Michael Aloysius Aquino was born on 16 October 1946 in San Francisco, California. He served in the United States Army, including a tour in Vietnam, and built a long parallel career in military intelligence and psychological operations, eventually reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and holding a doctorate in political science; that military and intelligence career, and its later public scrutiny, exists as a documented strand of his life separate from his religious leadership. He joined Anton LaVey's Church of Satan in 1969 and rose within it to become one of its most senior priests, editing its internal publications for several years.
By 1975 Aquino had come to believe that LaVey's leadership had grown more commercially than spiritually focused, and he and a group of allied senior members formally broke from the Church of Satan that year. Aquino described receiving, during a solitary ritual working, a text he called The Book of Coming Forth by Night, which he presented as a communication from Set that provided the doctrinal basis and name for the new organization he founded in the same year, the Temple of Set. He led the Temple for decades afterward and died on 1 September 2019.