The Satanic Rituals (1972): LaVey's Companion Volume Explained

The Satanic Rituals is the second major book by Anton Szandor LaVey, published by Avon Books in 1972 as a "companion" to The Satanic Bible (1969). Where the earlier book set out the philosophy of the Church of Satan, this one gathered a series of ceremonial texts, each introduced by an essay that claimed a source in some older secret tradition, from French libertines and Russian sectarians to the Yezidis and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Scholars read it today as a revealing example of how modern Satanism built itself a usable past.

Background: From The Satanic Bible to a Book of Ceremonies§

By the early 1970s the Church of Satan, founded in San Francisco in 1966, had a national network of local groups called grottos. The Satanic Bible had sold well, but its ritual section was brief: a general framework for ceremonies of compassion, lust and destruction, together with LaVey's adaptation of the Enochian Keys of John Dee and Edward Kelley, whose origins are traced in Enochian Magic and John Dee. Members and grottos wanted fuller ceremonial texts, and the publisher wanted a sequel.

The Satanic Rituals answered both needs. Its long introduction argues that Satanic elements can be found in many cultures and secret societies, often hidden under other names, and that the Church of Satan was the first body to draw them openly together. LaVey insisted, as he had in The Satanic Bible, that ritual was a form of "intellectual decompression": a deliberately theatrical setting in which participants could release emotions and confront the conditioning of a Christian upbringing. The book carries the same Sigil of Baphomet emblem as its predecessor, and its history is best read alongside The Satanic Bible and the wider account of LaVeyan Satanism and the Church of Satan.

Contents of The Satanic Rituals§

The book is organised as a sequence of ceremonies, each preceded by a historical-sounding essay. What follows is a description of their themes, not a guide to their performance.

Le Messe Noir§

The opening ceremony is LaVey's version of the Black Mass, given in French with an English translation. Its introduction reviews the legend of the inverted Mass, from heresy accusations to the Affair of the Poisons and the novel Là-bas by Joris-Karl Huysmans. LaVey argued that the Black Mass had mostly been an invention of the Church's opponents and inquisitors, and that its value for a modern Satanist lay in blasphemy as therapy: it was meaningful mainly to people who still felt the weight of Catholic belief. The long background to this rite is told in The Black Mass.

L'Air Épais and Das Tierdrama§

"L'Air Épais", the ceremony of the "stifling air", is presented as a rite of the Knights Templar's highest degree, a drama of death and rebirth in which the initiate confronts mortality. No historical Templar source supports this claim; it belongs to a long modern tradition of attaching occult secrets to the order, described in Templar Legends.

"Das Tierdrama" ("the animal drama") is framed as the work of a German lodge descended from the Bavarian Illuminati. Its central theme is the animal nature of human beings, and its recited "law" plainly echoes the chant of the beast-men in H. G. Wells's novel The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), turned from a satire on imposed morality into a celebration of instinct.

Die elektrischen Vorspiele and Homage to Tchort§

"Die elektrischen Vorspiele" ("the electric preludes") is set in the atmosphere of Weimar Berlin, with its expressionist cinema and fascination with machines and angles. LaVey used the rite to develop his interest in geometry and atmosphere as tools for affecting emotion, ideas that later fed his "Law of the Trapezoid". "Homage to Tchort" draws on Slavic folklore, in which chort is a common word for a devil, and on nineteenth-century speculation about a dark god Chernobog.

The Statement of Shaitan§

The most problematic chapter presents a rite attributed to the Yezidis, the Kurdish-speaking religious community of northern Iraq and neighbouring regions. LaVey relied on Western sources such as Isya Joseph's Devil Worship: The Sacred Books and Traditions of the Yezidiz (1919), which presented the Yezidi veneration of Tawûsê Melek, the Peacock Angel, as devil worship. Yezidis themselves reject that identification, and specialists regard the texts Joseph translated as late and unreliable. The label had long been used to justify persecution of the community, which makes LaVey's borrowing a striking instance of an outside stereotype being adopted as a lineage.

The Lovecraftian Rites and the Satanic Baptisms§

The two Lovecraftian ceremonies, "The Call to Cthulhu" and "The Ceremony of the Nine Angles", use a pseudo-ancient language and the mythology of Lovecraft's stories, which LaVey treated as intuitive fiction about forces older than humankind. The book closes with Satanic baptisms for adults and for children. The Church had publicised a baptism of LaVey's three-year-old daughter Zeena in 1967, and the published rite presents baptism as a dedication to self-affirmation rather than to a deity.

Sources, Borrowings and Invented Lineages§

Almost every chapter of The Satanic Rituals claims a pedigree, and almost none of these claims can be documented. Historians such as Ruben van Luijk and Massimo Introvigne treat this not as simple fabrication but as a recognisable strategy. Per Faxneld has described LaVey's habit of constructing "secret lineages" of de facto Satanists, figures who never called themselves Satanists but whom LaVey adopted as forerunners because they embodied pride, carnality or rebellion.

The approach has precedents: Freemasons and occultists regularly traced their rites to Templars, Egyptians or Rosicrucians, and Eliphas Lévi presented his syntheses as the hidden doctrine of the ages. LaVey's twist was to value fiction and film openly as sources of ritual power, so that Lovecraft, Wells and expressionist cinema could stand beside Masonic material without embarrassment.

The book also illustrates a habit of reading other religions through the lens of Western demonology. The Yezidi chapter, and in a different way the Slavic one, take descriptions written by missionaries, travellers and folklorists and treat them as authentic traditions of devil worship. Modern scholarship on the Yezidis, notably the work of Philip Kreyenbroek and Birgül Açıkyıldız, describes a monotheistic religion with its own cosmology, in which the Peacock Angel is the chief of the angels entrusted with the world, not a rebel against God.

Michael Aquino and the Lovecraftian Ceremonies§

The two Lovecraftian rites matter historically because they were written by Michael Aquino, later the Church's most important dissident. Aquino, whose career is traced in Michael Aquino, stated that he composed them at LaVey's invitation, and they reflect his own more metaphysical approach. Where LaVey generally treated the Prince of Darkness as a symbol, Aquino's texts speak of ancient intelligences and of a principle of self-awareness that stands apart from the natural order.

This difference became decisive in 1975, when Aquino and other members left the Church of Satan and founded the Temple of Set. The theme of the "nine angles" remained important in Setian symbolism. The similarity of name with the British Order of Nine Angles, which emerged in the 1970s and is discussed in The Order of Nine Angles, has often been noted, although that group gives its own, very different account of the term and has no connection to the Temple of Set.

In the same years Kenneth Grant was weaving Lovecraft's fiction into his Typhonian Thelema; together these developments made Lovecraft a major source of mythology for later occult groups.

Ritual as Psychodrama in the Church of Satan§

The underlying theory of the book is that ritual works on the participant, not on the cosmos. LaVey distinguished "greater magic", performed in a ritual chamber, from "lesser magic", the everyday manipulation of attention and appearance. In the ritual chamber, he argued, symbols, costume, sound and darkness create an emotional state in which a person can express desires and resentments that ordinary life suppresses, and then leave them behind.

This explains why LaVey could be relaxed about the invented histories of his ceremonies: if a rite's purpose is psychological, its authenticity matters less than its power to move the participant. Critics have argued that this weakens the Church's claim to be a serious religion; defenders reply that frankly acknowledging ritual as theatre is one of its distinctive features.

Reception and Influence of The Satanic Rituals§

The Satanic Rituals never matched the reach of The Satanic Bible, but it has stayed in print and served Satanists as a ceremonial repertoire. Its Black Mass circulated widely in occult subcultures and, during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, extracts were sometimes cited by police trainers and Christian writers as evidence of a criminal underground, a reading that ignored both the book's theatrical premise and the absence of any link to the crimes alleged.

In the work of Faxneld, Jesper Aagaard Petersen and others, the book is a key document of how a modern religion invents tradition: borrowing the prestige of secret societies, repurposing hostile stereotypes as badges of honour, and treating popular fiction as a source of myth. It also documents the early tension between LaVey's symbolic Satanism and Aquino's metaphysical one, a tension that shaped the whole later history described in What Is Satanism?.

Frequently asked questions§

Who wrote The Satanic Rituals?§

The book was written and compiled by Anton Szandor LaVey and published by Avon in 1972. Michael Aquino, then a priest of the Church of Satan, wrote the two Lovecraftian ceremonies, "The Call to Cthulhu" and "The Ceremony of the Nine Angles".

Are the rituals in The Satanic Rituals genuinely ancient?§

No. Although each ceremony is introduced with a claim of descent from Templars, Illuminati, Yezidis or other groups, historians find no evidence for these lineages. They are best understood as invented traditions that lend atmosphere and prestige to rites composed in the twentieth century.

Do Yezidis worship Satan?§

No. Yezidis venerate Tawûsê Melek, the Peacock Angel, as the chief of God's angels, and reject the identification with Satan made by outsiders. LaVey's chapter relied on early twentieth-century Western sources that scholars now regard as unreliable.

Sources and further reading§

• The Satanic Rituals — Anton Szandor LaVey, 1972
• The Satanic Bible — Anton Szandor LaVey, 1969
• Devil Worship: The Sacred Books and Traditions of the Yezidiz — Isya Joseph, 1919
• The Yezidis: The History of a Community, Culture and Religion — Birgül Açıkyıldız, 2010
• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories — H. P. Lovecraft, 1999
• Contemporary Esotericism — Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, 2013
• Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism — Ruben van Luijk, 2016
• Satanism: A Social History — Massimo Introvigne, 2016