Anton Szandor LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966 and, three years later, published The Satanic Bible, opening it with nine short statements presented as the tradition's ethical foundation. Satan, in LaVey's system, is not a literal being to be worshipped but a symbol of pride, carnal indulgence and the individual's own vital nature, set against what LaVey characterized as Christianity's demand for abstinence, humility and self-denial. The Nine Statements accordingly favor indulgence over abstinence, vital existence over spiritual pipe dreams, undefiled wisdom over hypocritical self-deceit and kindness only to those who deserve it, among others, framing Satanism as a rationalist, self-interested ethics dressed in inverted Christian imagery rather than a theistic religion.
LaVey drew the language and structure partly from earlier sources, including Ayn Rand's Objectivism and Might Is Right, a nineteenth-century social Darwinist tract by Ragnar Redbeard, and combined them with ceremonial trappings borrowed from occultism to build a public, media-savvy organization at a moment, the late 1960s counterculture, primed to notice it. The result was less a metaphysical system than a permission structure: an argument that self-interest, pride and bodily pleasure need no theological justification once the demand for one is set aside.
The Nine Statements remain the Church of Satan's official founding text and the clearest single expression of LaVeyan Satanism as a distinct position, atheistic about Satan as a being, but committed to a specific and contestable account of what a satisfying human life requires.