Born with a Tail

August 12, 2024
Journalist Brod (They Just Seem a Little Weird) provides an entertaining if thin biography of the fabulist who founded the Church of Satan and claimed, among other things, to have been born with a tail. Born Howard Stanton Levey (he changed his name in his teens), Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997) grew up in Chicago and was drawn from an early age to the “fantastical and the macabre”—he read Dracula by age six and was soon schooling himself in hypnotism—and developed a scorn for traditional religion. Launched in 1966, the Church of Satan “rejected the Holy Trinity... and allowed its congregants to indulge in their lust for life”; its scripture was a manifesto LaVey published in 1969, which blended the “rational self-interest of Ayn Rand with the godless self-realization of Nietzsche.” The church soon spread across the U.S., though its popularity is hard to quantify—LaVey claimed that by 1970 it boasted between seven and ten thousand members, a number he almost certainly fabricated. Brod’s portrayal is appealingly colorful and eccentric, if somewhat underdeveloped—he spends little time examining LaVey’s legacy or his movement’s cultural significance. The result is an energetic yet superficial portrait of a bizarre figure in American history.