Practice · Orders · Later twentieth century

The Church of Satan

1966 · United States

Anton LaVey's church, founded in San Francisco. It belongs in this section because of its form rather than its doctrine: a named founder, published scripture, degrees, and a deliberate use of ceremony — the Golden Dawn's machinery pointed somewhere else entirely.

Is anything of the name working now?

Working, and independently attested

Reported as continuing by the World Religions and Spirituality Project, which is not the body itself.

What can be gleaned from it

That an initiatory body can be built in public, with its founder giving interviews, and still work as one. It is the first body here that never claimed a hidden warrant from anybody — which is why nothing about its origin is in dispute.

Founding

In the chronology: Anton Szandor LaVey.

What it came out of, and what came out of it

Bodies this study records as coming out of it: The Temple of Set.

A descent is a claim in this database and never a column, so every line above and below carries a source. See Evolution for the whole chain and for what the five kinds of descent mean.

On the record

  • Its warrant to exist none claimed this study's reading

    This study's own reading. It is the first body in this section to found itself in public on its founder's own authority, and it is the only one whose origin nobody disputes. The two facts are the same fact.