LaVey and the Founding of an Atheistic Satanism

Anton LaVey, a San Francisco showman and organist with a background in carnivals and nightclub work rather than any inherited occult lineage, founded the Church of Satan on Walpurgisnacht in 1966, an intentionally theatrical date, and published The Satanic Book the following year setting out the distinction between Greater and Lesser Magic that still defines the tradition's practice. LaVey drew his ritual material and his rationalist framing partly from Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational self-interest, partly from stage magic and carnival showmanship, and partly from earlier occult writers, while explicitly rejecting any belief in Satan as a literal being, a supernatural underworld or an opposing deity to God, which places his Satanism apart from every earlier use of the name in Christian demonology and from theistic Satanist groups that emerged later and do posit a literal being.

The Church of Satan under LaVey and his successors has consistently treated ritual as psychodrama, a deliberately staged event whose value lies in the emotional and psychological effect on the participant rather than in any claim that unseen forces are being contacted, which is why LaVey described Greater Magic's working environment as a decompression chamber for the intellect rather than a channel to anything external. That explicitly psychological account of its own ritual is unusual among magical traditions generally, most of which claim some form of objective efficacy for their workings, and LaVey's insistence on a naturalistic explanation is one of the clearest lines separating his organisation from the broader ceremonial magic tradition it otherwise drew from.