Called "The Black Pope" by many of his followers, Anton LaVey began the road to High Priesthood of the Church of Satan when he was only 16 years old and an organ player in a carnival:

"On Saturday night I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning when I was playing the organ for tentshow evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday night they'd be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence.

"I knew then that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man's carnal nature will out!"

From that time early in his life his path was clear. Finally, on the last night of April, 1966 - Walpurgisnacht, the most important festival of the believers in witchcraft - LaVey shaved his head in the tradition of ancient executioners and announced the formation of The Church Of Satan. He had seen the need for a church that would recapture man's body and his carnal desires as objects of celebration. "Since worship of fleshly things produces pleasure," he said, "there would then be a temple of glorious indulgence..."

On the altar of the Devil up is down, pleasure is pain, darkness is light, slavery is freedom, and madness is sanity. The Satanic ritual chamber is die ideal setting for the entertainment of unspoken thoughts or a veritable palace of perversity.

Now one of the Devil's most devoted disciples gives a detailed account of all the traditional Satanic rituals. Here are the actual texts of such forbidden rites as the Black Mass and Satanic Baptisms for both adults and children.

Throughout the explicit pages of The Satanic Witch, Anton Szandor LaVey dares to say what many dread to know. After many years of tutelagein the dark side of human behavior - as a police photographer, carny hand and burlesque house musician - Anton LaVey rips the lid off the forbidden knowledge of seduction and manipulation.

The Satanic Witch empowers its readers with a series of workable formulas, which in an instant surpass the entire catalogue of self-help tomes and New Age homilies.

At last, the collected wisdom, humor, and dark observations by the founder of The Church of Satan, The Devil's Notebook is the first original collection of LaVey's writings to be published in two decades. The High Priest speculates on such topics as nonconformity, occult faddism, erotic politics, the "Goodguy badge," demoralization and the construction of artificial companions. Like P.T. Barnum, Ben Hecht and H.L. Mencken before him, LaVey zeroesin on humankind's limitless capacity for self-deceit and self-denial. Included are instructions for the creation of what LaVey terms "total environments," or places of magical evocation, where the enlightened may escape the deleterious effects of contemporary existence.

The Devil's Notebook is truly a noir grimoire, available just in time for the third millennium. With an introduction by Adam Parfrey.

Anton Szandor LaVey, notorious founder of the Church of Satan, died on October 29,1997, days after completing his final contribution to Satan Speaks!

Satan Speaks! collects together sixty unorthodox, paradoxical and humorous essays by the most misunderstood man in America.

Marilyn Manson pays tribute to Anton LaVey in his foreword, and Blanche Barton, mother of Xerxes Satan LaVey, provides a poignant introduction.

Twenty-fice years ago, on April 30, Walpurgisnacht, 1966, Anton Szandor LaVey shaved his head and declared the beginning of the Age of Satan. From that moment on both the famous and the infamous have found their way through the doors of the Church of Satan, with LaVey as its diabolical "Black Pope."

Blanche Barton, Anton LaVey's authorized biographer, gives a straight-from-the-shoulder account of the many strange and sensational events (some heavily documented by a media blitz, others related for the first time anywhere) that surrounded LaVey and his thousands of followers as they ushered in a new era of indulgence and carnality, based on pleasure instead of self-denial. Miss Barton details the evenings spent with LaVey's Magic Circle, peopled with artists, writers and filmmakers whose names will be familiar, and points out de-facto Satanists throughout history, such as Benjamin Franklin, who would, LaVey is sure, have been in favor of a "United Satanic America!"

In addition, Miss Barton outlines the direction this ever-growing organization is taking today, in her chapter "Satan's Master Plan." And she lays it on the line with what every reader will want to know: "How To Perform Satanic Rituals."

Many people consider Anton LaVey the most dangerous man on earth. Others simply dismiss him as an entertaining charlatan. What secrets lurk within the man who shaved his head on Walpurgisnacht, 1966, and declared the formation of the Church of Satan? Written with the cooperation of her enigmatic subject, Blanche Barton's biography reveals what has previously been hidden from view:

- LaVey's erotic involvements with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield
- The dark origins of Satanic ritual
- LaVey's early career as hoodlum, carny, burlesque house organist, Zionist operative, lion tamer, and ghost hunter for the San Francisco police department
- Rare photographs and documents, including LaVey's "banned essay" on lycanthropic transformation.

ALL ELSE IS ERROR. The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error. A condition of combat everywhere exists. We are born into perpetual conflict. It is our inheritance, even as it was the heritage of previous generations. This "condition of combat" may be disguised with the holy phrases of St. Francis, or the soft deceitful doctrines of a Kropotkin or Tolstoi, but it cannot be eventually evaded by any human being or any tribe of human beings. It is there and it stays there, and each man (whether he will or not) has to reckon with it. It rules all things; it governs all things; it reigns over all things and it decides all who imagine policemanized populations, internationally regulated tranquility, and State organized industrialism so joyful, blessed and devine.