be the weirdest guy in San Francisco. And it just got bigger and bigger." (10:51)

The Evolution of Satan in Culture (12:51—17:16)

• A history of the Devil's image: "The red devil with horns and a pitchfork…it’s a relatively recent invention," rooted in 18th-century street puppet shows and Faust legend (13:43).
• Marcus: "Satan was not even that big a deal to Christianity in the very beginning...he kind of got retconned into the villain." (15:30)

The Function and Use of Satan in Western Religion (17:39—22:28)

• Henry: "In early Christianity, Satan was often portrayed as a bumbling buffoon...a trickster at best." (17:39)
• The church's shift: "If Christianity had a villain...the church could attribute man's actions to Satan...made Christianity a more active religion because Satan gave people something to do." (21:56)
• Quote: "It seriously took them a thousand years to come up with this idea." — Marcus (20:41)

The Birth of Satanism & LaVeyan Philosophy (22:33—33:03)

• LaVeyan Satanism isn't based tightly on the Biblical Satan, but on cultural and literary reinterpretations, especially John Milton's Paradise Lost (23:53).
• Henry: "Satan is not real. He's not some guy. Which is something I cannot fucking stress enough." (30:27)
• Marcus: "It is the spirit of human potential...what Satan stands for is humanity and our freedom." (30:37)
• The importance of not taking Satanism too seriously, and understanding it as "an introductory philosophy," meant to be outgrown and adapted (73:47).

The Paradox of Satanic Identity and Christian Backlash (33:30—36:45)

• LaVey opened the door for both non-theistic and theistic Satanist interpretations—the latter misunderstood and infamously misused by figures like Richard Ramirez.
• Christians, not Satanists, have a long record of mass violence: "Far more people have stained humanity with blood spilled in Jesus’ name than Satan’s." — Henry (34:22)
• Marcus: "Satan never killed everyone on earth...not once." (36:45)

Motivations, Failings, and the Satiric Carnival (39:44—44:49)

• LaVey is complicated: "Was Anton Lavey a bad husband, partner, and father? Yes, yes, and yes...But he also pushed culture into exploring its darkest corners by shining lights into areas not normally seen." (40:32)
• The deliberate showmanship and myth-making at the core of LaVey’s persona.

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Anton LaVey: Early Life & Influences

Family & Childhood (44:03—50:06)

• Born Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago, April 11, 1930.
• Real tail at birth (a caudal appendage): an odd true detail LaVey mythologized.
• Marcus: “No one is following Howard Levy into a black mass.” (45:49)
• Grew up largely in San Francisco; parents were "completely devoid of religion" (49:22).

Outcast Identity & Early Interests (50:21—53:36)

• Henry: "He was a bookish child who hated sports...took pride...in being an outcast." (50:21)
• Bonded briefly with Boy Scouts; found community there, echoing the Satanist theme of self-reliance and independence (50:40).

Formation of Personal Mythology: Heroes and Antiheroes (54:31—61:13)

• Fascinated by figures like Al Capone, Rasputin, Nietzsche, Jack London, wildman arms dealer Basil Zaharoff ("Z.Z.").
• Zaharoff’s amorality and freedom appealed to LaVey’s developing philosophy: "When he [LaVey] sees somebody pluck an idea like that out of the air…what that is a societal loophole." — Marcus (59:22)
• Exposure to carnivals, World's Fairs, and showmen like Sally Rand—core elements in LaVey's worldview and performance style.

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The Carny, Sideshow, and Showbiz Satanism

Fairs, Nudity, and Hypocrisy (61:18—72:26)

• Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch: a world’s fair exhibit combining nudity, activism, and spectacle profoundly shaped LaVey’s concept of transgression (62:11).
• His "first satanic awakening": bearing witness to the hypocrisy of his Sunday school teacher at the topless show (72:01).
  • "He saw the hypocrisy of Christianity, which was his first so-called satanic epiphany." — Henry (71:53)

The Spirit of the Sideshow: PT Barnum, Nightmare Alley (86:04—106:44)

• PT Barnum as a "de facto Satanist": embracing personal freedom, trickery, and spectacle (94:41).
• Marcus: "[Barnum] is providing only what people are asking for.” (94:44)
• The American hunger for spectacle and deception ("the egress" trick): “We do like being tricked.” (94:41)
• Henry: “It's showmanship again. It's big showmanship.” (95:41)
• Influence of the carny novel and film Nightmare Alley: magic, ritual, confidence tricks, and the danger of believing your own act.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "You ask five Satanists what they think Satanism is—you’ll get five different answers. And if you think your way is the only way…you’ve missed the point." — Henry (08:24)
• "There's no reason to let facts get in the way of a good story." — Marcus (12:42)
• "For me, Satanism is like the carnival from whence Anton LaVey came…a little unsettling, a little scary, but also goofy, an element of play." — Henry (07:13)
• "Never cross into another man's territory." — Marcus (33:26, on Satanic moral code)
• "If Christianity had a villain…then the church could attribute man’s actions to Satan himself." — Henry (19:27)
• [On PT Barnum & American gullibility:] "You get, you idiot. And he turned things around a little bit. Even though Americans might like to be humbugged, they really don't like it as much when people brag about it..." — Henry (94:14, 95:54)
• Henry: "[LaVey’s] main goal was he wanted to be the weirdest guy in San Francisco." (10:51)
• [On Sally Rand:] “The first time you see a woman that changes the thing inside your brain. That’s how I view Sally Rand. And that became…this ideal for him, of the inherent power she just has.” — Marcus (67:18)

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Important Timestamps

• 05:11: Stating the episode will focus more on culture than esoteric philosophy
• 13:43: The red devil iconography’s origins in art and advertising
• 30:37: The concept of Satan as human potential, not a literal being
• 34:22: Christians spilling more blood in the name of Jesus than Satanists ever did
• 44:03: LaVey’s birth and family background
• 62:11: Sally Rand, burlesque, and formative “satanic” awakenings
• 86:04: P.T. Barnum’s “American Museum” and American love of spectacle
• 99:19: Nightmare Alley, carny magic, and the dangers of "believing your own act"
• 106:44: Transition to part two: LaVey’s circus years, ghost-busting, and the birth of the Church

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Episode Highlights & Running Jokes

• Ed’s asides about being an atheist and his own gnarly Boy Scout stories
• Running humor about bodily fluids, especially LaVey’s well-known fetishes: "He like it a pee pee, man." (47:27)
• Recurring deadpan about the hypocrisy and abstract nature of religious history—“It’s almost like none of it’s real.” (22:01)
• Ongoing banter about whose turn it is to eat cake or do “satanic” acts in the studio
• The hosts’ delight in the absurdity of historical figures: “He was truly a merchant of death!” (57:01, re: Z.Z.)

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Closing Thoughts

This first episode of the Anton LaVey series establishes why Satanism—and especially its showman-pope—is so much more than tabloid panic or edge-lord philosophy. Through LaVey’s life, the hosts illuminate how Satan became more symbol than deity, Carnival barker than king of Hell, and why irreverence and outsider status still matter in a culture obsessed with seriousness and conformity.

Stay tuned for Part II, where the rollercoaster continues with LaVey's circus adventures, supposed stint as a ghostbuster, and the formation of the Church of Satan itself.

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Listen if you enjoy: irreverent deep-dives into American counterculture, the messy blend of myth and history, and the spirit of the eternal funhouse. Hail Satan!

Transcript

[Marcus Parks]

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[Henry Zabrowski]

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[Marcus Parks]

but when the sauce is this good,

[Henry Zabrowski]

the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla.

[Marcus Parks]

Not a rolled quesadilla anymore.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Now it's a sauce shovel.

[Marcus Parks]

Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa. Get it with any item on the Cantina chicken menu while it's here.

[Henry Zabrowski]

The participating U.S. taco Bell locations for

[Marcus Parks]

a limited time only while supplies last contact store for availability.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There's no place to escape to. This is the last on the left. That's when the cannibalism started.

[Ed Larson]

What was that?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes,

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. It is the most evil domed shaped molten lava cake in the world.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Only ah, remember, only the people watching on Netflix can see it. We have a cake here in front

[Ed Larson]

of a cake with a horn that keeps falling off.

[Marcus Parks]

I too elated to care. Not true audio slaves.

[Ed Larson]

And it's celebrating are the episode 666.

[Henry Zabrowski]

666.

[Marcus Parks]

666. The number of the beast and it's.

[Ed Larson]

Is that. Is that what that means? Yes. Oh, okay. See, I never learned 666. We never talked about the.

[Marcus Parks]

You never got to that level of elementary school.

[Ed Larson]

No, no, no.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Very, very difficult for you.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, blow the candles out. I get one satanic wish.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Okay.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, Henry, you should do it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, you should do it. Oh, you don't get terrible radio. God damn. God, this couldn't be. They were not trick candles, everybody. They were not trick candles. And it took Henry a full 15 seconds to do it, which is an eternity on radio.

[Marcus Parks]

I had to reach across my laptop. It's episode 666. I'm excited. What the hell am I supposed to do here? We can't follow every rule in the GD radio book.

[Henry Zabrowski]

My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with resident Satanist Henry Zabrowski.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, I carry the burden. I carry the burden of being the most sovereign of us all.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Just immediately want to start making fun of you.

[Marcus Parks]

I know what it's like to be to walk around being wiser and more moral than everyone else. That's really the key.

[Ed Larson]

He has a pitchfork made out of forks.

[Marcus Parks]

It's just three forks.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And we have the man with no affiliation whatsoever, Ed Larson.

[Ed Larson]

I'm an atheist and proud.

[Marcus Parks]

Good work. I am here as the devil's lawyer. Yeah. That is my. Literally his advocate.

[Ed Larson]

That's nice.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, that is my goal.

[Ed Larson]

Advocate.

[Marcus Parks]

That is. Honestly. That's why Anton lavey started this whole fucking thing. Eddie.

[Ed Larson]

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 were boobs in it.

[Marcus Parks]

That sick fuck has got you jumping from one foot to the next. Look, but don't touch. Touch but don't taste. Taste but don't swallow. And that's sick. Is laughing his ass.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Actually, for Henry's birthday this year, I got him a bumper sticker that said, she's got a huge.

[Marcus Parks]

She's got a huge ass and you got your head all the way up in it. Yeah. Honestly, it's like. And that was an improv line.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It was.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And everyone on set reportedly had to keep themselves from laughing.

[Marcus Parks]

Of course. It's incredible. He's an amazing actor. Except when he does a British accent.

[Ed Larson]

You ever see Paterno?

[Marcus Parks]

Jerry. Jerry. You fuck those kids. Jerry. Who are. What's this chair doing in here? Whoa. You got it. You can't tell me. You mean to tell me you had that kid where? Inside of what?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Jerry, you can't go around calling yourself the tickle monster. 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 Sandor. LA.

[Marcus Parks]

And I already got my defensiveness out in our production call. Nice. It was about an hour, but we did it. We did it. Good. Because this is obviously very close.

[Ed Larson]

So you like him.

[Marcus Parks]

Like is. There's no like here.

[Ed Larson]

Okay.

[Marcus Parks]

It's not about like.

[Ed Larson]

It's about respect.

[Marcus Parks]

No, he gave me the permission to not like or respect him. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, he freed me like Charles Bukowski did. Honestly. Yes, for some people.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, I'm going to 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 as see. Well, today, any of you can go To a last podcast live show and yell, hail Satan. Hail sweet Satan. You can yell that in unison with 2000 other weirdos of like minds just because it's fun. You don't have to be a Satanist or anything like that. You just want to 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Wow.

[Ed Larson]

So there was already. Slavery was already done.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. And they're still doing witch like one. Let's get one last witch trial in there.

[Marcus Parks]

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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That trial bewolf. For almost the entirety of the first two millennia of western Christian society, nobody in their right mind openly said that 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. And serve a purpose in the culture at large. 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Almost. Almost all of it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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. 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. And if you think your way is the only way, that again, for the. To the best of my understanding, you've missed the point, honestly.

[Marcus Parks]

Thank you, Marcus. Because that's the big issue here that we're going to be covering in this whole series is what is the point of Anton lavey?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Sure.

[Marcus Parks]

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, mountain climber, you. 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 going to do this topic and we're going to get angry emails no matter what, because it's. It's him. It's like it's on episode and it's also. It's him. And other Satanists argue. And that's the kind of 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Exactly.

[Ed Larson]

I always saw Satanism as like a form of atheism.

[Marcus Parks]

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 reread.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah,

[Henry Zabrowski]

it's a really bold assumption you just made there with Edward.

[Marcus Parks]

If you really read it. Well, he specifically says this is a separate from God in all this. This is specifically, as we'll get all into it, the Church of Satan, Levayan Satanism is all about making fun of the bastards. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

It's a, it's a lifestyle more Than a religion?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. A philosophy?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

It's an lifestyle.

[Ed Larson]

Now, you called him success. Was he successful?

[Marcus Parks]

Like, did. Did he have money?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, yeah, no, he. He had. He lived a pretty good life throughout. And when I say successful, I mean more notorious. You know, successful as 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.

[Ed Larson]

Okay.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Because that was his. His. Really? Because we're going to 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 weird. Exactly. It's like Big Lebowski in the running for weirdest guy in the world, you know? And it just kind of grew from there, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and it grew to the point where, like, Anton Levy, well, he was a little bit lazy. Like, to the point was, like, I don't want to deal with this anymore.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it's never supposed to be all that fucking serious. And then it got serious, and then it got unserious and got serious again and got unserious. So now we're back in a serious point, which is why recovery the fucking first place.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 70s? 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 and how that disease

[Marcus Parks]

of thought will also go on to fuck up the whole thing to begin with.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 going to be Pedro Pascal.

[Marcus Parks]

He should be.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

There's no reason to let facts get in the way of a good story. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Is that his quote.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, no, that's just. That's just truth.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Before we get into the full life story of Anton lavey, I think it would be helpful. And also, you know, it's episode 666. Yeah, let's do a short history of Satan. It's just so everyone has a full concept. Oh, Louie. Yeah. Old scratch. I love old soul 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, just a guy going, I'm sick of painting goats.

[Henry Zabrowski]

While most images of the devil throughout the second millennium often came from painters working on the behest of the church, 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 kids like, oh, no, it's the devil. 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.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And the red devil, therefore, took his place as simply the latest iteration of Satan. Going back through a history, it was about a thousand years old, but it seems like Satan is the goat. This is just my personal opinion. Yeah, Seems like Satan is the goat is made a big comeback again because of shifting mediums.

[Ed Larson]

The witch.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

That was fucking. It does look stupid, though.

[Ed Larson]

But it's still scary somehow.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it's. It looks stupid and scary, but goat Satan looks fucking awesome on screen.

[Marcus Parks]

Has anybody seen Hexen?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Seen Hexen? You know, like that devil. Yeah, that's the devil.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

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 for about

[Henry Zabrowski]

the first thousand years.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Like, he kind of got retconned into the villain.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Because he hated heaven.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, there's many ways he's. Again, he's a great foil to God.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And we're. And actually that saying the whole. About him hating heaven and all that. We'll get into that here in a second.

[Ed Larson]

Okay.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There's a. There's a whole set, like, it's. That's. I find. Personally, I find the history of. Of Satan as a figure endlessly fascinating

[Marcus Parks]

because, you know how I view it? Like, when you say 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, not always, really. Since the late 18th, early 19th century. We'll get to that here in a bit.

[Ed Larson]

I always looked at Satan as a figure that existed to make sure that Christians were scared into morality.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, we'll also get into that because this whole thing is an evolution. It took. Seriously, it took thousands of years for it to get to this point.

[Marcus Parks]

To me.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And I'm the very end of the process.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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, sells apples.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, love that. Love that.

[Henry Zabrowski]

One of my favorite late medieval evil 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 St. Augustine. He's got a book of vices. And he's showing it to St. Augustine going, like, you like that one? Yeah, you like that one? You want that one?

[Ed Larson]

I blow you with my ass.

[Marcus Parks]

Hey, I kiss my mother with that ass.

[Henry Zabrowski]

St. Augustine is holding up his hand like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I will not give in to your vices. Devil, as cool as you are in 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. At best.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, you also. You got to get tricked into a contract. Like, that's the thing too. Mark Twain would use him as a kind of care, a funny character.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But even way before Twain, way before

[Marcus Parks]

Twain, because then you could probably connect them to the same other mischievous characters of all those kind of folklore, like Anansi 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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. Like, there's a lot of different characters came together to kind of. And Loki, of course, is a good one too.

[Marcus Parks]

This made me think of 100 days of 120 days of Sodom. Let's read it together.

[Ed Larson]

When did he learn the fiddle?

[Henry Zabrowski]

That was actually 73, I believe.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, but you honestly. It was after his period playing the clarinet, as we all know, the most evil woodwind.

[Ed Larson]

You know, the difference between a fiddle and a violin. Fiddles played by a racist.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, I've heard that. I have heard that. I thought it was just because I was too fat to play the violin.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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, than the church could attribute. Attribute man's actions to Satan himself.

[Marcus Parks]

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've never.

[Ed Larson]

The golem. Was that what I was always.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the golem 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. Out of dirt.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I. I know, like in Islam, like their devil is like shaytan.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Which is more of a genie, like a jinn.

[Ed Larson]

A white man.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. White devil.

[Marcus Parks]

White. White devil. Let me guess. Well, if.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 thousand. A thousand years to come up with this idea.

[Marcus Parks]

And that evil who came up with that idea got the bonus of the year. The Pope was like, oh, fucking shit, Francisco.

[Ed Larson]

Here's a bunch of boys.

[Marcus Parks]

Thank you.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 into confessing through torture or the threat of execution. And often they'd be 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, you can burn, you get hanged, you get squished.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Even in Salem, there were some people who confessed that lived, some people who confessed that still died.

[Ed Larson]

Interesting.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it's really up to the whims of whoever. It's almost like none of it's real.

[Marcus Parks]

It's almost like it's all made up. It's almost like they just did it to kill people they didn't like.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. And in Salem, you know, a lot of times it was. And it also became very useful for people 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, so I'm consorting with the devil at night.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, so I'm consorting with the devil. And then that guy's dead. You buy the plot of land from the town. All good.

[Ed Larson]

See, I would just be like, you saw the devil

[Henry Zabrowski]

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. Something interesting about all this is that Levayan 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.

[Marcus Parks]

This is when, like, they lied to us about, like, Drew Barrymore and 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 shot in the head in the first scene and you're like, what the.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, they barely even used him in the sequel to the Bible.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, very little. Yeah, it was just. Actually, I think it was one scene, you know, when Jesus is out in the desert, the 40 days and 40 nights and even.

[Marcus Parks]

That was a hangout. That was like a hangout. That was a loose, long discussion, we. Where they were just chilling out.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, yeah. Then he sucked his thorny

[Marcus Parks]

one of the lost track.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And even in the Old Testament, it's just, yeah, him, you know, tempting Eve with the apple and then the bet that, like, him and God gambling over

[Marcus Parks]

job, you know, and also God was scary enough.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 fan fiction 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. You don't, you know, exact same fucking thing.

[Marcus Parks]

You don't think that 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

So this is the Milton that Donald Sutherland's talking about in Animal House.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, I'm with you guys.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You got it Coming along, man.

[Marcus Parks]

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[Henry Zabrowski]

from your grave. 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.

[Marcus Parks]

You dude. He's like John Taffer from Bar Rescue.

[Ed Larson]

You can't rain in hell cuz then they'll put out all the fires. Yeah,

[Marcus Parks]

well that.

[Henry Zabrowski]

All that sort of comes into the, you know, the movie the Devil's Reign, which is personally my. One of my favorite, like satanic exploitation movies.

[Ed Larson]

Movies.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Anton lavey was actually a. I believe he was only he was a consultant.

[Marcus Parks]

It's the only movie he's ever consulted on for Satanism.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it's incredible. Ernest Borgnine plays a satanic cult leader. He's awesome.

[Marcus Parks]

And Ernest disavowed the movie. Yeah. 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 Levey because just the idea of Ernest Borgnine, Anton Levade hanging out. I want to smoke cigars and I want to hang out with everyone. Drink.

[Ed Larson]

Perfect with them all night.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

It's all fiction.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's all fiction.

[Marcus Parks]

Like the Bible.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. The circles of Hell, that's from the Divine Comedy that was written in the 14th century.

[Ed Larson]

It's really helpful actually, because I really didn't want to read the B

[Henry Zabrowski]

to

[Marcus Parks]

know it starts wet, ends hot.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, this stuff isn't from the Bible. I mean, all this stuff about, you know, reigning 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. 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 liberty, which is very much in line with modern Satanism. This is what you'd call non theistic Satanism 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 Levaine Satanism, Satan is not real. He's not some guy which is something that I cannot fucking stress enough.

[Marcus Parks]

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, 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 pets here, right?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And it's like. And yeah, life's better as a pet and it really sucks being out there in the world. But you have freedom. You have the freedom of choice. You have the freedom to do whatever you want to do.

[Marcus Parks]

You get to. Yeah, like literally you get to. You get to eat, you get to play music. You get to do all of the things you want to do. You don't.

[Ed Larson]

Then you also gotta go to work.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. There's a lot of bad 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.

[Ed Larson]

Can I ask a dumb existential question that obviously doesn't have a real answer? Is hell on earth?

[Marcus Parks]

Heaven's a place on earth. You know what that's worth? Like, like.

[Ed Larson]

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?

[Marcus Parks]

Oh my God, I don't know. We're fully. And I even. I don't know. And I've read all the side stuff. I've read all the books. I've read the Peter Gilmore.

[Ed Larson]

Honestly, they hated me.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Wasn't that a whole. Wasn't that the Plot of an episode of Pretty Face. Doesn't an alien go to hell?

[Marcus Parks]

It 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah, because he. He dies on Earth and he doesn't know what it is. Just anyone who dies on Earth, it does it. Yeah, it's great.

[Marcus Parks]

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 would kind of like. They pinpointed it for a while, saying hell's over there and. But no, it does not. Technically, according to all of this, you would leave Plan Earth.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Okay.

[Marcus Parks]

And you'd go to another realm.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

Never cross into another man's territory.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 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.

[Ed Larson]

Whoa, Marcus.

[Marcus Parks]

I just called how they won.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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. Years, far more people have stained humanity with blood spilled in Jesus 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 example, we can go to our latest war in Iran. Earlier this year, over 200American 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 is a real enemy. Enemy is primed to make a big 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 who pled their innocence and faith right up till the moment the rope wrapped around their necks by their good Christian neighbors ended their life. It has happened before and it can happen again. Again.

[Marcus Parks]

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 going to go into right now order nine angles or 764 or these other things, things that's still, that's kind of modern. But the real 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 what I kind of think. The, the scales are not even here.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, Satan never killed everyone on earth.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Never.

[Marcus Parks]

Not once. Not once.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Again, we are in the middle of history right now. Like that's why we're talking about this is because you know, Satan has always been a very powerful figure. At least has been for the last thousand years. Satan has been an extraordinarily powerful fig and we're about to see how powerful that figure really is again.

[Ed Larson]

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?

[Marcus Parks]

No, we triggered, we trigger Armageddon and God kills everybody except for the super religious and he turns them into ghosts. So we should, in that theory, kill God. Yeah, we have to kill God. We need to get the lance of launchers, we need to dig up Lilith. I, I know how to do it. I'm watching Evangelion again. I know how to do it. It's in the rebuild.

[Ed Larson]

All right, cool.

[Henry Zabrowski]

All right. Call my friends.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm gonna stab God in the heart.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Now. Part of what Anton Lev 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 dos as the Salem witch Trials. Of course, it had the exact opposite effect. Lavey recognized that the modern world required 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 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 read really 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 Levay meant when he said an evolution was needed.

[Marcus Parks]

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. 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 Little devil. And you wonder why I'm like this.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, the. Yeah, the bishop at my. My church that I was an altar boy for. He ended up banging a bunch of boys, and they. 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. A bunch of kids.

[Marcus Parks]

No A. It's not broke.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Now.

[Ed Larson]

Are you sure the M wasn't for Marcus?

[Henry Zabrowski]

It was both. He was very. It was. It was what you'd call a double entendre.

[Marcus Parks]

He was a pretty funny brother.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He was very funny. It was a very funny brother joke. It was both little Marcus and little Masturbator. Don't worry, he clarified.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah, sure. I can't wait to hear it again because I know we'll hear it the next time I see him.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 1945. That's part of what it sounds like. It's not true, but it is. Yes. 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.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, he started a religion.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But he also pushed culture into exploring its darkest corners by shining lights into areas not normally seen another way, words. He was a Lucifer, a Lightbringer, and for that, his story certainly deserves to be told.

[Marcus Parks]

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 this back to a context level in which we will all starve to death if we stop. Start from the beginning of thought. Yeah, we could talk about it. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I chose. I looked at it and I said, no, you're right, you don't need it.

[Ed Larson]

So Satanism is younger than Scientology.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Satanism is older than. Or younger. Yes. Because Scientology is the 50s. Satanism is 66.

[Marcus Parks]

You probably learned a lot from Scientology, to be frank. I know that he did go. He will. We'll get. We'll get on to a lot of different things. I don't know about him and Elrond.

[Ed Larson]

He got hubby dubby.

[Marcus Parks]

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.

[Ed Larson]

They would have been buddies.

[Marcus Parks]

No, honestly. Honestly, I don't think they would have.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They would. I think they. It would have been two opposing forces, like very. They would have hated each other.

[Marcus Parks]

I think they literally would have gotten to a physical fight. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Pretty good slap fight. 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 Tail by Doug Brod. Out of the two, go with Born with a Tail. It does a fantastic job of sifting through Anton lavey's many exaggerations and lies. And in fact, we'll probably. Probably talk to Doug Broad on a. In an interview here soon.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah. Also read Nightmare Alley.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 Sandor lavey.

[Marcus Parks]

I just want to say, Reggie Satanis, welcome to today's Black Mass. It's truly one of the most evil, diabolical things that one can do. Anton Levey is so funny.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

His accent is.

[Marcus Parks]

Hey, Reggie Satana say you want to listen to the calliope a little bit? Yeah, I know. It's just this called. This is called Clown's Lament. No one over here. This is called Clown's Lunch Order.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, I'm just sitting here and there's, you know, I got a lion, and I love my line, and all of my. All of my neighbors are saying, oh, the lion's too loud.

[Marcus Parks]

You know what I'm saying? There's a lion. Why are you fucking mad? Okay, let me just guess. Hey, hey, let me. Nice to meet you. Let me guess. 195 pounds, right? I'm good.

[Ed Larson]

That's amazing.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, I'm really good. I'm really fucking good.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

I would put it on a scale, right? Because then I'd put him. Because Aleister Crowley was sort of like Aleister Crowley, hpb, a little bit more on the serious side. He's way on the other showbiz side.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He's on the circus side very much. We're gonna get into that. Like, he is a fucking carney.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, I know that Mr. Lavey does not sound as good in a song.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it doesn't work.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, A bit of self mythology, it gives these guys, it gives their ideas a bit of a bit of a hook. Because 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. They Americans love the chosen one. And so Anton Lavey was born Howard Stanton Levy on April 11, 1930.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, you never called me Howie, never called me Howie. I damn you to hell. Like, but 19 curses on you.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He had a full head of black hair, strange amber eyes, and an actual tail, which sounds like we're starting with the 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 Koltan, would 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.

[Marcus Parks]

I love Transylvania.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Although we now know that she was from Ukraine. Yeah, she was not from Transylvania.

[Ed Larson]

You can't. If you're gonna write a bible, you can't put your grandma in it.

[Marcus Parks]

It's not really a Bible. That's the thing. We'll get all into it, Eddie. I'll explain it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 because no one is following Howard Levy into a black mass.

[Marcus Parks]

Honestly, the balls. I would have loved to have her. 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, that's kind of like. It's just boilerplate. Yeah, but Howard Levy, the Pope of evil, Howard Levy, such. It's like almost more powerful. Yeah. Hey, hello, everybody. It's enough egg salad for everyone, but no, one bowl of it is poison.

[Ed Larson]

I love that great comedic actor, Eugene Leve. Oh,

[Marcus Parks]

if his name was Eugene Levey, he would have been eaten too much pussy in order to be an actor. That's a problem.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, yeah. Jean lavey. Hi, Jean lavey. Sounds like a man who invents a pussy eating machine.

[Marcus Parks]

Here we go. It's Diesel. Same brain.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Since Anton lavey 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 lavey was a committed urophiliac, meaning his fetish was urination.

[Marcus Parks]

He like it a pee pee, man.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He love it a pee pee.

[Marcus Parks]

We are part of a urination. Hi, I'm Peepee Abdul.

[Ed Larson]

It's Janet.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 lavey claimed set him down the, quote, fetishistic sexual path towards water sports. Lavey further wrote that he believed that men born in different eras would have different fixations. Lavey's type, for example, came from the beauty standards of the 1940s. He wrote that if he had a

[Marcus Parks]

type, if I had a type, it was a fleshy, heavily made up moss with pale, translucent skin who pissed the panties.

[Henry Zabrowski]

When he wrote, he purposely put a period after translucent skin with pale, translucent skin who pissed her panties.

[Marcus Parks]

He would talk about it a lot. Like, if you look at him too,

[Ed Larson]

there are so many other romantic ways to write it. He's just couldn't.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He's like, I know.

[Marcus Parks]

I just like it too much. Translucent skin and you baby in a pants.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's not the only time either. He's like, and then When I was 11, I was collecting bottles and I saw a lady's bathroom and there was a hole in the wall, and I watched the women urinate.

[Marcus Parks]

He did.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He did now. Well, 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.

[Marcus Parks]

And we all know Chicago women piss the thickest. I know that for a fact.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's actually what Malort is.

[Marcus Parks]

It is natty light piss.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 flibber to gibbet.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah, flibbertigibit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

What do you mean? What are you saying? The coolest guy in the world, he

[Ed Larson]

had to stay away from places where he get beat up.

[Marcus Parks]

Piss that panty.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Unfortunately, his head was shaped like a football.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So if he got anywhere near a field, just start kicking him.

[Marcus Parks]

Charlie Brown. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Specifically the Cub Scouts. Loved the Cub Scouts. He earned his bear badge. Always had fantastic things to say about Scouts.

[Marcus Parks]

You know what I'll say about Satanists and Levan Satanists in particular. That is a. It is considered to be a. Like an. A positive attribute is being very handy. Yeah. Being very self sufficient.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Being independent.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. 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 lavey's life is like every scene 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 lavey wasn't a cult leader, but you see, like people who understand systems, especially humanity, those humanities, like just societal systems, those are the people who change things, you know, or those are the people they e. Change them or they used those systems to get laid. Like Keith Renee.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, he understood systems perfectly. Anton. The. They also understood systems and how society work, but he used it to figure out how to be independent and then to tell other people how to do the same.

[Ed Larson]

The CPP and panties.

[Marcus Parks]

He did, like the PP and the panties. And he did get to touch Jayne Mansfield's boobies.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He did.

[Marcus Parks]

That's a huge get.

[Ed Larson]

Really pretty massive.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, yeah, we're going to get into the whole. Jane. Yeah, he. He took credit. Not credit, but he. He felt that he accidentally kill.

[Marcus Parks]

Long story.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Long story. We'll get into it later.

[Ed Larson]

All right.

[Marcus Parks]

All right.

[Henry Zabrowski]

All right, now, since Anton lavey was comfortable being himself, he had no trouble making friends. His house was always full of kids whom lavey would organize into secret societies with mock military orders. And he would become enraged when other kids broke character or lost interest.

[Marcus Parks]

I don't want to, like, obviously say that I have a lot of similarities, but this is literally the I did. Yeah, this is all the. That we did. We only got together and made little clubs. Like, me and my boys, we'd get together, and, like, my couple girls, we 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.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. This is so much better than, you know, being similar to the Toy Box killer.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Except I wish I had a boat.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, basically, throughout his childhood, Anton the Way 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. Particularly on biographies, history, adventure novels, and crime. That's more that I would say. That's what I relate to more. It's just like, yeah, school, School. I'm gonna go do my own.

[Marcus Parks]

I was just better at it. Yeah, I was better at the stuff I read that wasn't math and science.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, I was real bad at that.

[Marcus Parks]

I was bad at those. Yeah, I actually did well tonight. 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. I'm not going to. This is not going to be part of my future.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I was so bad at it that I. I, like. I suspect my father may have bribed one of my teachers.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, y. I got to say, you are. Your mother certainly cares about your school, young man. I get to see your father, your teacher, you know, like, giving your teacher sexual favors.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Ed Larson]

I fucking. I did real bad at school, and I understand this completely.

[Marcus Parks]

And now you write term papers for half your living.

[Ed Larson]

I feel like I've learned more in the past two and a half years than I did in high school.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, I'm not a bad teacher. Well, by the end of it, lavey had made heroes from wildly disparate corners of human history, people that lavey would later, later call de facto Satanists. These people are extremely important to the development of Satanism as a religion. They included Al Capone, Rasputin, Frederick Nietzsche, Louisiana politician Huey Long, adventure novelist Jack London, and a fairly obscure character from the Ottoman empire named Basil Zaharoff, known to his friends as zzed Zacharias Basilius Zakharov was a Turkish arms dealer who first showed up in history as a pimp at a Turkish Bronz brothel in the 1860s.

[Marcus Parks]

Do you like her hairy or too hairy face or not? Hey, tricks on you. It is a bag of salt.

[Henry Zabrowski]

All right.

[Marcus Parks]

Do anything you like. But at the end, free apricot help your mind.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, at the same time as zzed 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.

[Marcus Parks]

It would be such a strange bad day for the fire to not be put out. Kind of crazy how the fireman, he brought it in a fire basket. Don't know how it happens. Yes. Name Zed. Yes. Yes. I'm fake at everything. I'm mad at everything.

[Henry Zabrowski]

By the 1880s, ZZ was an arm salesman trying to unload second rate multi barreled machine guns and steam powered submarines.

[Ed Larson]

It actually doesn't make sense.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Hey, they kind of worked. Yeah, yeah. No. The earliest submarine.

[Ed Larson]

A hole in the top.

[Henry Zabrowski]

The earliest submarines were used in the Civil War. The American Civil War.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. Oh yeah. The Monitor and the Merrimack, those are steam powered.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

There's a dude with coal like shovel shoveling in the bottom of the.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Most people on board would faint.

[Ed Larson]

Where did the steam go?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Pipe.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, so they still. It had like a snorkel.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not going that deep. And when I say submersible, I mean it just like goes right underneath.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. This isn't. They aren't going against like the U boats. No, I mean like this is very early submarine technology.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Not Red October. No, no. These early submersibles would get so hot the crew would faint. But ZZ still managed to submit sell six steam powered 19th century submarines to the Greeks, the Turks and the Russians. As an arms dealer, ZZ truly was an evil individual. Even if he didn't often hold the gun that did the killing. It said zed. Zed. And every idea has to have someone who did it first. There's always going to 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 country. Conflict, conflicts that he Himself would help provoke.

[Marcus Parks]

You know, there's a lot of people that say is, there is nothing innocent in war, But I tell you, there is the gun. It has no mother, it has no father. The gun goes to the home in which the gun needs to go. There is no gun flag. You know, you say. You say.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You see, he did indeed sell weapons for three decades to every side of every conflict in Europe, Asia and South America from, like, 1890 up until, like, 1920. Like, Zed. Zed was there and all of them. And that's a violent time in human history.

[Ed Larson]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Put it all together.

[Henry Zabrowski]

In World War I alone zone, Zed. Zed 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 1920. Now, to me, Zed. Zed is no different from the Duponts. He just has a lot more fun with it. So, Henry, what is it about Zed Zed that makes him a de facto Satanist? How does he influence the development of Satanism?

[Marcus Parks]

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 out, like the Internet's true, truly neutral.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

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, what 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. Just a. I've arrived because war has given me a purpose.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Sure.

[Marcus Parks]

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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There's a lot of, like, breaking the system.

[Marcus Parks]

And they don't Evangelize.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

It's about you choose it. You know, I mean, you go make it. You go choose it. So there's a little bit of that.

[Ed Larson]

Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And. And. And so. And 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 Zed. Zed brought.

[Marcus Parks]

I bet you he did. As a young man, I think he thought it was kind of cool and fun, probably.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But he also kind of. But he viewed the idea of someone who's like, I don't have a country. Yeah. I'm a billionaire. Between all the lines.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. He. He was fond of saying, like, hello, my name is ZZ and I have $16 million.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. All he wants to do is be Zed. Headset. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Now, out of all the influences that led to the creation of the 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 Whig sphere in Knoxville.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, like the. The big globe in Queens. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Or the two things from the Men in Black movie.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. Also in Queens.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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, 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. His first satanic awakening while he was at an exhibition called Sally Rand's Nude Ranch.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, baby.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's not the type of awakening you would think it. I mean, yeah, sure, probably some kind of awakening, but, you know.

[Marcus Parks]

But it shows to me how serious we're supposed to take Satanism. It's always, remember, these are the influences.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a very good point.

[Ed Larson]

A ranch in San Francisco on Treasure island, no less.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah. Come on, now.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 lavey's de facto satanists.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, you know, a lot of times you look in the past at a person, you're like, oh, you know, like, you know, standards were different. Sally Rand was hot.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Fully modern person.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, modern. Hot woman.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Sally Rand had gained fame in the 1920s and 30s for popularizing the fan dance, 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 fan dancing act a national craze, because, yeah, she could do the fan dance on. On film, but it's not as good unless you have the. You have the music to go along with it.

[Marcus Parks]

Butt was invented to that music. Think about that. Like, this type of dirty sex was invited. Like,

[Ed Larson]

I thought butt was invented in Greece.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it was

[Marcus Parks]

that.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But Sally Rand was most famous for appearing nude in public. To make a point. Six years before lavey 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 ball dinner.

[Ed Larson]

She's white

[Henry Zabrowski]

chocolate.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. No, no, no, God damn it. That's Mrs. Godiva.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he just.

[Ed Larson]

That's how he got into plenty of places.

[Marcus Parks]

How? We just walked into that con where we just said, we're talent.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah,

[Marcus Parks]

walk right in.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Sally Rand made it all the way to the hotel where the dinner was supposed to be held. She even tried her luck walking 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Wow.

[Ed Larson]

I hope she still got paid.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Ed Larson]

I never heard of her before, but I looked her up when you said she was hot, and I definitely recognize her face.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, sure, sure.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, we all see your face now. Now, how is she a de facto Satanist?

[Marcus Parks]

So number one, Anthony Anton lavey, despite what he would do to his wives and his daughter, worshiped women. Yeah. Loved women that weren't his wife and his daughter. And he saw truly, you know, Sally Rand is an example of what would be the satanic ideal of the woman's body. And I think largely Anton lavey even said this. If we read the Satanic Witch, you start to understand that Anton Levey projected himself in his own mind, outwards as a busty woman. Like, he viewed in his mind, like, you know, I got big tit energy. Totally.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. It was at a capon.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, sure, right. But he viewed himself as like, my powers as a man can only be harnessed if I imagine myself as a busty woman and use the same wiles as a busty woman, but as a man. And so it's actually great advice.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's really great advice.

[Marcus Parks]

It is. That's what the Satanic witch is all about. And so what 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. 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 better. We're like. We are just literally primates. There is no real. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Sometimes better, sometimes most of the time worse.

[Marcus Parks]

Most of the time worse. So I feel like when he saw that, it's this idea of like, he's like, at his mother.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, she's not.

[Marcus Parks]

Sally rant. Like, the first time you see. He's like, that's the first time he saw. When's the first time you saw a woman? Like, you saw that woman that changed the Thing inside your brain. That's how I view Sally ran and that episcop became like sort of this ideal for him. Of like, look at the inherent power she just has.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Just living makes a great point. Like, if you'd like the whole stupid, awful, like alpha male like, you do go for that. The masculine thing. All you're gonna attract are other awful men. Yeah. But with the. If you have like the big tit energy. Feminine, you attract everyone.

[Marcus Parks]

Yes, yes. It's about making. So essentially satanic witch is a whole long thing about sort of. Well, I'll. Don't do this to me. Sure.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, no, no, it's fine.

[Marcus Parks]

There. I'll get there. It's fine.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's just. It did. It's kind of fascinating.

[Ed Larson]

Do you think that when Sally Rand was on the horse, she had to change her name to Sally Ride

[Marcus Parks]

and then she blew up and then she exploded.

[Ed Larson]

That's the other one.

[Marcus Parks]

Sally. Sally R. She made it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

She made it.

[Ed Larson]

She died recently.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, well, then she didn't make it.

[Ed Larson]

Well, she. Suicide.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, I. I guess.

[Ed Larson]

It's so small. She did commit su stitching.

[Marcus Parks]

No. Okay.

[Ed Larson]

How am I supposed to know?

[Marcus Parks]

I don't know. I was like, what she see on the movie?

[Ed Larson]

Oh, yes. Gonna jump in the shower now. Oh, taking off my pants. There goes the underwear. Oh, my shirt's off now too.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Ed Larson]

Those are my breasts.

[Marcus Parks]

Hello. Hello? Who's that?

[Ed Larson]

Who's looking at me? Hey, hey, don't look at here. This is my bathroom. Hey, keep your eyes open. Oh, it's legal for you to just look from your house into my house? Oh, man, I gotta get some blinds. I'm gonna go to blinds.com. that's right, because I heard that blinds.com, they've actually been selling blinds for 30 years. You believe that? 30 years I've had no blinds. What's wrong with me? I'm so stupid. But now I'm getting blinds.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's it.

[Ed Larson]

I'm going to. To blind stock blinds dot com. I'm gonna get these. Yeah, the sideways ones. Or maybe I should do the ups and downs. You know what? I'm gonna ask a professional. Oh, I can go full DIY or bring in a licensed or vetted pro. That's amazing. I'm gonna finally have some privacy so I can play with my privates in private. Right now, blinds.com is giving our listeners an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more. Just use the code left at checkout.

[Marcus Parks]

Limited time offer.

[Ed Larson]

Rules and restrictions apply. See blinds.com for details.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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[Ed Larson]

I love his satanic epiphany came from some duke

[Marcus Parks]

that's the greatest set of penories I've seen since I left Michigan.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 disappear 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. Yes, 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, 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, the

[Marcus Parks]

way I'd even put it, which will. As we will cover this. Satanism is an introductory philosophy. It's the first thing that should get you going. It's inherently for. Even Anton Levay even kind of says that that's why the satanic Bible is so simple.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Is that. He wrote it for 15 year olds to read.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

You're supposed to. Supposed to expand.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Now, Sally Rand's nude ranch was not the only event at this fair that influenced Anton lavey.

[Marcus Parks]

Sorry, I didn't get that out. All right, now we can go.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

Live tonight. Premature babies on the main stage. They don't goo goo.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They don't.

[Marcus Parks]

They don't gaga, but you will seeing these live premature babies. Oh, my God. You could see that one grow an arm.

[Henry Zabrowski]

When I went yesterday, I saw four die.

[Marcus Parks]

Wow, what a wonderful preemie explosion.

[Ed Larson]

It sounds like a crazy thing, but they. These events that these exhibits existed because there weren't incubators in hospitals.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 guy like guys in iron lungs. When they first put people on 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Just him being like, take me home. No, I'm sorry, you're the show.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But 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.

[Marcus Parks]

I'll go, though. Don't do it.

[Ed Larson]

I hate.

[Marcus Parks]

I hate to have to get the lightning lane for.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It really is like. Imagine walking into a room at Disney and it's just a bunch of people in chairs getting chemotherapy treatments. Same.

[Ed Larson]

I mean, it would make sense, though, for Tomorrowland if it was an advancement. It's kind of like the adventures of Inner Square.

[Marcus Parks]

Also, just know you. You just called what hospitals are going to be, by the way, just so you know that.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

You've just. We have just put into the zeitgeist what's going to happen. And eventually people are going to be getting their chemo at Disneyland. Can you imagine Donald Duck giving you your chemo?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes, I can. And it's the only way it's going to happen, dude.

[Marcus Parks]

Character meet and greet. Chemo. Is that. How is that not a thing? Dude, write it down.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Write it down.

[Marcus Parks]

Spider Man.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Write it down. I'm writing down. I'm mailing it to myself.

[Marcus Parks]

Dr. Strange brings you chemo copyright.

[Ed Larson]

We should get 11 to do it since we're on Netflix, you know, and

[Marcus Parks]

it's great because she's got. She's. Let's continue.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I want to get one of the guys from Dark to do it. That's my favorite Netflix show.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Super weird.

[Marcus Parks]

Zachary. Can we get that lady?

[Henry Zabrowski]

And also, that's why I chose Tomorrowland instead of Toontown. Yeah, it's not gonna make sense. In tune.

[Ed Larson]

No, it doesn't make sense

[Marcus Parks]

if you tell me for a second that Roger Rabbit's my oncologist.

[Ed Larson]

You ever played the Deer Zachary drinking game?

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Where you drink a beer and blow your brains out.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, as Anton lavey saw it.

[Marcus Parks]

Beer, Zachary. We have to do something with beer. Zachary.

[Ed Larson]

Just pouring beers on a dead baby every time you get sad. Drink.

[Marcus Parks]

I started drinking before.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 preemies are bad? Now imagine a preemie in 1939 trying to survive at the fair.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, give him more lead.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

This baby is weak. He needs more lead injection.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Not lead, lithium. It's lithium that makes a baby grow.

[Marcus Parks]

I already gave him all the mercury we had.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I mean, they basically made dying babies a freak show. And Anton lavey absolutely loved the contrast from. For him, this was Satanism writ large. Now, 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Listen, I don't do. I don't do jumping jacks, okay? That is one of the most joyful single exercises. I refuse to do it.

[Ed Larson]

I'm.

[Marcus Parks]

I'll hang a rope.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He also began developing a hatred towards jocks, and this is a direct quote.

[Marcus Parks]

Young men who found themselves unusually well endowed.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Just a headstick. I hate boys with large penises.

[Marcus Parks]

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 the penis. Make it longer, make it appear longer.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 in college.

[Ed Larson]

My roommate had to get his tail drained and 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.

[Marcus Parks]

That's really fun.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's a good friend. Yeah, it's a real good friend. Now, Anton lavey was too old to be a boomer, but too young to serve in a 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 of 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.

[Marcus Parks]

And that. That'll change you.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It will. No, it very much will not.

[Marcus Parks]

Especially going from here to there and seeing how different it is.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And also just being in post war Germany, just the devastation of it and the destruction of it, it was a. It was. Post war Germany was nightmarish in every way. But these films, they were masterpieces of ritual and occultism. I mean, you look at the. Like, look at Metropolis, the rituals of Metropolis, the occultism you know Nosferatu.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, that was the first sequel.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, Nosferatu.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, sure, I hated Nosfera.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 Church of Satan. Now, besides his interest in film, Anton lavey was also a fantastic musician.

[Marcus Parks]

He's almost musician first up in terms of abilities.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

My father tried to teach me and I didn't take. I wish I had done it. I wish I had fucking learned.

[Ed Larson]

Wasn't he one of those guys that could just, like, hear a song and then play it?

[Henry Zabrowski]

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. That's awesome. He also threw himself into the study of painting, classical music, philosophy, and of course, magic. But lest you start bullying him now,

[Marcus Parks]

what's there to bully?

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, if there was a bully, he wouldn't exist.

[Marcus Parks]

No, this is perfectly normal, healthy boy behavior, Levey.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. Playing second, being second chair oboe in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.

[Marcus Parks]

Healthy growing boy.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, lavey 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, Satanism and appearances are one and one.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That is.

[Marcus Parks]

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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It does.

[Ed Larson]

He, the Satanist. That started with the eyeliner.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes, Probably.

[Marcus Parks]

Probably.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, Yeah, I would say. I would say so.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Unless the Cathars had something like it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, Levay attended, 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 lavey intentionally sought out the reprobates of San Francisco. The gamblers, the pimps, the prostitutes who populated the Bay Area's pool halls and bars.

[Marcus Parks]

Cool guys. Cool, fun guys.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This was Anton lavey's uncle's crowd. His Uncle Bill. Although lavey gave no details, which means he could be lying about all of this. Lavey 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.

[Marcus Parks]

That's why it's great. That's why Las Vegas is fantastic.

[Henry Zabrowski]

These criminals, lavey claimed, taught him that everything is a racket, including the church. The crafty man, lavey 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 humdrum existence of factories and offices and commutes.

[Marcus Parks]

Burn it to the ground.

[Ed Larson]

I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

Very good. Very good, guys.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That song's called Blazes and Flames.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, that's awesome. You know, I actually just met a guy who ran away to the circus. Yeah, at Zach Bacon's Haunted Museum. Yeah, it was the. In this like, freak section. He literally was like, he told his whole story. He's like, I was 16, I need to get out of my parents house. And I left and I joined the circus in 20 with like 30 years ago.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Was he an exhibit or no?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, he was in it as an exhibit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I thought he was just a guy hanging out.

[Marcus Parks]

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 off and join the circus.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, is he one of those Jim Rose guys?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, sure, sure.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, probably I am. 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, Peter P.T. barnum.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 in his story is far darker than what you're probably expecting.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, I feel like P.T. barnum could have had his own series.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah. Like, honestly, he is. He is. I actually wonder if he's worse than Anton Levy as a person.

[Ed Larson]

You know, he's definitely got more depths on his hands.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, he's got a fair amount of death, honestly. Yeah, P.T. barnum is a. Yeah, there's a lot going on there.

[Marcus Parks]

True American.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, 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 Heth, who was supposedly 161 years old. Barnum had been told that Joyce Heth was George Washington's nursemaid, born in the 1670s. And Barnum figured that he could sell this lie, even though Joyce was. Joyce was probably no more than 80 years old, because Joyce could actually tell a pretty convincing story when you 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.

[Ed Larson]

Oh, so she was like the first time an artist was. Got their art stolen from them. Great record producer.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, he was a manager. 100. No. Oh. 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. Yeah. 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.

[Marcus Parks]

Kind of like my RAV4. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Awful. Just had to get in a rap.

[Marcus Parks]

Had to get a Rap4 joke in there. Has had to do it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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. 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.

[Ed Larson]

Let's have Hugh Jackman sing a song about that.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Let's just say this storyline was. Was not in the Greatest Showman.

[Ed Larson]

It wasn't.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It was not.

[Marcus Parks]

This is Hugh Jackman's part.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And guess. Yeah, he played P.T. it was a life story of P.T.

[Marcus Parks]

barum.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

This.

[Marcus Parks]

I didn't even know that this was cut.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This was all cut.

[Marcus Parks]

That's so funny because if you even look at him, he's so battle toad. You know what I mean? Like, he's so gross. He's so ugly. That so funny.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And it gets worse from here. Oh yeah. 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.

[Marcus Parks]

And no, 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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.

[Marcus Parks]

What did you say?

[Henry Zabrowski]

PT Last chance. Last chance to see George Washington's nursemaid.

[Marcus Parks]

What do you mean last chance?

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'm here.

[Marcus Parks]

Why is it last? What do you mean? This is my final choice.

[Ed Larson]

Is that a tooth in the back of your mouth?

[Marcus Parks]

No, no, no. It's a sin.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Barnum, at the same day that he was announced in the Final death tour. He also sent an anonymous letter to a Boston newspaper claiming that Joyce was an automaton made of whale bones, springs, and rubber. This brought out even more people.

[Marcus Parks]

Did you hear Joyce? You're on automaton. No, no, I'm. I'm Joyce. I'm Joyce. Joyce. No, no, no. You're a robot. Don't be confused. You're a robot. All right, I'll come back and put some batteries in your ass.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 1500 New Yorkers shuffled past to see if Joyce really was an automaton. And by the end of it, Barnum.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

When they find out that she was a lady. Oh, yeah. Skin and bone.

[Ed Larson]

They found out not one person was in that line. It'. Listen, it's.

[Marcus Parks]

It's just the lady. No, they. Everyone's like the ticket. Oh, hey, spoilers.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, that was the 18th, 19th century version of spoilers.

[Marcus Parks]

Hey, buddy, we're all online here, okay? I want to see that old black woman's viscera. I know it's a lady. Obviously it's a lady.

[Ed Larson]

Nice. Don't think it's a robot.

[Marcus Parks]

That's cuz you're hopeful, old man. And that's why we're doing this.

[Henry Zabrowski]

By the end of it, Barnum had made the modern equivalent of $1.5 million 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 Heth. 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 like to be humbug. Which is to say that Americans liked being tricked. No. 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.

[Ed Larson]

It was a Ripley's.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. It wasn't stupid and boring. It was fun and cool.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it is. It is actually one of those. Like, it's in my top five. Like, no, they asked, like, if you could time travel to any time and see anything. Barnum's American Museum is in my top five. Oh, I would Go see.

[Marcus Parks]

I'd be in a heartbeat.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 fish tail that he called the Fiji Mermaid got a lover. 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. Cuz most Americans had no idea that egress was simply the Latin word for exit.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, that's what you get, you idiots. I mean, it's crazy.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You get, you idiot.

[Ed Larson]

It is one of those things where it's like, what a. And that's hilarious.

[Henry Zabrowski]

See, that's the thing. After seeing the aggress, the customer was then forced to pay another entry fee to get back in. And while you'd think this would really piss people, 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 aggress.

[Marcus Parks]

It's just too fucking good.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He was right, Americans, that we do like being tricked.

[Marcus Parks]

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, again, it's about personal choice. He, 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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, I would say the American Museum, his later stuff is more the Satanist stuff than the, you know, slavery, the slave owning stuff. That's not good.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, bad look. That's what you mean. Yeah, it's bad optics.

[Ed Larson]

This trickery still happens. I mean, you go to the Magic Castle, they trick you into eating a really expensive shitty meal.

[Marcus Parks]

It is a bad meal, but the close up magic otherwise is good. They don't touch your wife. It's actually really nice in there. But these like, he's a de facto sadness because in his mind I am providing only what people are asking for.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's showmanship again. It's big showmanship.

[Marcus Parks]

You wouldn't you wouldn't need me if you guys all didn't like this stuff. Yeah, that's a P.T. barnum point of view.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And he turned things around a little bit.

[Marcus Parks]

He tried.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Even though Americans might like, 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, portrayed and swindled his audiences over the years.

[Marcus Parks]

That must have been so much fun for him.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It really, it was a lot of fun. But when people read it, they were very angry.

[Ed Larson]

Magicians shouldn't tell their secrets.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They really should. And that was another. I think Anton lavey learned that just

[Marcus Parks]

look at somebody, you know, you look at every time somebody breaks character.

[Henry Zabrowski]

As soon as they break characters, character, 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 was would like to think was trying to atone for his youthful evils. Yeah, he could have double down evil son of a. When he was a kid, I think

[Ed Larson]

he probably just saw the writing on the walls and he was just trying to stay in charge.

[Marcus Parks]

But I'll say honestly that it wasn't that popular of a view. Like, like it really was a gamble. 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 cuz he said this in a quote about like if I could give anything back at the end of my life, I will. So he, he rebuilt Bridgeport, Connecticut. He did all these things and so he kind of like did this thing being like hey, I am trying like, like at the very end of his life, which is the most you could say about most human beings.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It really is. He, he fought against the railroad. He's a bad person either.

[Marcus Parks]

But then in the end he tried to say I'm sorry. And then he fudgeing died and yeah,

[Henry Zabrowski]

in the last, in the last 20 years of his life he did try to turn things around which. Yeah, yeah. Which honestly is more than we can say for almost anyone we've ever talked about on this show. 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 loved freak shows. Queen Victoria loved them.

[Marcus Parks]

She was the naked one, right?

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, no, no. Victoria was the absolute opposite. Opposite. She was the most buttoned up, sexless

[Marcus Parks]

that I'm sort to ever exist. Which one is the super horny one?

[Ed Larson]

Sally Rand.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Super horny queen.

[Marcus Parks]

Wasn't there super horny queen?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Not in England. I don't think in England.

[Marcus Parks]

Side stories Potl I send me a list of the corniest queens.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I think you're thinking of Catherine the Great out of Russia. That's exactly Fred Mercury.

[Marcus Parks]

So send me pictures, side stories. LPOTL gmail.com. send me pictures of the horniest queen.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And also Abraham Lincoln. Good friends.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Abraham Lincoln, also a super horny queen. Cannot be denied at all.

[Marcus Parks]

Rail spin.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Catherine the Great.

[Marcus Parks]

That's the horny one. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

Okay, good for her.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It says the AI is telling us that Queen Victoria was super horny.

[Marcus Parks]

Cuz we asked about horniness and AI is going to lie to you.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it's going to lie. It's going to tell you what you want to hear.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 Carney's fem fatales and grifters, was known as Nightmare Alley. Also made into a movie a year later.

[Marcus Parks]

Don't watch the Bradley Cooper one, watch the black and white one.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, the 1947.

[Ed Larson]

Yes, I did like the Bradley Cooper.

[Marcus Parks]

It's fine. But if you watch. If you read the. You got to read the. Watch the old one and read the book.

[Ed Larson]

I'll watch it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, the author of the novel was a man named William Lindsay Gresham who'd volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1938. Very much at 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. 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, usually while dressed as some sort of wild man. Geeks were worryingly common.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Amongst carnivals and sideshows across America for decades.

[Marcus Parks]

They're very popular.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Extremely popular. Yeah.

[Ed Larson]

I wonder how that, like, ended up translating into being a nerd.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'm not. I'm not. I think at one point, like, geek was more of a. Just a person who was unpleasant to look at. Like, nerds were smart and geeks were just, like, unpleasant people.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

In the beginning at least. But they soon became conflated. It's fun. And I'm just talking on my ass there. I might be totally wrong.

[Marcus Parks]

This is interesting because it comes from an old term for just a clown, a German. German clown called a gick, 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 like, ugly, pinheaded. Eyes too close, mouth too big, arms too long.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Use gross.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, that's cool.

[Marcus Parks]

But he stole the story from a strong man that he had met, and he took the entire thing. Now, I. Without about Nightmare Alley. It's not just about show business.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

It's about the. The literal world of magic.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

Of actual ritual magic. Which is the thing about Nightmare Alley that makes it really interesting, because what. What Anton Lay realized, much like happens at the end of Alistair Crowley's works. You realize that he says there, it's not from out there, it's from in here.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 grizzly 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 Carney life. Nightmare Alley. Now, Nightmare Alley captures the occultism of Carney 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. Public from their hard Earned cash.

[Marcus Parks]

But they also give them something in exchange, Marcus. They give them hope and lessons and entertainment and have 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 exactly that you are fully in charge.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Really like the phrase for entertainment purposes only is very important to surviving the modern world.

[Marcus Parks]

World. Very much so.

[Ed Larson]

They also sold popcorn, I think.

[Marcus Parks]

They did. They did.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, just like the spiritualists of the 19th century, 20th century, Carney 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 carney was offering. And that's another. Another satanic thing. You gotta say yes. You choose. Yeah. Now, Nightmare Alley blew the lid off what Carneys 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.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 Crossing. Crossing Over.

[Marcus Parks]

But cold reading is the heart of all occult. Yeah, cold reading is the heart of all occult. Ritual in enchantment is cold reading. And Nightmare Alley is all about cold reading.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Which is the no one wants to was. That's like what HPB did, naturally. That's what Alistair Crowley did. Naturally. That's what LRH did naturally.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. And that's why there's so much of it in London, Long island, because they're all judgy pricks.

[Marcus Parks]

What do you mean?

[Ed Larson]

There's a lot of cold reading and. And. And the. What do you call them?

[Marcus Parks]

The Long island medium.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah, but there's a. It's not just them. I mean, Rob, am I crazy? It's everywhere.

[Marcus Parks]

It's for. You know who it's for, Eddie. It's people like my mother, former Catholic women that have become witches.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Well, in Nightmare Alley, the main character is a man named Stanton Carlile, who learns. 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 Carlisle eventually becomes a religious figure. Reverend Stanton, pastor of the Church of the Heavenly Message.

[Marcus Parks]

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 they. He becomes this reverend and all this kind of stuff, and guess where it ends? He's right back in the pit. Yeah, he's the geek.

[Ed Larson]

He saw the movie, was nominated for an Oscar.

[Marcus Parks]

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.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, Anton lavey thought Nightmare Alley was awesome.

[Marcus Parks]

He did.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He did not see it as a warning in any way whatsoever.

[Marcus Parks]

The warning's the very end.

[Henry Zabrowski]

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 will return next week for part two of our series on Anton lavey. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Hail Satan.

[Ed Larson]

Six.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Six.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Yeah, man. I'm gonna listen to the. Oh, we gotta put butthole surfers on. Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Really?

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah. Satan. Satan. Honestly, great work, Marcus.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Thank you as well. I think that you comported yourself nicely,

[Marcus Parks]

didn't I? Yeah. I feel really good about me.

[Ed Larson]

Yeah. You've been excited for this for all of time.

[Marcus Parks]

I was nervous.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, of course.

[Ed Larson]

Really?

[Marcus Parks]

Because there's a lot of. Because we're about to Wade. You'll see. We're. Now we're putting herself out there. As you said before, you're going to call yourself a Satanist. You expect to get punched in the face.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

All right. And that's a part of what we're going to do. We're here celebrating Satanism for a couple more weeks. We're going to eat this cake, lady in the Tramp style that Rob has just brought back anally. What plugs do we have?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Go to patreon.com lastpodcast on the left. The left. If you want ad free episodes. And if you want to watch the stream, last stream on the left every Tuesday at 5pm PST. We moved it a little bit earlier. And if you want to see video episodes of the show, you can watch it. If you got a Netflix subscription, we're all Netflix.

[Ed Larson]

The stream ends up on YouTube every Thursday at 6pm and then directly after that is HGX2.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's right.

[Ed Larson]

That's right. We're in the plot playoffs, baby.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And I'm playing a win. I'm playing a win.

[Ed Larson]

Other YouTube channels we got is someplace underneath. LPN Romantasy. Who's the Be the Foreign report?

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Ed Larson]

Dogs in Space, LPN TV and the Brighter side, LPN. Go check those out. Subscribe to that and we'll keep putting stuff there. And we are hitting the road. We only got four shows left of JK Ultra. The last from next one's going to be tonight in Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Music hall of Oakland.

[Marcus Parks]

We're here having fun. Iron City. Join ourselves. We're going to, we're going to go down the Stellers. We're going to go, you know, see out there.

[Ed Larson]

All right, come on. Saturday, June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the GLC live at 20 Monroe. Friday, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kanes Ballroom. And Saturday, July 18th, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Tower Theater. Go check those shows out. There's going to be a lot of fun. And of course, side Stories is going to be in in London, Ontario on June 28 to Rio. That's going to be a lot of fun. And then you want to come see me do standup, just go to eddytunes.com and you could find all the dates there.

[Marcus Parks]

And we will be having more information about our Halloween sound effects album. Frank Jansen's revolting repository of Gasly Sounds, Volume 1 and 2. The first printing sold out very quickly, but there is going to be, dare I say it, a second pressing.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's right. Yeah. And so just wait, don't, don't, don't buy the secondary market on Discogs just yet.

[Marcus Parks]

Don't just do it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There's gonna be a news pressing soon

[Marcus Parks]

and we're gonna have announcements about that very soon.

[Ed Larson]

Hell yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Thank you all for selling it out.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, thank you.

[Marcus Parks]

And that incredible band, Mass for Trash. I wonder where they came from.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

I wonder who those people weren't with. Those incredible, mysterious people.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Incredible songwriters and screamers.

[Marcus Parks]

You never know who those people.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I screamed. It was fun.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it was great. He's the lead singer.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, Ash is the lead singer. I, I Assisted.

[Marcus Parks]

I just wrote it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'm just wrote it.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm part of the think tank.

[Ed Larson]

Ash Gordon.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Of course.

[Ed Larson]

Yes, of course.

[Marcus Parks]

Isaac Hansen.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Ash Gordon.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And I and I knew when Rob was googling who was the horniest queen. Definitely brought up a drag race story.

[Marcus Parks]

Of course. They always. Yeah, they always do. You know and a lot of them are very rarely horny because of how much their penises hurt.

[Ed Larson]

I don't know.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I don't know.

[Marcus Parks]

I don't know.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I really don't remember. Remember them. It's season eight.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. It's a long. That was a different person ago.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'm re watching it, you know right now or you know. We just started season six.

[Marcus Parks]

Holy.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well funny. Season five.

[Marcus Parks]

Who's the best season ever?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Best season ever. Fantastic.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, we all know this. Well, hell Satan everyone.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Patreon.com Give me stuff.

[Ed Larson]

Hail Satan again.

[Marcus Parks]

Hail Satan for 666. And you know what? In the name of Satan, give me your money. Give me your families. I don't care. Just give it. Just give it to me. I'm going to take it. I'm it going to do. Do with what? What I need to do with it.

[Ed Larson]

Okay.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I wanna, I wanna eat. It is a little chocolatey.

[Marcus Parks]

Hey D. It's amazing. It's amazing what it you could do when you have a big piece of brown. That's what I like is a big piece of brown.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's delicious.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, don't you get it?

[Ed Larson]

Really good.

[Marcus Parks]

The name's on the thing there.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's actually incredible. It's really good.

[Marcus Parks]

That's okay.

[Ed Larson]

It's like Satan made it himself.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh no.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, it's filled with shit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I was gonna go to heaven and now I'm not.

[Marcus Parks]

No, you're going to fucking hell, dude.

[Ed Larson]

No one needs to see this.

[Marcus Parks]

Bye fuckers. Leave us alone. Leave us the fuck alone.

[Henry Zabrowski]

In the US there's a break in every 26 seconds. But when intruders step near Simplisafe home security steps up.

[Marcus Parks]

Stop.

[Ed Larson]

This is Simplisafe.

[Marcus Parks]

Police are on the way.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Using AI alerts US based live agents help deter break ins SimpliSafe no long term contracts. Save 50% on your new system with professional monitoring at SimpliSafe.com sxm or with promo code sxm outdoor deterrence requires a

[Marcus Parks]

Simplisafe active guard Outdoor protection plan starting at 49.99amonth. Visit simplisafe.com licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012 Breathe in.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Feel the sense of calm that comes

[Marcus Parks]

from having up to $300 in overdraft

[Henry Zabrowski]

protection with Goto bank now.

[Marcus Parks]

Did you say $300?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

Now back to our breathing.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So if I overspend my balance, Goto bank has my back up to $300?

[Marcus Parks]

Yes. Can we breathe out now?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Less worries, more zen. With over $300 in overdraft protection tap to open an account today.

[Marcus Parks]

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[Henry Zabrowski]

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