Michael Aquino: Founder of the Temple of Set, Life and Ideas

Michael A. Aquino (1946–2019) was an American army officer and occultist who rose to senior rank in Anton LaVey's Church of Satan and in 1975 founded the Temple of Set, the most important initiatory organisation of the modern left-hand path. He reinterpreted the Prince of Darkness as the ancient Egyptian god Set, made the Egyptian word Xeper ("to come into being") the centre of his philosophy, and became a prominent and controversial public figure during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

Early Life, Education and Military Career§

Michael Angelo Aquino was born in San Francisco on 16 October 1946. He studied political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating in 1968, and later earned a doctorate there, completed in 1980. Commissioned in the US Army in 1968, he specialised in psychological operations and served in Vietnam. He remained in the active army and later the reserve for more than two decades, retiring as a lieutenant colonel.

His military career was unusual for a religious founder and later became part of his public image. In 1980 he co-wrote with Colonel Paul Vallely a short paper, "From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory", proposing a more aggressive use of strategic psychological operations. The paper was a policy discussion of propaganda, but in later decades it circulated widely in conspiracy literature as supposed proof of secret mind-control programmes, a reading for which there is no supporting evidence.

Joining the Church of Satan§

Aquino encountered the Church of Satan, founded in San Francisco in 1966, around the time of his first military service and became a member about 1969–1970. Intelligent, articulate and widely read in philosophy and history, he quickly rose through its degrees, edited its newsletter The Cloven Hoof for a period and became one of LaVey's most trusted priests. He later wrote an extensive insider's history of the Church, circulated among members from the late 1980s and later published, which remains an important if partisan source for its early years.

Within the Church, Aquino represented a more metaphysical tendency than LaVey's own. While LaVey presented Satan mainly as a symbol of human nature, as described in LaVeyan Satanism and the Church of Satan, Aquino and some other priests understood the Prince of Darkness as a real intelligence and regarded magic as more than psychodrama. These differences became decisive when organisational tensions grew in the early 1970s.

The 1975 Schism and The Book of Coming Forth by Night§

In 1975 LaVey announced that degrees of initiation in the Church of Satan could be granted in recognition of contributions, including financial ones. Aquino and a number of senior members interpreted this as the sale of priesthoods and as proof that LaVey regarded the Church as a business rather than a genuine initiatory body. They resigned in protest, and Aquino set out to determine whether the Church's authority had passed to them.

According to his own account, on the night of 21–22 June 1975, the summer solstice, he performed a ritual invoking the Prince of Darkness and received a communication that he wrote down as The Book of Coming Forth by Night. In it the entity identified itself as Set, the Egyptian god of storms, deserts and foreigners, declared that the Age of Satan proclaimed by LaVey had ended and inaugurated an Aeon of Set, and named Xeper as the "Word" of the new aeon. The text consciously echoes Aleister Crowley's reception of The Book of the Law in 1904, treated in Thelema and the Book of the Law, and Aquino presented it as continuing and correcting Crowley's revelation.

For Aquino, Set was the original form of the being later demonised as Satan: the god of isolate, self-aware consciousness who stands apart from the natural order. Historians of ancient Egypt point out that Set had a complex and changing role in Egyptian religion, being both a protector of Ra and the murderer of Osiris, as outlined in Ancient Egyptian Religion; Aquino's Set is a modern theological construction that draws selectively on that history.

Founding and Leading the Temple of Set§

The Temple of Set was incorporated as a non-profit church in California in 1975. Among its founding members was Lilith Sinclair, a former Church of Satan priestess who later married Aquino and became a senior figure in the Temple. Aquino served as its High Priest for most of the next two decades and as its leading theorist throughout; in 1996 he stepped down in favour of Don Webb, though he remained a Magus and an influential voice.

He gave the Temple an initiatory structure of six degrees, a system of semi-autonomous orders devoted to particular currents, and an extensive internal literature, much of it written by himself. The core teaching holds that the human psyche is a gift of Set that sets humans apart from the unconscious cosmos, and that the purpose of life is Xeper: self-creation, the deliberate development and immortalisation of the individual self. The Temple's approach is described in The Temple of Set and the Left-Hand Path and placed in a wider context in The Left-Hand Path.

Some of Aquino's choices provoked controversy. In 1982 he conducted a private ritual at Wewelsburg castle in Westphalia, which the SS leader Heinrich Himmler had planned as an ideological centre. Aquino described the working as an exploration of the dark side of twentieth-century history and its occult symbolism, and the Temple's Order of the Trapezoid took up related themes. Critics read it as a flirtation with Nazi imagery; Aquino rejected the charge and insisted that the Temple condemned National Socialist ideology.

The Presidio Investigation and the Satanic Panic§

The most painful episode of Aquino's life came during the Satanic Panic. In 1987, in the course of an investigation into alleged abuse at a child-care centre at the Presidio army base in San Francisco, a young child was reported to have identified Aquino as one of the abusers. Police searched his home in August 1987, attracting heavy media coverage. No charges were ever brought against Aquino or his wife, and Aquino argued that he could not have been in San Francisco at the times in question.

The army's criminal investigators nonetheless listed him as the subject of an investigation, and Aquino spent years challenging this in court, without success. Researchers of the period, among them Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, place the Presidio case alongside the McMartin preschool trial as an example of how leading interviews, recovered-memory techniques and fear of Satanism produced allegations that collapsed under scrutiny. In the late 1980s Aquino appeared on television talk shows to defend Setians and other minority religions against the claims of "Satanic ritual abuse".

Writings, Ideas and Legacy§

Aquino was a prolific writer. Beyond The Book of Coming Forth by Night, his works include his histories of the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, the Temple's foundational documents on initiation and "black magic" understood as the self-directed transformation of the psyche, and a later book-length expansion of his ideas on MindWar. His writing is systematic, erudite and polemical, combining Egyptology, Western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche, and the ceremonial magic of the Golden Dawn and Crowley.

He died in San Francisco in September 2019. Historians such as Ruben van Luijk and Massimo Introvigne regard him as the key figure in the transition from LaVey's atheistic Satanism to a philosophical and initiatory "left-hand path" that treats the self as sacred. His insistence that Set was a real principle, rather than a symbol, opened a path for later currents that combine individualism with metaphysics. At the same time, his career shows how a small religious movement became entangled in the moral panics of its time, and how the public image of Satanism was shaped as much by accusation as by its adherents' own teachings.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Michael Aquino?§

He was an American army officer and occultist (1946–2019) who served as a priest in the Church of Satan and in 1975 founded the Temple of Set. He wrote The Book of Coming Forth by Night and developed the Temple's philosophy of Xeper, or self-creation.

Why did Michael Aquino leave the Church of Satan?§

In 1975 he and other senior members objected to Anton LaVey's decision to award initiatory degrees in return for contributions, which they saw as selling the priesthood. They also held a more metaphysical view of the Prince of Darkness than LaVey.

What is The Book of Coming Forth by Night?§

It is a short text that Aquino said he received from the Prince of Darkness on the summer solstice of 1975. It identifies that being as Set, proclaims the Aeon of Set and makes Xeper the central principle of the Temple of Set.

Was Michael Aquino charged in the Presidio case?§

No. He was investigated in 1987 after a child's allegations, but no charges were filed. Historians of the Satanic Panic treat the Presidio case as one of several day-care cases in which allegations were not substantiated.

Sources and further reading§

• Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent — Stephen E. Flowers, 1997
• Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism — Ruben van Luijk, 2016
• Satanism: A Social History — Massimo Introvigne, 2016
• The Invention of Satanism — Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen, 2016
• Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology — Jesper Aagaard Petersen (ed.), 2009
• Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture — Chris Mathews, 2009
• Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt — Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, 1995
• Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend — Jeffrey S. Victor, 1993