The Nine Satanic Statements

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.

LaVey's Nine Statements have generated as much internal Satanic disagreement as external controversy. Michael Aquino, a Church of Satan priest, broke with LaVey in 1975 over questions of organizational direction and LaVey's own conduct, founding the Temple of Set on the claim of a direct communication from an Egyptian deity, Set, and replacing LaVey's atheistic framework with an explicitly theistic one centered on the doctrine the Temple calls Xeper, self-directed becoming. The split was personal as much as doctrinal, but it produced the first major organized rejection of LaVeyan Satanism from within the movement it created.

The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, positions itself as a further departure, adopting its own Seven Fundamental Tenets rather than LaVey's nine and explicitly rejecting what it characterizes as LaVeyan social Darwinism and a fetishized authoritarianism, in favor of an activist, community-facing organization built around individual sovereignty, empathy and evidence-based reasoning. The Church of Satan, for its part, has publicly dismissed the Satanic Temple's activism as a political project unrelated to LaVey's own philosophy.

A separate current, represented by the Order of Nine Angles, criticizes LaVeyan Satanism from an opposite direction, describing it as a tamed, psychologized version of a properly transgressive and, in the order's own self-description, traditional Satanism. Between these positions, the Nine Statements function less as a settled scripture than as the fixed point every later current in modern Satanism has had to define itself against.