A Satanic Incest Inquest: 5 Easy Pieces w/Church of Satan Scion Stanton LaVey
Because DO you really remember Halloween?
In the big picture we all want the big picture take on all of the mysteries around the periphery of how we understand the world. Charles Manson and the so-called Manson Family get rolled up in some unsavory and seemingly senseless murders and we try to make sense of it all, inevitably stumbling on words that try to do that without really doing that at all. “Evil” being the one that comes up most/more often than others.
And because the light and the heat of the lurid draws our attention more readily than not, it’s frequently that kind of nihilism that congeals around our attempts to “understand” and so it is that, yeah, evil really does seem to do it. A purposeful delight in cruelty and a senseless adherence to a certain kind of chaos, check and check, and our Sunday School rendering of how our lesser angels hang is complete.
Because the idea, as it’s been laid out, has evil being an exterior product which, likely, has really very little do with us. An exterior product that exists in a moral framework that suddenly, or maybe not so, finds itself enmeshed in some sort of orthodoxy that makes eating traife just as retrograde as adultery.
But likely as not, we’ve got it ass backward and it’s very much an interior product that makes the creation of a Satan a convenient MacGuffin. A biochemical sleight of hand that we all shrug and agree on as the reason/excuse we did whatever we did that we should never have done in the first place.
These were the meditations in 1987 that had me track down the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey who had both stopped doing interviews and moreover revealed that he was an atheist who was really just working a hustle. He had stopped doing interviews because people only sought him out around Halloween and were less interested in the intellectual spirit of inquiry and more the buzz and trill of the hoo-hah scary dude factor.
I asked the cops who interviewed me, “did the supposed victim tell you she kept her mouth open when I pissed on her face?”
In regards to the hustle part? He mostly saw himself as serving a purpose that people would pay for in the same way that Christian churches worked believers and he had reasoned that this worked for him. Years later, after befriending and tripping the fame fantastic with Jayne Mansfield, Sammy Davis and John Travolta, among others, he died.
And years after that I got an angry email from his grandson Stanton LaVey. Stanton believed an article I had commissioned had maligned him as a wife abuser and he wanted to set the record straight.
I liked Stanton right off in a way very similar to how I had liked his grandfather. And I appreciated both the hustle and the work as creative evaluations of human weakness and/or gullibility. But the Church of Satan post-the death of Anton has been riven with the worst kind of fracturing, infighting and casting of aspersions up to and including dark whispers of fraud, associations with serial killers and, finally, incest.
Which seemed to signify, well that, and with Halloween being right around the corner, a perfect time to break out another FIVE EASY PIECES; this one with LaVey the Younger. So five questions, five answers. None (sort of) about what the person is noted for. Enjoy.
[ONE] You know what convinced your grandfather to talk to me was that I was a Stanford guy. Did you go to college?
STANTON: I briefly attended Junior college to study film history. I only stayed for a semester or so before dropping the whole college idea. It was what they call, I think, a study for “personal enrichment.” I have issue with what is taught in school, how it’s taught and the classist (no pun intended) method of academia. I believe it is mostly a load of BS that boils down to memory games and achievements in sucking up to this administrator, that professor, the dean of such and such. It’s not unlike Hollywood, the mafia, the government and every other corrupt system that masquerades to some degree as an altruistic endeavor, a benefit to society as a whole, blah blah. Bullshit! Punk isn’t dead. Drop out, tune out, trip out and get out while you still leave a kinda cool looking corpse for embalming, if you’re fancy enough to afford a gravesite all your own.
[TWO] To a certain degree you have some celebrity through association but without any of the usual perks like huge amounts of cash. How much does this suck?
STANTON: It’s way cooler to have the association than not. But would I trade that association for huge amounts of cash…? Probably. I own a collection of original photos, artwork and other extremely rare LaVey/Church of Satan vintage late ‘60s and 1970s anti-religious relics if you will, that is worth, all told, a cool million. But I very rarely part with original pieces. I have my core collectors I sell to. It’s a close knit LaVey Collectibles family of sorts. I like knowing who has what and also playing a part in who is granted what and for how much cash. Life could be a lot worse. Put it this way, I might not be rich but what I lack in cold hard cash I make up for in charisma, pedigree and straight up audacity as my grandmother sometimes calls it. When god flipped the coin when I was born I called “heads I win, tails you lose…muthafucka!”
[THREE] The circumstances under which we met involved a sort of MeToo accusation. Having been born into the family business how much leeway has that given you when trying to negotiate relationships? In other words since people might expect you to do just about anything have you been able to?
STANTON: Yes, actually, women, for the most part, fetishize me before meeting me the first time. And beyond that it is almost as though I am expected to be a freak in the sheets. How fun it is or isnt totally depends on my personal interest levels on a case by case basis. If I sound like a sex snob, I guess I am, so what about it? Can anyone blame me? I was babysat by witches masquerading as hookers to help pay my grandfather’s mortgage. In other words I was raised by whores for the most part.
My mother was more of the family slut. She taught me what a “foot-job” was when I was just five using her feet to demonstrate how to curl her toes around a man’s penis to better help him ejaculate. I was intrigued by it all, and I bet a lot of kids who are overexposed to sexuality find it at least interesting. But having to endure listening to Zeena’s liaisons with men such as Boyd Rice and Adam Parfrey on the other side of my bedroom wall was kind of sickening at age 9. Even still I started dating when I was in elementary school and had my first sugar momma by age 10.
What’s really weird is how many women confess fantasizing about me raping them. How much it has to do with the rape charges I myself once faced, charges that were dropped by the plaintiff after I exposed her plot to gain stardom by way of exploiting my consensual sexual relationship together to the DAs office. When I asked the cops who interviewed me, “did the supposed victim tell you she kept her mouth open when I pissed on her face” the cops jaw dropped as he stuttered, “no, no no she did didn’t - looks like we’re gonna have to double back around and interview her again.”
When he said that I knew the case had no merit, luckily I was right. I was released, charges dropped after one very uncomfortable weekend in the county jail. And of course that one weekend that I could have spent clearing my own name from these bogus allegations, instead the villagers got the jump on me and started posting Youtube videos slandering me and making me out to be some kind of monster.
The lesson to be learned, “don’t mess around with the only cute barely legal girl who everyone wants to bang in a tiny mountain village, even worse, don’t do that when you already have a name for yourself as a sort of lady killer. Even worse yet don’t do any of this when the last biography on Charlie Manson just hit bookstores with an entire chapter about your bizarre life in it!
[FOUR] You wrote a story for me not only about your rapist uncle who wanted you to kill him but also family suspicions that a family friend was The Zodiac Killer. Reportedly it seems that the Zodiac Killer was just shown to have died back in 2018. Did your Grandmother have the right guy?
STANTON: I wish I could confirm that for you but the answer that she has for me, that has been locked away from me all these decades, the odds that she is going to make it available to me now, while she herself is still amongst the living are slim to none. All I can say, for now at least, is that she swears by her account and the name she has, and still does! If that is an indicator that they have in fact discovered the right guy…only time and my own grandmother’s passing, and then my meticulously sorting through her things will tell.
[FIVE]: And in regards to your parentage, it seems there's been a rumor, first shared with me by you actually, that your grandfather was also your father: how true or possible do you think this is and could that have largely been responsible for the fraught relationship you had with your mother?
STANTON: My family was into some pretty experimental shit, I have to admit, and the possibility that Anton somehow inseminated Zeena when she was just 13 years old, might have at the time seemed perfectly rational, who knows? What we do know is that my entire family backed up total lies fabricated to veer me away from anything resembling the truth. From inventing far out claims that Zeena was essentially raped by a “sea man” who had docked in Half Moon Bay to sell his bounty of fish to other slightly more believable plots of a neighborhood delinquent being the father that my family rejected because of his criminal nature.
Both stories have tons of holes in them and both have been rejected in more recent years by my family as having been lies to make it so that I would ask less questions. It didn’t work. I am just as curious as ever as to the true identity of my biological father.
Let this be a notice to anyone thinking of leaving their children and leaving them in the dark as to their identity. Don’t do it, the amount of emotional damage that can be done by denying the facts and making up lies is not worth whatever your egos reasons for doing so are. Your kid is likely to forgive you for leaving, if they know who to forgive at all.
So how likely is it that Anton is my father? About as likely as my grandmother’s claim to have dined with the Zodiac killer, I’d give it 51% credible, 49% incredible.
But for some bizarre reason, my grandmother Diane’s logic on the matter of whether or not Anton could be, or is, my father and my grandfather, the best she can come up with isn’t a solid answer but rather a dismissive rejection that, and I quote, “Anton wasn’t into young girls.”
Well, lest we forget that Anton married his first wife when she was underage, and then began cheating on the first wife with Diane when Diane was barely 17 years old. And this is when Anton was already 31. So evidently he DID have a thing for the younger ladies.
And, he is even quoted as remarking on Zeena’s figure saying that she’s going to be a “top of the clock”. In Satanic lingo that means “big tits.”
His first wife, Karla’s mother, later killed herself by the way.
There are other interesting asides but I’m saving them for my book. A bio exclusively on Anton by me. If I live long enough to see it all the way through.