40 Fun Facts About Satanism

In Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible, which day is the highest holiday of a Satanist's year, outranking Halloween?

Their own birthday comes first because LaVey taught that each Satanist is their own god. Walpurgisnacht, the spring night of witches, comes next in importance.

Which Rat Pack entertainer befriended Anton LaVey and was made an honorary warlock of the Church of Satan?

Sammy Davis Jr. met LaVey after starring in the 1973 comedy pilot Poor Devil, and described the friendship years later in his autobiography.

What did each pair of Lil Nas X's 2021 Satan Shoes reportedly contain, mixed with ink by the art collective MSCHF?

Human blood, one drop per pair, came from about six MSCHF staff. Critics compared the stunt to a 1977 Kiss comic book printed with the band's own blood in the ink.

Which tabletop role-playing game did Patricia Pulling's 1980s group BADD accuse of drawing teenagers into Satanism?

Dungeons & Dragons became Pulling's target after her son's death in 1982. Game writer Michael Stackpole later picked her group's evidence apart in a study called The Pulling Report.

In which New England city did The Satanic Temple open its headquarters in a charcoal-painted former funeral home?

Salem, the Massachusetts town famous for its 1692 witch trials, is home to the building, which also operates as an art gallery open to visitors.

Which blonde film star visited Anton LaVey's Church of Satan in 1966, the year before her fatal car crash?

Jayne Mansfield met LaVey while in town for a film festival. The press branded her a Satanist, though she publicly denied ever being one.

Which big cat, named Togare, did Anton LaVey acquire as a household pet in 1965?

Lion Togare lived with LaVey before the Church of Satan even existed, and was eventually handed over to a city zoo.

Which consumer goods giant dropped a moon-and-stars logo that Amway distributors had rumoured to be Satanic?

Procter & Gamble's trademark showed a man in the moon overlooking 13 stars, said to honour the original American colonies. The firm denied any link to the Church of Satan.

Which word best describes the official outlook of Anton LaVey's Church of Satan?

Atheistic is how scholars describe Anton LaVey's creed: members worship no deity at all, and Satan stands for individualism and personal freedom.

Which shock rocker wrote the foreword to Anton LaVey's book Satan Speaks and held an honorary priesthood?

Marilyn Manson was never ordained as a working minister, the Church of Satan later clarified: the honorary title recognised his real-world accomplishments.

In which California city did Anton LaVey found the Church of Satan in 1966, at the so-called Black House?

San Francisco was home to the Black House until 2001, when the building was demolished after church members failed to raise the money to buy it back.

Which medieval order of warrior monks was accused in 1307 of worshipping an idol named Baphomet?

Knights Templar brothers were arrested across France on the orders of King Philip IV and tortured into confessions.

Which animal's head tops the winged figure of Baphomet in Éliphas Lévi's famous 1856 drawing?

Goat and man are fused in the winged figure, which Lévi called the Sabbatic Goat and designed as a union of opposites in perfect balance.

In which 1968 Roman Polanski film does a pregnant New Yorker come to suspect her neighbours belong to a Satanic coven?

Rosemary's Baby was a favourite boast of Anton LaVey, who claimed to have been a consultant on the production and to have appeared on screen as the Devil.

Which English band titled a 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request, a pun on British passport wording?

The Rolling Stones followed it with Sympathy for the Devil, sung from Satan's point of view, which fed media rumours that the group were devil worshippers.

In which country did black metal musicians begin a wave of church arsons in 1992 with the Fantoft Stave Church?

Norway convicted several musicians over the fires. They showed no remorse in court, describing the arsons as symbolic retaliation against Christianity.

The Satanic Temple's bronze Baphomet statue was meant to stand by a Ten Commandments monument at which state capitol?

Oklahoma never received it: the state's Supreme Court ordered the Ten Commandments removed, so the temple withdrew its request. The statue was first shown in Detroit.

After Anton LaVey's death, the Church of Satan moved its headquarters to which Manhattan neighbourhood?

Hell's Kitchen became the church's base once a new high priest was appointed, ending decades in which it had been run from California.

Which discredited 1980 bestseller by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder helped ignite the Satanic panic over ritual abuse?

Michelle Remembers was co-written with Pazder's patient Michelle Smith, whom he later married, and every investigation failed to corroborate its claims.

Which California preschool gave its name to a 1980s Satanic panic case that became America's longest criminal trial?

McMartin family members faced hundreds of charges, yet seven years of proceedings ended without a single conviction, and many of the children later recanted.

Which English occultist, often branded a Satanist by the press, revelled in the nickname 'the Beast 666'?

Aleister Crowley was first called the Beast by his own mother and embraced the label, yet he denied being a Satanist because he rejected the Christian world view altogether.

Which New Testament book names 666 as the number of the beast, though some early manuscripts say 616?

Revelation's figure is widely read by scholars as a coded reference to the Roman emperor Nero, an infamous persecutor of the early Christians.

Which Puritan poet's 1667 epic made Satan its protagonist, humanising the fallen angel as a proud rebel?

John Milton was a devout Puritan, yet Romantic writers such as Shelley recast the Satan of Paradise Lost as a noble rebel against tyranny.

The upside-down cross, often used as a Satanic emblem, is traditionally the symbol of which apostle's martyrdom?

Peter, by Catholic tradition, asked to be crucified head-down because he felt unworthy to die in the same manner as Jesus.

Which fraternal society did French hoaxer Léo Taxil falsely accuse of Devil worship in the 1890s?

Freemasons were the target of Taxil's invented exposés until 1897, when he called a press conference and announced that the whole story had been made up.

Which French king's mistress, Madame de Montespan, was accused of joining Black Masses in the Affair of the Poisons?

Louis XIV had ordered the Paris police chief to root out poisoners, only for the accusations of witchcraft and blasphemous rites to reach his own inner circle.

By what popular name is Sir Francis Dashwood's 18th-century society of rakes, who met at Medmenham Abbey, remembered?

Hellfire Club meetings featured mock rituals, drinking and banqueting. The legends of Black Masses and demon worship only became attached to it in the late 19th century.

Army officer Michael Aquino left the Church of Satan in 1975 to found a temple named for which Egyptian god?

Set was, Aquino claimed, the true name that Satan revealed to him during a ritual. The officer worked in military intelligence, specialising in psychological warfare.

Which Middle Eastern minority, devoted to the Peacock Angel, was long persecuted as supposed devil-worshippers?

Yazidis honour the angel Tawûsî Melek, whom outsiders wrongly equated with Satan, and the persecution drove their communities into the remote mountains of northwestern Iraq.

In which Arkansas city were three boys murdered in 1993, in what prosecutors called a Satanic ritual by three teenagers?

West Memphis gave the convicted teenagers their collective name, the West Memphis Three. They walked free in 2011 under a plea deal that let them keep asserting their innocence.

Which 1975 horror film, featuring John Travolta's film debut, credited Anton LaVey as its technical advisor?

The Devil's Rain starred Ernest Borgnine as a Satanic priest opposite William Shatner, and LaVey himself turned up on screen in a minor role.

Anton LaVey summed up his Satanism as which American novelist's philosophy with ceremony and ritual added?

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged ran so close to the Nine Satanic Statements that some critics accused LaVey of paraphrasing the novel without acknowledgement.

The Enochian Keys in The Satanic Bible were adapted from an angelic language recorded by which Elizabethan scholar?

John Dee wrote the language down in his private journals with the scryer Edward Kelley, and LaVey's version swapped its Christian references for Satanic ones.

Which tract by the pseudonymous Ragnar Redbeard supplied much of The Satanic Bible's opening Book of Satan?

Might Is Right, a social Darwinist polemic, was mined for whole passages, which Anton LaVey edited to strip out its racism, antisemitism and misogyny.

Which failing did Anton LaVey rank first in his 1987 list of the Nine Satanic Sins, above pretentiousness?

Stupidity was, for LaVey, the cardinal sin of Satanism. Solipsism, herd conformity and a lack of aesthetics also made the list.

The Process Church, a London sect whose gods included Christ and Satan, was founded by ex-members of which movement?

Scientology is where Mary Ann MacLean and Robert de Grimston met. They split from it in 1962 and married, and their splinter therapy group grew into the Process Church.

Which English band's 1982 album Black Metal gave an entire genre of extreme music its name?

Venom emerged from the new wave of British heavy metal, and the first wave of the style named after the record also included Mercyful Fate and Bathory.

Which French novelist's 1891 book Là-Bas, about Satanism in contemporary France, climaxes with a Black Mass?

Joris-Karl Huysmans stirred controversy when the story first ran as a newspaper serial, following a writer who finds devil worship alive in the France of his own day.

The five Hebrew letters on the Church of Satan's Sigil of Baphomet spell the name of which biblical creature?

Leviathan is spelled out around the points of the pentagram, a design that first appeared in an 1897 French occult book and lost two other names in LaVey's version.

Which former US president had the street number of a Bel Air retirement home changed from 666 to 668?

Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy moved to St. Cloud Road in 1989, the year they left the White House, and had the address renumbered.