The Satanic Bible - History

History

There are multiple stories of the birth of The Satanic Bible. In the introduction to the 2005–present edition, High Priest Peter H. Gilmore describes LaVey as having compiled The Satanic Bible on his own from monographs he had written about the Church of Satan and its rituals. Gilmore lists a number of people who influenced LaVey's writings: Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken, the members of the carnival with whom LaVey had supposedly worked in his youth, P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, John Milton, and Lord Byron.

LaVey's estranged daughter Zeena Schreck, in an exposé about both her father's religion and past, attributes the birth of The Satanic Bible to a suggestion by Peter Mayer, a publisher for Avon. According to Schreck, Mayer proposed that LaVey author a Satanic bible to draw from the popularity of 1968 horror film Rosemary's Baby, which had caused a recent rise in public interest in both Satanism and the occult. Schreck states that, aided by Diane Hegarty, LaVey compiled a number of writings he had already been distributing: an introduction to Satanism, a number of short essays, a guide to ritual magic, and articles he had previously published in The Cloven Hoof, a Church of Satan newsletter.

Either to meet length requirements set by the publisher or out of agreement with the ideas, LaVey and Hegarty plagiarized writings by other authors. These included a social Darwinist book published in 1890 entitled Might is Right, as well as Dee's Enochian keys from Aleister Crowley's The Equinox, modified to replace references to Christianity with those to Satan. Some accuse LaVey of paraphrasing the Nine Satanic Statements from Rand's Atlas Shrugged without acknowledgement, though others maintain that LaVey simply was drawing inspiration from the novel. LaVey later affirmed the connection with Rand's ideas by stating that LaVeyan Satanism was "just Ayn Rand's philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added".