1992, Feral House, 147 pages

When I read the back of this book, and see that the author has affected the makeup, eye-tweezing and garb of a pulp fiction sorcerer from the 1930s popular literature I read as a boy, I understand that I was, in the 1970s, part of his target audience.

The mind behind the Church of Satan, through this slim volume found on the shelves belonging to a keen mind who has spent his life resisting colonization by the thought stream of negation we all either float, swim, dive or drown in, is told in his own words. I felt a bit undead as I read the words of a man who was, I suppose, one of the past age’s best satirists. For he simply made fun of Christianity—entirely admitting his utmost dependence on it and claiming it to be the most important collection of mind control documents in human history—crafted a creepy mirror image of medieval Catholicism and had the decency to not actually rape, torture and burn the victims of his cult as the target of his parody had done.

Throughout The Devil’s Notebook, his self-acclaimed earthly avatar emerges as an absolutely American facet of the cultural end phase—nothing but a brilliant pleasure seeker. He claims that no one does good to do good, but only for approval or social leverage. I know that to be a lie. But did he? It is very possible that he never met an actual good person.

I think perhaps that might have been the case.

This man was easily twice as intelligent as I am—I would say a real genius. He spent great insight and energy on two things:

First, pleasure seeking, which he somehow mistook as the only rational goal of humans.

And second, something more, deification, simply using the formula of deceit and temptation foundational to so much human ideology and less-purified and still mystic religions.

No commentator I have ever read was more dialed in [before the blatant gaslighting of the last decade] on media as social mind control. The demoralization and fear dispensed on one hand and the coercive insistence on safety that can never forever forestall the Reaper are identified with incisive wit in concise and readable prose. Here is the master propagandist critiquing his fellows during the course of his own decades-long stage trick.

Below are some quotes from this ascendant god’s slim book of essays:

“If you are a law-abiding citizen, who is concerned about the safety of home and family, you are made to feel like a criminal if you own a gun…”

“How refreshing it would be to hear a political candidate say, ‘I don’t believe in God, but in the protection of citizens health and safety.’"

Well, he nailed that, 27 years in advance.

“Even the clothes on your back integrate you into the herd unconsciously…”

LaVey identifies media demoralization as downstream from Christian guilt and the need for such villains as we are told to obsess over part of the ancient duality of this faith. He really just proclaims that he is the new medieval pope living for pleasure at the expense of the faithful and suggests that the reader become useful to his pleasure in exchange for initiation into the arts of extracting pleasure from a world designed to crush our souls.

It is quite interesting that LaVay understands servitude, and the money system as a form of advanced coercion and debt maintenance:

“I foresee a return to slavery once money becomes worthless. In fact, it will be more desirable to become a self-realized, pleasing slave, than a silly, incompetent master.”

That last comment has been realized in the recent ideological mob hysteria, in which the prospect of being the King [or of supporting him] of a self-hating nation is far more frightening than being an actual rebel openly calling for his downfall.

He concludes, “In the future humans will be barter.”

On page 67 he reminds the reader that breaking the chains of delusion, by which you have been educated against your own self-interest, is not enough. That the person aware of reality must also be able to see the world through the lens of the “stupid,” to see the world the way the deluded meat-puppet sees it. This importance of the herd view, of being able to see the world through the hysteria-hued glasses of the idiot masses, this reader sees as the key to LaVey’s art and his apparent and wicked wit.

LaVey is an admirer of H. L. Mencken on page 139, quoting the old curmudgeon that, “I reserve the right to be a lonely man,” and then twists and deepens this proclamation of alienation into a credo of using humans for pleasure. In other words, at this point, LaVey has managed to elevate himself in his own minds eye, to the perpetual aristocracy, the upper class elite who have tortured, robbed, raped and fleeced the domesticated human herd since antiquity. It seems a shallow place to arrive after such a deep dive.

The last line in the book exposes the ascendant deity as quintessentially American, a man who would be pushing for a mandatory, universal shamdemic vaϲϲine in this, his hereafter:

“…never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls because someone is being paid to pull on the rope.”

Never has a more slavish metaphor been written, a sentiment that is at the heart of everything American, a nation founded as a slave pen and whose sheep, shepherds and sheepdogs—and even those who would be wolves—forever pine for a master over their mind.

The Devil’s Notebook is the most honestly American book I have ever read.