Practice · Orders · Later twentieth century

The Temple of Set

1975 · United States

Founded by Michael Aquino and others who left the Church of Satan. Six degrees, local groups called Pylons, and specialist Orders within it.

Is anything of the name working now?

Working, and independently attested

Reported as continuing by the World Religions and Spirituality Project.

What can be gleaned from it

Very little, and the refusal is itself the finding: the Temple states as a matter of policy that it does not publish its membership figures. It is the plainest instance on this page of the thing a reader most wants and cannot have — how many people are in one of these.

Founding

  • Founded 1975

  • Founder Michael Aquino, with twenty-eight others

    This study's chronology has no page for him.

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

  • Came out of schism

    Aquino and others left the Church of Satan in 1975 over the sale of priesthoods and over whether Satan was a symbol or a being.

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

  • What it withholds membership figures, as a matter of policy

    The plainest statement in this section of what cannot be gleaned. An estimate of about five hundred members in 1984 is on record; nothing more recent is.