471. Satanism: Fear, Manipulation, & Suffering | Zeena Schreck
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Hello, everybody. Today I'm speaking with Zina Shrek, whose original name was LaVey, and who is the daughter of Anton LaVey, who was the most famous Satanist of the last half of the 20th century. And so she grew up

with the man who established the modern Church of Satan. A very intelligent man, very charismatic, very creative, very Machiavellian, psychopathic, manipulative, a carny barker, an admirer of P.T. Barnum, a man for whom there was a sucker born every minute, a man who deeply believed that the world was an act and that life was a carnival and that

if you had the wool pulled over your eyes to his benefit, then so much the worse for you, and I suppose as well you deserve it for being so foolish and gullible. That's the eternal self-justification of the Carney-Barker psychopath. And Zina grew up in that household as, by all appearances, a dutiful woman, young woman, committed to the well-being of her father,

to the degree where in the 1980s when a panic about satanic practice arose in the general population, quite a widespread panic, she felt compelled to defend him and took on the mantle of high priestess of the satanic church for five years before coming to the realization that she had been

immersed in a pack of lies, in a web of lies, before understanding as a consequence of the promptings of her conscience that she was participating in something that was not what it claimed to be, and in a life that wasn't what she thought it was, and was also called by promptings, you might say, of a genuinely religious nature to

forswear the church to leave her father and to set out, what would you say, into the desert of her own doubt.

And so that's what we talk about. The crazy 1970s, the hangover from the hedonistic bliss of the summer of love hippies, the dark side of let it all hang out and tune in, turn on and drop out, right? The catastrophic underbelly of immature hedonism, right? And, uh,

Well, who better to guide us through that absolute bloody catastrophic mess than the daughter of the prime Satanist from the 1960s and the 1970s? Join us. Zena, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me and everyone today. I guess I'm curious, you've had a very strange life, and I want to describe that. I guess I'm curious,

to first, for myself, before we delve into any of the details, what do you think we could accomplish with this conversation? What's the utility of the conversation as far as you're concerned? Well, that's a good question. Well, it's also a big question. I suppose in the bigger picture,

Since I don't normally break apart bits of my past to discuss, it only comes up anecdotally in relation to where I am today. I always prefer to live in the present, in accordance with my Buddhist practices. But if I were to think of an overall accomplishment of what we get across today, I think it might be to reassure

those who might be watching who live in difficult situations or difficult families or really dysfunctional conditions in life that they should not give up hope and that there is a way out and to always remember that everything is impermanent. If we practice patience and diligence

in trying to find our own course that is in alignment with who we truly are. I think that the only thing I really have to offer, because everybody has adversity in their life, but in my case, maybe the only thing I have to offer is that

people who are raised with certain conditioning or certain

you know, belief systems that they've learned through childhood that they really never had an opportunity to question, or even if they did question it, they always felt they had to defend it on behalf of their parents, whatever that may be, whether it's religion or politics or corporations or, you know, profession or anything. That if there are people who

who felt that because of their early life conditioning that they're just stuck and that's their destiny and that's their fate and they really can't do anything about it, there's no way out, that I would at least hope that my life's experiences and my life story can provide an example amongst many others in this world and in history of the fact that

if you have strength of character, if you have a greater vision, if you have, you know, a willingness to change, that it is possible to break the conditionings that were placed upon you against your wishes. Well, so there's a couple of themes in there that are, I think, personally and sociologically relevant. I mean, on the...

We all, what would you say, are the beneficiaries and victims of the actions of the past. And I suppose that's true most proximally with regard to who it is that you have in your family of birth and your parents. And they have their individual idiosyncrasies and talents.

and then they are also exemplars of the much broader culture. Now, your father was a very famous man, an extraordinarily controversial person. You know, I was reading the Satanic Rituals this morning, and back, you know, I'm old enough, so I kind of caught the tail end of the hedonistic 60s. You know, I'm really a kid of the 70s, and the 70s was where the 60s went to die. As am I.

I always say that the 70s are the hangover of the 60s. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, the drunken hangover. Because it was a really ugly hangover. Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. It really was. And, yeah.

You know, when I was 18 or 19, I spent a fair bit of time investigating Alistair Crowley and also your father's works and familiarizing myself with the dark side of the 1960s, you know, looking at how that had affected the music, for example, of the Rolling Stones and the vicious underbelly of the

what would you say, carefree hedonism, let it all hang out, tune in, turn on, drop out ethos of the 1960s. It's like, that's all fine, boys and girls, but, you know, there's a pretty dark shadow that comes along with that. And it's like the shadow of the Marquis de Sade for the French Enlightenment. And these aren't the sorts of things that people like to delve into, but

except carelessly and foolishly, that's for sure, and pridefully. And, you know, it was quite a trip down memory lane in some ways to take a look at this book today, because I haven't thought about those things in relationship to the early 60s or the early 70s and the late 60s for quite a long time. So you were right in the middle of this. And so maybe you could start by telling people who your father was and then...

Also, when you were born, so we can place you exactly in time. And then I think we'll probably go through your life autobiographically and let you tell your story. So why don't you tell everybody who your father was to begin with? Okay. Yeah, so first of all, you know, I was born in 1963, and my father was Anton LaVey. So he was the founder of the Church of Satan, which...

coincided with being the founder of modern-day Satanism as a cohegent kind of organizational, openly public organization for Satanists. Not that Satanism didn't exist before, but it was always in secret or it was practiced very differently from the way my father practiced it. Let me back up and

clarify something when you were discussing about the hedonism of the 60s and the dark side and the Rolling Stones kind of Altamont-type things that were happening then. The interesting thing to understand about

my father and his organization was that they were a generation older than the hippie generation. And as such, they were mostly comprised of— the members were mostly people who were young in the post-war generation of the '50s. So in a strange way,

you could consider that the Church of Satan always considered itself the counterculture to the counterculture, because we were... My father was really very anti-hippie. And so this is where it gets complicated, because it doesn't fit into the stereotypical idea one has of Satanism.

in the occult milieu. So it's a little bit complicated because my father was anti-occultist, actually, and he was really much more of a performer and a showman and very Machiavellian, of course, in the formation of the church in the way that he did it.

So, the hedonism that was promoted within the Church of Satan was something different than what was going on in the 60s. So, the hedonism within the Church of Satan was more like, I mean, it was more like for Satan.

I don't know if you recall, but in the 60s there was this phrase, "Don't trust anybody over 30," right? Because the 60s was a youth culture generation, and anyone over 30 was considered part of the establishment, "Don't trust them." Yet, in the Church of Satan, that pretty much summed up a large percentage of the membership, and they were very much

a part of the establishment, but in the sense that they were professionals. And they would go to Church of Satan events to sort of live it up, whether it was to meet people that they'd have liaisons with or affairs or whatever. It was really not...

It's hard to describe, but it was really not what people imagine and what people think. I mean, yes, there was a lot of psychopaths and a lot of deviant people in the Church of Satan. I'm not going to say there wasn't. But the way that that transpired was very different than the "let it all hang out" kind of attitude of the hippies.

My point is both are problematic. Both are not... So my father's attitude was more like...

He was more like P.T. Barnum, who was an inspiration to him. It's like a sucker is born every minute, and it's perfectly logical and valid to take advantage of people that want to be taken advantage of. As long as everybody's enjoying themselves and nobody complains, then, you know, but the fact is, interestingly, he was anti-drug. He was very anti-drug. He was a very law and order kind of person.

I mean, we had friends in the police department.

I have to say something that I've never said publicly before either is in my teenage years, I dated a policeman who was a friend of my father's who was just part of the patrol that was always coming in and out of our house because we needed protection from vandalism and from attacks on the house and threats. And so...

He fell into a different category than most occultists, and as I say, he didn't even consider himself an occultist. He considered himself more of a, more of like a doing some sort of like a social experiment in a way of providing that if you created a doctrine and a religion that was based on people's base

impulses and base desires that maybe you could take away the stigma of people exercising those base desires. But the problem with that is it was entirely mixed with a lot of neuroses from his own side. I mean, it was very, you could say,

postmodern in his way of approaching Satanism and the symbolism of Satan, it really doesn't hold up to scrutiny and academic study and things like that. And certainly it doesn't hold up in terms of what constitutes a real religion. It's not a real religion. It's just more like

More like, you know, a private club, basically. However, I would say that I was raised with the understanding that it was a religion, and I took that very seriously. And then...

much later in life during the 80s when there was the Satanic panic, and then I felt that it was my religion that was being under attack. But more importantly was because I had empathy and compassion for my father, and I was very afraid that he was going to be framed for something that he was not responsible for. And yet he was utterly incapable of defending himself, utterly unwilling.

defend himself, that, you know, what I did for that organization was really for my father. It wasn't like... And then subsequently, what grew out of that was a sense of responsibility. Like, I felt like, okay, somebody...

needs to just show up and show that these people are real people, that they're not ethereal things that you can just hurl accusations at. And, yeah,

because I knew from experience that the media likes to grab onto boogeymen and make something that is going to inflame and get people very riled up. And you can sell a lot of advertising that way, and you can also create a lot of new jobs that way, and it's good for the economy, all kinds of things like that. So I knew that that was happening, but...

But more importantly, I thought that they were imagining that, "Well, this isn't going to hurt anybody because there isn't really anything such as Satanism anyway, so we can kind of use this." But in fact, there were people who considered themselves that.

And I thought, well, we need to—I need to at least be a placeholder, just say, this is, you know, a real person whose life you're affecting. And because I felt like I had to protect my father. So what I did was out of necessity and out of love for my father, I—

And fear, because I had a son, fear that my son would be taken away from me by Child Protective Services. So fear, a mother's fear, love for a father. And then yet at the same time, as all that was going on, because I'm jumping forward to the 80s now with the satanic panic period, as all that was going on, my parents were, they weren't ever...

legally married in the first place, but they lived as man and wife, so you could say that they lived as common-law marriage. And so they were breaking up, and so there was this immense tension between

between my two parents and me feeling as though I was being pulled between the both of them. Two narcissistic parents, both saying, you know, either blaming me for being like the other parent or trying to draw and quarter me, saying, you know, "You have to support me." No, you have to support me. And so there was a lot happening in my life at that time.

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Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash Jordan. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Jordan, and you can get an extra three months free. Expressvpn.com slash Jordan. Okay, so I want to delve into some of the characterizations that you touched on in relationship to your father, because he's emblematic of a whole wealth of

what would you say, like a symbolic cluster. You know, you said that, well, you described him as narcissistic, you described him as Machiavellian, but you described him as a showman. You said that, you know, one of his heroes was P.T. Barnum. You described the, what's the phrase, there's a sucker born every minute. Then you said something very interesting about that, and this is something that everybody who's listening and watching should understand.

I mean, one of the things that characterizes a Machiavellian orientation towards life is a proclamation which has an iota of truth in it, which is, if you're stupid enough to let me take advantage of you, if you invite me in to take advantage of you, you deserve everything you have coming to you. Right, well, and you know, it's a very strange thing. So, let me reflect on that in a...

a strange manner. So, in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is very bitter and resentful because what he's offering to God is not being accepted. His sacrifices are being rejected. And he essentially makes a case to God that his misery and unhappiness is a consequence of his failure. And God says back to him, "No, that's not true. You're missing an intervening variable here, buddy.

You did sacrifice inappropriately. You're not bringing your best to the table. And because of that, you are failing. But that's not why you're miserable. You're miserable because something tempted you when you were failing. It's sin that crouched at your door. And you invited it in and you let it have its way with you. And that's why you're bitter and miserable. And that's a very different causal sequence. Now, the reason I'm bringing that up is because the constant...

of the showman carnival barker is, and you see this parodied, for example, or explored in Tom Waite's work, and you see it touched on in the work of people like Robert Crumb, is that if you're the kind of damn fool who invites the predator into your house and then he eats you, it's like, well, you kind of set yourself up for it and you had it coming. Now, the problem with that is that

the Machiavellian, who you could think about as a force of divine vengeance in that regard, ensuring that those who are foolish get their just desserts, also uses that as a justification for their own predatory and parasitical activities, right? Well, of course I can take advantage of you because, well, first of all, you're probably a thief anyways, and you just hide it with a facade of moral virtue. That's what the Marxists always claim. Yes, there's a lot of justification. Yes, yes. And then the next thing is, well,

if I accept this story that you're a fool and so I'm entitled to deliver you what you deserve, then that justifies virtually anything on my behalf. And so now it's a very complex characterization of your father, but now you also...

interestingly enough, in the 80s, so you would have been in your 20s at that point, despite the fact that your father had this very complex character and was toying with the edges of propriety, let's say, at minimum. You also felt compelled to rise to his defense, and you did that very publicly. And so I'm very curious, like what, how would you, you obviously loved your father,

I did.

They never came to school to defend me when I was being bullied and picked on. I just had to learn how to fight myself. But yes, I always felt...

until I was an adult and parted ways with my father, I mean, I always felt that we were buddies, that we were really close. And yeah, I mean, obviously, I looked up to him as the, you know, Jehovah God kind of archetype, except in Satan form. And which is interesting, because I think that's a lot of how his followers do look up to him as like a kind of

Satanic Jehovah, and they treat him in the same way. And so it is not really that I was such a rebellious kid. I was a very obedient, dutiful daughter. And I, you know, there was only—even though I was left to my own—left on my own quite a lot growing up,

I mean, my mother and both of them made it clear that there are only certain rules, which is don't do anything that is going to drag us into a negative light, which in hindsight I think is really funny because as if they didn't do enough themselves to do that. But I couldn't do, for example, I didn't have the luxury of having a drug problem. That just couldn't happen because...

that would reflect badly on my parents. So that was something that, you know, although they were pretty logically open-minded about, if you want to experiment, you know, let us know, and that kind of pseudo-liberal attitude. However,

by their behavior and by things that my father would say about really being very anti-drug, it didn't take a genius to know that he would not have been happy if I had gone down that route. So I was constantly keeping myself in check and being sure that I lived up to what his standards were.

which was really idiosyncratic, obviously. So what I'm trying to say about rebellion, what I'm trying to explain about rebellion is I was not a rebellious child. In fact, I always felt like it was us, our little clan, against the world. And I was very rebellious against other authority figures, like in school or out in the world, and I was really a scrappy kind of warrior in that way.

But I always felt like there was the core family that was solid and tight. And I continued to feel that way until the split with my father. And I would even characterize when I severed ties with my father, not as an act of rebellion, but just as simply severance, as putting an end. That was the end, forever. So that wasn't, you know, because rebellion implies a kind of

relationship. It implies that a child will test the limits this way, and then the parent will push back that way, and there will be a give and take and a give and take. I never had any of that. Never did any of that. I reached my limit, and then there was a tipping point, and then I was done, and it was a clean severance, and I never went back. It was not even rebellion. It was just, "I'm done."

You've pushed me too far, and I can't even... Okay, so let me ask you two questions about that, because there's another paradox about your father. I mean, in the satanic rituals, for example, it certainly appears that he's perfectly willing to harness, let's say, power.

sexual activity for the purposes of the church. And there is an overlap with a kind of sexual hedonism there. But you also characterize him as someone who essentially had a law and order orientation and was very strict with regards to

for example, to your own behavior, at least on the drug side. And so those are very difficult things to bring together, right? So you have this Machiavellian person, he's narcissistic, he's a real showman, he's drawing all sorts of attention to your family, and he's a celebrator of what's unacceptable. And yet, there's an element of him too that's

aligned more with the law and order types. And so, and then you also brought into that your sense. Yep. Go ahead.

No, finish your thought. Well, you also brought into there something else that's interesting, which was, you know, you were a dutiful person and your initial presumption, which I think is the default presumption of a daughter, is that your primary loyalty was to your family and that you felt that your family was an embattled unit. Now, you know, that is a trick.

that Machiavellians use with people who are close to them, right? They tend to sever their ties to other people and keep them intensely focused on what's proximal. I'm very aware of that. Yeah, to prize loyalty above all else. And they use the word we. They use the word we. So that you're dragged into the we.

Yeah, well, and I can't see how in some ways how you could have escaped that as a child, right? I mean, especially if you're relatively dutiful in your personality, because you're going to assume, especially if your father's also charismatic, your primary allegiance is going to be to him. And so you think you believe that that was what happened.

motivated your participation as a high priestess, say, let's say in the 1980s, is that you were still on the side of your family. You still believed that your father... Okay, so how did the evidence mount for you that the orientation that you had in relationship to your father was...

Of the sort that would eventually have to be severed. Like, how the hell did you come about that revolution? That was a gradual process. Like most things in life, things don't just... Really, things don't just happen out of the blue. Things don't just happen suddenly. There's lead-up. There's... And I've always been...

a really patient person, and I give people a lot of chances and a lot of benefit of the doubt. And I've always, sometimes stupidly so, but I've always tried to see actually the good in people, even people who are really reprehensive. I've known a lot of

People who, by any normal standards of society, would think that these people are beyond the pale, they're totally psychopathic and horrible. And, you know, I mean, that's a matter of psychological analysis. That's not for me to say what their diagnoses are. I'm just saying that by normal standards,

standards, they would be seen that way. And yet, because I've known such people in perfectly normal—I wouldn't say perfectly, because nothing about my life has been perfectly normal—but I mean, I've known them in the same way that I'm talking to you now, just talking normally. And so I could always see—yeah, I mean, I saw the problems in such people, including my father.

But in the case of him in particular, so that was a gradual process. But what began to happen is as I was defending him publicly, and I would like have a little powwow with him and say, okay, these are the interviews I have lined up for next week. And then, you know, what would you want me to... Because I would always say to him, what's the party line? What do you want me to say? I was a mouthpiece for him. But at the same time,

Because he would just say like, he was so out of touch with reality, he would just say crazy things like, you know, talk about celebrities. And that's all he cared about was that people saw him in an entertaining and exciting and kind of cocktail party conversation kind of way. He really had no interest or concern about, you know, the phenomena that was happening there.

that were happening in the country at that time with innocent people being accused of horrible things, that didn't interest him at all. So what happened with me is, you know, I would begin kind of having to

either I would have to, you know, push him a little more, like say, well, I'm not really sure that they're going to want to talk about Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe and things like, and I would say, you know, but people are being accused of being members that aren't even members of the Church of St. Things, things like this. And so anyway, what I had to do

because there was a lot of cognitive dissonance happening, what I had to do was be his mouthpiece and yet filter it through my personality, through my conscience.

And I had to live with it. So, you know, I would phrase things in such a way that according to my personality, what I could live with up to the degree that I was still promoting his vision. And it was never about me. It was always, and I always held, you know, held him up as the, you know, this is, I'm here on behalf of him.

And so gradually what happened is some people would start coming forth to me and telling me about things about his life that I didn't know about. People in the public would just say, oh, do you know that

It would be horribly embarrassing, but they'd say, "Well, do you know where this part of the Satanic Bible came from? Or do you know where that really came from?" And of course, because I lived in a vacuum and a bubble in my family, so I just accepted it. And this is the best way for Machiavellians who are narcissistic, is to get people to be very credible defenders of them.

If you can convince an innocent person that all of your facade is true, and you send them forth, they will be very credulous, and they will be very credible, and they will seem very convincing. And of course, that's the problem of what I have to live with today, is I still get so many Satanists that come to my website or come to my social media pages and

clueless and say, "How can I join? How can I? So where do I sign up?" And it's like, you didn't get the memo 30 years ago or over 30 years ago. So the disillusionment

happened gradually. It wasn't like overnight. And then, of course, like all things that happen gradually, then there's the tipping point. Then everybody freaks out and they say, whoa, she just blew up over this one little thing. But it wasn't just one little thing. It was an accumulation of too many things. And then the final straw was when he threatened my own life. When after I had been doing this four or five years on behalf of him, all of these public appearances, I had been

taking the, um, threats, and I had been endangering my own life, showing up in studios where there would be huge hordes of, you know, Christian evangelists that really want to take a baseball bat to my head and, you know, kill me. Um, and I have lots of anecdotal stories about that, too, how that's, that's a reality. Um, and then, uh,

So what had happened was, the tipping point was that my husband at that time and I, we were preparing a 25-year anniversary of the Church of Satan, and it was going to be a public performance. And the venue, but also the police and the sheriff's department in Los Angeles had been getting a lot of threats and a lot of warnings that if it was going to go on, you know, something really terrible would happen. And

And interestingly enough, actually, because I knew Richard Ramirez at the time, too, because my husband at the time and I were considering writing a book about him. That's a whole other subject. Tell people who he was.

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Richard Ramirez was a serial killer, a serial murderer in Los Angeles in the 80s who self-identified as a Satanist, and he was a follower of my father's. And he's somebody that, you know, the present-day Church of Satan wants to pretend there was no connection to. But here's the thing. As I was beginning to represent the Church of Satan on a broader scale,

level in a broader spectrum, and there were some things that began developing in me. And those were realizations, and realizations that if you are a real religion, you can't pick and choose who is drawn to that religion.

I mean, there are Christian murderers too, but each Christian denomination can't just close shop and say, "Well, you can't join." Because if you are a true religion, you can't have that kind of selectivity. Religion is something bigger.

Religion isn't a private club, right? So then that brought to mind philosophical questions, like philosophical questions like, "What is the meaning of it? What purpose does religion serve, actually, then, to the community? And if we are supposed to be this kind of anti-religion or a counter-religion,

What purpose does that serve and to who? And so, it's just a religion of Anton LaVey's personal friends? Well, then that's not a religion, right? But he had different tiers. He had like his inner circle, and then he had his circle of friends who in fact were outside of the Church of Satan, people that he liked to feel like he could have a kind of

Yeah, Machiavelli and also Rasputin, you know, the Russian monk Rasputin. He was also very influenced by him. So these were kind of role models for him that he felt that he, through knowing people in influential circles, whether it was in the entertainment field or other fields, that he could have some sort of influence over them in some way in their practice.

decision-making, things like that. But then he had the laity, the laity of the Church of Satan, which of course, because he was so in his youth, he was very influenced by the carnival, carnies, carny life, you know. So the laity is what we always referred to as the rubes. Those were the paying customers. The laity were, to quote my father, he would say, "They're the stuffing in the mattress."

You know, they're what pay the bills. Right, right. So that carnival association is extremely interesting. So there's a, I'm a real, what would you call, aficionado of the early Disney classic animated movies. And I've spent a lot of time, for example, lecturing about it, walking through the story of Pinocchio. And there's a mystery, there's a lot of mysteries in that animated movie, which is about the attempts of

someone striving forward to free themselves from the invisible strings that control them, right? Because Pinocchio's a marionette and he's trying to become a real person. Well, the first temptation that he had

encounters. This took me a long time to figure out. The first temptation he encounters is to become an actor. He gets picked up by the coachman, this Italian character, who's a traveling carny, and he's put on the stage as a puppet, right? And the Italian carnival director claims that he's going to make him a star, but

It imprisons him, essentially. And it took me a long time to understand. I thought, well, this is so strange because this is a Hollywood movie, and yet actor is put in an extraordinarily negative light. And I thought, actor, actor. And then it seems obvious in retrospect, but it wasn't to begin with, that Hollywood

Well, it's a parody of accomplishment, right? To be an actor is to have all of the, what would you call, the trappings of the real thing, but not to do any of the work. Exactly. It's a persona. And there's not... Well, and you said, you know, you're tilting continually towards the description of your father, essentially, as a carnival barker. And you said...

For example, that when you were trying to work through some of the deeper philosophical implications of the accusations that were coming your family's way, his insistence constantly was to play up his association with high-level celebrities, right? And to become... So, I mean, so the actor issue is...

it's a continuation of the great game idea. So you say, well, there's a sucker born every minute. It's perfectly reasonable and even right to prey on the gullible because they deserve it. But then there's a deeper justification underneath that, which is something like, well, everything is a great show anyways, right? There's nothing real. That's kind of the postmodern element. There's nothing real. Everyone who's

successful isn't successful because they've actually contributed something real. They're successful because their act worked.

And so I might as well have an act. And your father was obviously, I mean, with the carnival surround, that really becomes tangible because a carnival is all about taking a break from the duties and responsibilities of life and celebrating the orgiastic and the odd and the lustful and the base. And there's an attraction of that carnival barker who's often represented in literary works

in literary symbology as a, what would you say, an invitation to the satanic realm, right? That's why you see in Stephen King, for example, and Ray Bradbury, it's very, very, or in movies that

use the trope, let's say, of the serial killer is often terrible things are going on behind the scenes in a carnival, right? It's a place of dark magic. And so your father obviously was part of that world. And is it safe to say that he believed that it was all a great show and that he was staging a theater? Okay, yeah. Yeah.

Here's the thing, is I believe that in the beginning, he really believed, he really believed that he would, I think that he really believed that so-called normal society, straight society, you know, normal, regular society,

middle-class society that they were corrupt in their way. So I'm sure he had some early life experiences. I'm sure he had early life experiences that disillusioned him and caused him to take a dim view of society and the double standards and the corruption and things like this. But here's the thing.

A lot of people get that too. But not everybody thinks, "Well, then I'm going to take revenge, and I'm going to flip the script, and I'm going to flip the script, and I'm going to do one up on that." But I think in the beginning,

With the help of my mother, I must say, because my mother, don't forget, was 50% of the development of the Church of Satan as well. And she had her own personality, and she had her own makeup from her past and her family and things like that.

And she very often was like a balance to him, but sometimes she was also someone who was pushing him from behind the scenes too, "Go further, go further," and setting—she was his PR agent, she was the administrator of the whole—she built up the Church of Satan in the administrative sense. So if my father had not had

my mother, who was young and naive, and really looked up to him when she first met him and admired his talent, his creative abilities. And he was a raconteur, you know, he could talk for hours and hours. And so she didn't mind taking the behind-the-scenes position of

you know, doing all the work of creating and building up. - Okay, so she did the work, because that's curious, eh? Because a man like your father, given his temperament, highly entrepreneurial, highly open, highly creative, but also with that Machiavellian and narcissistic tilt, it isn't obvious at all that he'd be willing to do something like the administrative work that would be necessary to build anything approximating an organization. So your mom did, okay, but you also characterized your mom very briefly

also as narcissistic. Now, you said she was also young. How much of an age gap was there? Eleven. Eleven years. Okay. No, no, I'm sorry. Twelve years. Twelve years. Okay. And how old was she when he met her? Seventeen. Okay. Okay. Okay. So that explains something right there. Right. So he's just about thirty at that point, and she's seventeen. Well, he turned thirty right when they met. He turned thirty right when they met, and then a couple months later, she turned eighteen.

Right, right. And she was drawn to him because he was magnetic and she, but now you also characterize... Was that the time? Well, she doesn't sound like you exactly, right? Because you said you were dutiful and you were, you know, you were actually striving to be, to aim up and you were...

trapped in a situation where up looked like what your father was doing from within your family, but you characterized your mother as narcissistic. So tell me more about her role and her personality.

Yes, but she was narcissistic in a different way. She was not... And before I understood more about narcissism and really did some deep studying about all of the different kinds of narcissists and different traits that different ones have, I used to think, in just my own definition, is I used to...

think of her as a narcissist by proxy, because her narcissistic feed was in being a martyr to the great narcissistic genius, my father. She was the martyr, so she had no time for me. I mean, she was an absentee mother in my life. She passed off her mother duties onto other people.

So my grandparents or people in the neighborhood, other church members, my sister, she had absolutely no time for me. And because I was the only child of the both of them, and I was the last child. So my sister was born when my father was very young. He was only 21 years old when my sister was born. So she, in her formative years, she knew a very different person than

than the one I was raised with. And she actually had probably a more fun early childhood because it was more a normal kid's childhood, you know? I mean, yeah, they had, she always describes it as they had kind of an Addams Family existence, kind of Addams Family home. They were quirky and they had unusual pets like tarantulas and snakes and things like that. But that's not

as malignant as inviting psychopaths, opening your door to the public and letting any walk of life come through when you've got two young daughters. It's like the irresponsibility factor increased in the ensuing years. And as my sister was a teenager, I was still a small child. So my sister being considerably older than me,

And as a teenager, she could pretty much handle herself. She didn't have to be—although the strange thing is my mother used to say that I was allowed to participate in the rituals because I was precocious, whatever that means. But I think that was more of a justification in my mother's mind that if she—

said that I was more resilient and more precocious and more mature in my, you know, in my dealings with people because I actually was, as a child, I was kind of

I don't know. Yeah, scrappy is the only way I can describe it. Because I would talk back at some of the members when they would say I was just being shy. I was an introverted child, and I still am an introverted person, I think. My basic baseline leans towards contemplative thinking.

activities and pastimes, and I tend to be more thoughtful and think things out, so I'm more introverted in the stereotypical ways. So as a child, sometimes members would say, "Oh, she's just shy. She doesn't have the confidence to talk." And I would actually confront them and say,

I'm not shy. I have nothing to say to you. Right. Which was true. Right. That's a very different thing. Which was true because I'd see all these people, I'd see all these adults acting like blithering idiots, you know, just drunk and falling all over the place. And not really. I mean, I'm not saying they were...

participating in orgies and things like that, but they were just gross. A lot of them were just the ones that would come to the parties and that would party after the rituals and stuff. It was just gross. So no, I didn't have anything to say to people like that. But

to be fair, then there were also other members of the Church of Satan, too, who were not like that, who, you know, whether they were creative types or they lived a different lifestyle from that kind of

sneaking around behind your spouse's back kind of, you know, swinger club mentality. There were other people that didn't fall into that category, but they did not tend to stay long, I have to say. They moved on, actually. So, I want to dig into this characterization of your mother as martyr, because that was a very, very interesting thing. Well, because I'm, and you characterized that as a different form of narcissism. So, there's a bunch of reasons I want to delve into that. So,

See, one of the primary forms that female narcissism takes is something like the martyrdom of false compassion, right? Okay, can I interject something? You absolutely can, yes.

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Um...

It's interesting you say that because in Buddhism we also, you know, I mean of course Buddhism teaches compassion. It teaches that compassion should be, you know, the foundation from which all of our activities spring from. However, there's also very strict teachings about

the false understanding of compassion. And in Tibetan Buddhism, it's referred to in the translation as "idiot compassion." Now, idiot compassion is when it's motivated

for the wrong reasons. If it's either motivated for personal gain or it's motivated to, you know, create some favorable response for yourself, maybe you want to look better in other people's eyes, you're doing it for some reason that's going to actually buttress your ego. That's idiot compassion. And you have to really be careful not to do that.

Okay, so in the story of Adam and Eve, right, it's Eve who precipitates the fall, although Adam is equally at fault. His role in that particular catastrophe is secondary. But Eve's fundamental, I think Eve's fundamental sin is the idiot compassion that you just described. So let me untangle that a bit and

tell me what you think about it because we're getting at something very fundamental here like your father was a showman for the cult of Lucifer let's say but you're pointing out very clearly that your mother enabled and abetted that and for her own martyrs absolutely okay so she was an enabler she was a classic sin

Well, and she also ignored you, which is an interesting detail, and then also in some ways sacrificed you to the propagation of the cult. Now, Eve's fundamental sin, so you could imagine what the story of Adam and Eve does is it sets up the fundamental patterns of masculinity and femininity, and it does that in a very compacted manner. I would say according to the Abrahamic paradigm. Yes, yes, yes, definitely. But not according to all paradigm.

No, but there's an interesting overlap with what you just described. And I'd like to delve into that. And the reason why is because...

I just want to interject the reason why there's an interesting overlap is because, in essence, even a church of Satan is Abrahamic. So, yes, that would be, because it has to, by sheer definition, how can you have a church of Satan if it isn't in reaction to something that is, you know, it is, in essence, a sect. And Abraham, just yet another...

An anti-sect. Correct. I understand, I understand what you're saying. But still within that framework, within that framework. Yes. And as such, that's what my father was playing with.

was flipping the archetype of, "Okay, if the church says Satan is evil, then we're going to flip it and we're going to say he's good, and then it's just a reversal. It's a role reversal." But within that same paradigm, so I'm only elucidating on why,

What you're about to describe is under the paradigm of Abrahamic religions, this archetype or this example of typical masculine, typical feminine. But I would disagree that that's the only way of defining masculine and feminine because, to my understanding—

in a more broad sense, there's more of a spectrum. So you can have malignant feminine behavior, and you can have heroic feminine behavior. You can have malignant masculine behavior and heroic masculine behavior. And so that's more like a grid or a spectrum. It's not just

This or that. Now, with that understanding, because I just wanted to clarify that, now present what you were going to say in terms of the relationship between my parents and the Adam and Eve. Yeah, well, there's nothing in what you said that strikes me as like...

what would you say, that would motivate any contention on my part? I think the idea of malignant and positive masculine and feminine, that's... Yes. So, let's concentrate on the malignant element of the feminine to begin with, because you brought up this issue of idiot compassion. And it's not just idiot compassion, it's something worse, you see, and this is also partly how it's portrayed in the story of Adam and Eve, because what Eve essentially does is proclaim her ability to take...

formulation of the moral order to herself and then to clutch the serpent itself to her breast. So what she's doing is proclaiming to herself and the world that her compassion is so complete and godlike that she can even hearken to the voice of the serpent and bring that into the family circle. Right? And that's... Can I interject here? So that's the ego. That's the ego believing, I'm above all this, I can handle it.

Right. Yeah, and a lot of women have this attitude. But that's a false confidence. 100%. And it has cataclysmic consequences. But it's very interesting to delineate that issue of martyrdom out because you characterized your mother to begin with that way. And so I want to delve into that because I want to know from your perspective what benefit that martyrdom to the cause is.

conferred upon your mother and why do you and what now you also said she was very young when she got tangled up in this and so but she was also attracted to your father right I mean there was some reason that she invited him into and was and was open to his seductions let's say okay so what

What do you think your mother gained from this? Well, it's exciting for a young teenage. Okay, exciting. See, he was a musician. He was a musician. He played the organ at various civic events in San Francisco, but also at certain nightclubs, lounges, and bars. So in those days, being an organist...

was sort of the equivalent of being a DJ today. I mean, because you would play requests. People would, you know, drop a buck in your fishbowl that's sitting on the organ and they'd request something. And so it was sort of like being a human jukebox or like a DJ or something.

So that was kind of an exciting thing for a teenager who was living actually not in San Francisco, but in a suburb of San Francisco. So to a teenage girl, it seems like, oh, I want to gravitate to the bright lights and city of San Francisco, the big city, because I'm just in Pacifica, and that's kind of a dirt bowl, you know, and I want to get out, and I want to experience some excitement. And he seemed...

to her like um capable of delivering uh yes yeah okay and so and what was her upbringing like was she was she what kind of background did she she was working class she was from a working class family blue collar working class family uh her father her natural father was actually died she never knew her natural father he died in alaska jail an alaskan jail of liver

liver failure because he was an Irish alcoholic and he just drank himself to death by the age of 36. So she never knew him and her mother, I guess, to protect her from that realization. This is kind of what I'm about to say is kind of the germ of how family lies get

and yeah, and propagated and take on momentum. And then once you realize that that, once a child or a parent realizes they can get away with that, then they just make up many more lies. And this is,

This is why I often sort of jokingly say that I was born into a web of lies. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because I didn't know. I didn't know so much. I didn't know so much. So the first lie was that my grandmother, my Swedish grandmother, didn't—maybe to protect her daughter because her daughter—

was born. In those days, they used to say it was a reconciliation baby. Apparently, the father would go away and come back and go away and come back. And so, it was at a period of temporary reconciliation that my grandmother got pregnant with my mother, and then he went away again. So,

So naturally, that set up a kind of psychological ambiguity on my grandmother's part about my mother, because she was the product of this somebody that my grandmother eventually had to divorce. But he died, actually. He died before she even divorced him. I think that's how it happened. And then, so then my grandmother died.

Swedes are very Swedish women are really strong women and they're very

responsible women, and they have a Lutheran work ethic. And this is something that's passed down to my mother, this Lutheran work ethic. But to make a long story short, my grandmother had these two young daughters, and she moved from Chicago to San Francisco because she thought there would be better opportunities for work in San Francisco. She got herself a job at the phone company, and she was a single mother in the 40s.

raising two little girls on her own. And it was at the phone company that she met her next husband, who wound up being her husband for life. So at the phone company, he was a delivery person

I think he delivered bottled water, actually. He was a teamster. He was totally blue-collar, hard-working teamster, worked 12-hour days, and really solid, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, liked baseball. But he was second-generation Hungarian, so he was really, really...

very keen on being all-American, you know, baseball, hot dogs, everything. And so my grandmother remarried, and then my mother knew that this was her stepfather. She knew that this wasn't her natural father, but she always really loved him. And so it was a good relationship in that way, but in the back of her mind, she always knew

that she had no idea who or she didn't know anything about her natural father.

So that left some kind of like a hole in her psyche, which was easily filled then by my father. Right, right. Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so let's go into that martyrdom element. Okay, so now you've set up the background of the motivation for your mother and perhaps described the origins of her susceptibility to, well, to the more showy sort of carnival character, musician, right, and center of attention that was your father. Okay, but...

But now let's go into what she gained from this, because, again, you characterized it as a kind of narcissism of narcissism of martyrdom. And so tell me, tell me how you saw that in your mother and how you figured out that that was going on.

Okay, the way I saw it was because of the dynamics between her and her mother. I always had the impression, and it was stated explicitly to me by my mother, that she always felt that her mother really didn't like her very much. And that because one of my mother's classic things was to tell me, like, if anything ever bothered me or hurt my feelings, her mantra was, toughen up, Zena, things are tough all over. At least I don't beat you like my mother did.

And because she would always tell me that her mother would beat her so hard with, in those days, a brush, you know, a hand brush was bigger. They had big ivory brushes that, you know, could be used as a weapon, actually. And she used to tell me that her mother would, you know, spank her and beat her with a hairbrush until it broke. And so she always held that over my head, like I'm being so...

She believed that by not beating me, she was actually indulging me. But in fact, she was neglecting me. She was just leaving me to my own resources and not giving me any structure or no—and the strange thing, which I didn't understand when I was growing up, was in a sense, she was raising me as a single mother. But I was not aware of that, because I did not know that my parents were not married.

They lied to me about that. I always thought that they were husband and wife. And we lived in separate parts of the house. My mother and I and my sister, we lived on the top floor. My father had his own apartment in the basement. So we lived, in a sense, like two floors apart. It would be like if you divided your house into separate apartments or something. So...

So to get back to what was your initial question? Martyrdom. Martyrdom. What did she gain from this? So I believe that the advantage to her was she always wanted her mother and her stepfather, she always wanted to have their love and their approval. And I think she wanted that in her mother's eyes that she would be regarded as someone important. Right.

And by aligning herself with this kind of flamboyant entertainer man,

And the weird thing was, even as the Church of Satan was developing, she concealed so much from her mother about what was going on. For example, her parents weren't allowed to visit our home unless it was really organized and planned. There was no just dropping by. None of the family members just dropped by. That just wasn't allowed.

And so, even as the Church of Satan was developing and there were, you know, like I said, my father had different factions of the Church of Satan, where he had his celebrity friends and his, you know, so-called important people that he fraternized with, that he considered his friends, but not necessarily members of the Church of Satan, although they might have been on

honorary members or just kind of de facto members, but they were not the people who chose to pay for a card-carrying membership, you know. So those people, I think she really hoped that she, from her own mother, that she would get some sort of respect. Respect. I mean, respect is a

a common motivation in narcissism that people feel like they aren't appreciated enough. They want respect. They want to... - Is it respect, do you think, or attention? - They want validation. - Is it respect or attention? - In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual peace. But here's the thing, prayer, the most common tool we have, isn't just about saying whatever comes to mind. It's a skill that needs to be developed.

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with the dynamics between her and her mother. I don't think it was a tension. I just think she wanted, finally, for her mother...

to think that she was worthy. Yeah, okay, got it. Well, that makes sense. Well, if her mother was torn about her initial validity because she was the product of a sexual union that was ambiguous in its fundamental nature, then you could imagine that that dynamic would play out in the background for your mother, like constantly, well, possibly throughout her life.

Definitely. And even when she tried to get close to her mother—I mean, she did eventually get close to her mother in her senior years. But I can say that I even felt the fallout and the sort of chain reaction of my grandmother's weird attitude about my mother.

and probably of my mother's choices in life because I don't think, even though they tolerated my father, I don't think they were thrilled about her choice in marrying him, although they tolerated him. And yeah, when he could come to the holiday dinner with stories about his friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., then, oh, my grandfather loved that because, you know, he liked those kinds of entertainers and things. But it was sort of superficial. It was rather superficial. But I felt...

I felt from my grandmother a kind of judgmental attitude about me. About you too, yeah. Because I was the product. I was the product of my mother. Right, right, right. So whatever ambiguous feelings she had about her own daughter, it then continued on to me as well.

Right, right. Okay, so let's go into the 80s now and when you really decided to take up the mantle. Now, you've laid the groundwork for that. You said that you were a dutiful person. You said that it was in your father's interest and your mother's too to have someone who was innocent and actually aiming up for

and a believer in the moral propriety of the enterprise defend them. And you happen to be, as far as I can tell, you happen to be the choice for that role. And so you played the role of high priestess for how many years?

Five. Five years. Okay, so tell me what that meant for you. Like, there's the priestess element, and then there's the family spokesperson element. And then there's the next element would be what the consequences were for you of playing that role, let's say. And then also your disillusionment and movement onward to a different way of conceptualizing the world. So let's start with, well, let's start with what you actually did. Like, what did it mean to have that role for five years?

That's what I had to figure out, because it just happened suddenly. I had to figure out what does it—because in my mind, my mother was the high priestess, but she had left. So there was a vacancy. And occasionally, actually, my sister, too, served in that role when she was lecturing, or my father dispatched her to Amsterdam to be the—

to be sort of the spokesperson and the one to oversee and kind of keep an eye on what was going on in the European Church of Satan. So, in that capacity, then my sister also was high priestess in those days in that way, in those capacities. But in my mind, my mother was the only high priestess, and I had to think, well,

Because I was a single mother at that time, and I was not in a position to, and I was also working in hospitals and law offices. No, I think at that time I was working at UCSF. I was working at UC Davis in environmental health and safety. So I had a full-time schedule in my office.

On my plate, being a single mother, what was most needed was to do interviews because he told me he didn't have anybody. I mean, the Church of Satan was sort of more abundant at that point.

There had been a couple of schisms in the '70s, and that left my father really in a deep state of very dark depression, really malignant black dark depression and agoraphobia. And he had locked him—he just sequestered himself into his home and would only go to very select, safe places in public, but not

He was not doing any interviews anymore. And he did not want to confront these allegations. His attitude was, "He'll just wait till it blows over." But, you know, not just me, but everybody thought, "Well, this isn't anything. This is pretty extreme. This isn't going to blow over in a week or so. This is snowballing and continuing to get bigger and bigger."

So I had to... I had to...

kind of parachute, I had to parachute into the role of, you know, paratroop into the role of high priestess. I had to figure it out on my own as I went along. And then that's when, as I said, I started having realizations of like, well, what does it mean to be a religion and what is religion? I started doing a lot of my own self-research and looking into certain things. But aside from that, experience was beginning to

open my eyes to certain things. And what had happened was because my mother left my father, you know, I got to back up because you said, well, it was to my mother and father's advantage to have me doing this. But no, not exactly. It was to my father's advantage to have me doing this. My mother, having left

She was trying to pull me out of doing that. And she was convincing me. Every time I would talk to her, she was haranguing me about, don't care about anybody else. You shouldn't be doing this. And, you know, and like, I need your support. And if you're doing this for him, then how can I expect you to be supporting me during this divorce, you know, thing? And so it was very stressful for me being...

pulled at all sides. And she was actually telling me, "Don't care about anyone." Because I was beginning to develop what in Buddhism is called "Buddhichitta," which is a feeling of a realization that compassion can't be just for a select few special people. Compassion actually broadens, and it actually, you begin to

to develop and attain a certain level. It was just like the beginning stages when I began cognizing that, hey, something is really seriously wrong here because there's innocent people out there that are not even Satanists that have never even heard of such a thing. They haven't even heard of such a thing called Satanism, and yet, you know, their neighbors are

calling them into the FBI and the police and stuff, and it's just ruining people's lives. Was that part of that daycare witch hunt? The satanic death ritual? Absolutely. The McMartin preschool case was, up to that point, the hugest waste of time and money.

in U.S. history devoted to false allegations. Did you ever read Satan's Silence by any chance? Do you know that book, Satan's Silence? No. Oh, well, it was written by a lawyer and a social worker, and it's the best account that I've ever read by a large margin of the satanic daycare panic in the 1980s. It's an amazing book, Satan's Silence. Yeah, okay, so you were tanking. Okay, so I get the picture more thoroughly because that was an unbelievably widespread panic.

Right. And it lasted for quite a while. And so and you were trying to. OK, so let me ask you a question about that. Now, you know, the dark side of this potentially is that if you're called upon to be a spokesperson in a time like that, there's also a lot of attention drawn to you.

And, you know, you pointed out that your mother was certainly willing to play the role of martyr to seek attention and to seek respect. And, you know, you said that you were a pretty dutiful person and that you had a job and that this role of spokesperson was dropped on you and that you paid an emotional price because you were torn between your parents.

On retrospect, in retrospect, you've obviously done a lot of thinking about that. Do you believe that there was any contamination of your motivation by a desire for public attention or anything like that because you had the spotlight put on you? That could be easy to perceive, but the simple answer is everything was happening so fast. I didn't have time to even think about it.

As everything took off, I didn't have time to even think about it. And in fact, even the few times that I did think, oh, well, maybe this could be turned into an advantage, I very quickly learned that no, in fact, it's not an advantage because I had had seven years of theater training, for example, acting, and I wanted to go into the arts. I just wanted

to have a career in the arts some way, and I wasn't sure in which field, I hadn't decided yet, but as a single mother, the only vocation, the only branch of the arts that I could afford to pay for myself with my solitary—nobody was helping me, I had no

financial support from my family or certainly not from the father of my son. No, it was all to me was the only thing I could do was take drama courses and coaching and for example City College had free tuition in those days so I had to kind of piece together an education and yeah I mean some of my friends at that time that were in my acting classes they said well maybe you can use it to your advantage and but the problem

The problem was, it became super clear to me immediately that no, this is done, it's finished. I can't because of the religiously motivated hysteria that was happening then. If I went to, for example, I had some friends that would set up auditions for me who knew the casting agents, and so they knew

You know, of course, in America, you're not allowed to state your reason why you're discriminating against someone. But because through either an acting coach or friends who knew casting agents or something... So I'd go on an interview, but the casting person would say, we're not going to give any money to the Satanists. Are you crazy? And we can't be associated with this. It was like...

You know, being an untouchable. And then that got worse. It was not only professionally that I realized, okay, now I am too branded. I am so much of an identity, and I am known too much. I am too branded. I can never just play a role.

That's never going to happen. I can't be like a versatile actress that can play a cowgirl one year or not that I want to, but I'm just saying hypothetically that, you know, I couldn't play a role of like a baseball mom or something like that. It's just not going to happen because...

because word would spread, first of all, my name, my name, because at that time, not many people had that last name, LaVey, and then that would ring alarm bells. And then just physically, I was physically known and branded that way. Now, the paradox is, paradox is,

The Church of Satan actually began to—the membership began to grow because of my being out there. So it created a new upsurge in membership. And my father realizing this,

This is kind of a funny detail, my father realizing that I was actually generating more income for him and more membership. I remember he told me once that because I was doing such a good job representing him and that there were new members coming in,

that he would actually pay me, I think, 25% of all new memberships that come through that actually mention that they've seen me and wrote to join. So what's funny is he did that

For the first three, three memberships. So I got like at that time, I got $75 because at that time memberships were $100. And so I got $25 for three. And then it never happened again. Never happened again. So that was one of those pieces of information. Yeah, yeah. It was a gesture that was to dangle the carrot and make me think, oh, well, maybe, you know, but the, you know,

that dropped out. And not that I was doing it for the money, but I thought, for the first time in my life, I thought, oh,

"Oh, my Father's actually doing something for me, to help me, and He's actually acknowledging my contribution to what I'm doing for His organization." But it didn't last. It didn't last. And then that was that, and you asked me something else about… So here, I want to clarify. Because of the new upsurge of membership,

Here again, my father would cherry pick the people that he felt like, well, these people are in a category of movers and shakers. You know, they're kind of like in the new punk scene. And, you know, he was an old fart at that point. So he thought, well, this will, you know, maybe they'll boost my ratings with the, you know, with the cool kids. And so there was a new upsurge in what

in the membership of what he would call the rubes, but then there was also a new upsurge in what he cherry-picked as his little inner circle. And that was of these new kind of, you know, hipster, kind of edgy, punky or whatever, you know, just...

I wouldn't even know how to describe them by today's standards. But the interesting thing is they always claim, well, she just didn't know how to use it to her advantage. And what they mean by that, do you know what they mean by that? No, please elucidate. What they mean by that is I just wasn't Machiavellian enough. I just wasn't mercenary enough. Right, right. So that's a failing. I just should have been more…

Yeah, I should have been more black-hearted. I should have been just more misanthropic. I should have just been more just plow over everybody and just create my own. Well, you had the opportunity there to do that, apparently, you know, because you were driving membership. You could have definitely capitalized on that.

Not only did I have the opportunity to do that, I realized the power in that. But I was, as I said, everything was happening so fast. I was so swept up in, it was just extremely, it was an extremely chaotic time in my life and for the country that was experiencing that particular satanic panic phenomenon. However, then fast forward many, many years later, like about

15 or 20, I can't remember when this happened, but well after I became a Buddhist. And I was meditating, and in Buddhism they call the, well, really, the meditation session itself is the meditation session, but anything outside of the designated

meditation session is referred to post-meditation. Post-meditation can be any time in your ordinary daily routine, but in this case, what I'm going to refer to is the immediate post-meditation, because very often in the immediate post-meditation phase is where things come to you, where realization comes to you, where little sparks of

I'm not going to say enlightenment because enlightenment is a big thing, but like you could say are little steps in the path to realization and understanding. And knowing, so the realization that I had was true power is knowing what you're capable of, knowing how dangerous you could be

And refraining. Right, right, right. Of course, of course. Refraining. Refraining. Because I knew that I could mobilize people. And there were times where there were interviews. In fact, the very last interview I did that in my mind I designated, I knew in my mind, this is going to be it. This is going to be the last one. Because I ended on a good note. But it was not without reason.

Because the last interview I did, which was for a Sunday morning religion show in Los Angeles hosted by Tony Valdez, he was a very religious, conscientious journalist. Unlike many journalists, as you know, he actually did have a conscience, and he was a really, truly kind-hearted person.

a very open-minded person. And one of his colleagues had done an interview with me like maybe a month or a couple of weeks prior to that.

And her name was Christina Gonzalez. And one thing that I made very clear was because I'm a huge animal lover, I love animals, and in my formative years, because I was not properly socialized, my only companions were animals, cats and dogs, and the odd animals that we had in our home, a capybara, a lion, a mouse and a tarantula, all the crazy animals.

We're living happily together. Somewhat happily, yeah. But I did not have human friends of my own. You know, I was not properly socialized. So I'm still very close to the animal kingdom. So what I told Cristina Gonzalez was I said—

I really didn't even want to do any more interviews. I had felt that I knew at that point that I was leaving the Church of Satan. That was like sometime in March or April, and I had already told my father that I was leaving. And yet, my dutiful nature and I felt responsible, and she said she was telling me about a new law that was going to be passed by Los Angeles Animal Control.

about prosecuting religions that practice animal sacrifice, such as Santeria and Satanism, and they were bunching it together. But I told her, "Yeah, but Satanism doesn't practice animal sacrifice. We don't." And that's a fact. We don't. I mean, at least Levain's Satanism. If other Satanists do, that's not what I was representing. I was representing my father's organization. And so she convinced me that I really needed to do this, then

you know, to be a voice against this law that was going to be passed about prosecuting people for animal sacrifice. And I said, yeah, but it's kind of a contentious thing for me because personally, I do not agree with, you know, it was...

The problem was, I do not believe animals should be sacrificed, and it's in fact other religions that do, even conventional religions that do sacrifice animals or do kill animals in a ritualistic way. So, specifically I'm talking about Abrahamic religions that they eat their meat in a certain way, they do prayers, they do a certain ritual. It has to be a specific ritual to slaughter the animal.

So anyway, she convinced me to do it, but I did it under the condition. I said, the thing that has been disturbing me the most, being an animal lover, is...

You know, they're talking about animal sacrifice all the time, and they always plaster my face side by side with dead animals. And this really is beginning to take its toll on my psyche. It actually really is beginning to wear me down in terms of my mental equilibrium because...

The animals at that point were being raised in a misanthropic household. At that point, animals were more important to me even than most humans, honestly. So, you know, she promised me that. However, immediately as I watched the news broadcast, they did it. They spliced it and they edited it with a dead cat. And I got immediate... I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Classic.

Classic whatever the term is for nervous...

Well, it sounds like you had enough going on in your life to tilt you towards something like post-traumatic stress disorder. Like, that's just too much, all of that. I've been diagnosed that in the most complex ways, because it wasn't only that that caused me that. It was things in my early life and things subsequently, even after. So, yeah, that's been something that I've constantly been working on. So, yeah.

This is in relation to what I was explaining to you about that I know what my power is. I know that I can mobilize people. I know that I can inspire people to action. And I also know that people have often...

And I had that opportunity, I made a threat to them. And I said, if you don't make a public retraction by the next news show that the Church of Satan does not condone and does not support animal sacrifice, then I will have 200 angry Satanists on your studio doorstep picketing, and I'm going to contact all the other local news stations to cover it. And I threatened them with that.

And they did it, you know, they did the retraction. But this is what I'm getting to, to my last interview, Tony Valdez, who is a really kind-hearted person,

He reached out to me, and he actually said, you know, I feel for you. I see that you're under a lot of pressure and that you've been wrongly accused of things that you have nothing to do with. And he actually said, because he was from the same network, I think it was, honestly, I can't remember which network it was, but it was local Los Angeles network. And he said, how can I make it up to you? He said, I have some information.

little bits of authority. He says, I can't do a lot, but he said, I do have a Sunday morning show. And I thought, well, that's great. That's great. And I accepted it. And it was actually really nice, and it was the first time anyone ever let me speak without being interrupted. And he was thoughtful and kind. And interestingly, even in that very last interview, there was kind of a...

premonition of things to come because he made the comment, he said something like, "I see a lot of in what you're saying that sounds almost like Buddhism." And I don't know where that came from, but in fact, that was where my path ultimately went. So it's kind of interesting. So the point is, you know, realizing what your power—the true power is knowing that

knowing what you could do and knowing that you can refrain. You can make a choice, and you can refrain. And I have chosen—this interview we're doing today,

is an exception to the rule. I don't do any interviews anymore about this topic. Why do you make an exception? Because I felt that you, well, first of all, you're an educated person and you're a clinical psychologist, so you're approaching it from a different perspective than just a...

than just a normal podcaster who wants to get attention or just some other journalist who wants to do it for prurient interest. Because I get a lot of people who are pro-Satanic that want to interview me, and they want to make it seem like, well, it was just fun and games, right? Wasn't it just fun? Because all they...

All of them wanted to jump on the media bandwagon. And after I left, I left a void. And then all of these kind of hipster types in the Church of Satan that were my father's new inner circle, well, then they were all eager to just jump on that bandwagon. They wanted the media attention, but what they didn't get, they didn't get it. I didn't do it for the attention. I did it

for my father because he was my blood father. He wasn't, you know, those people were just doing it because they thought, I'm going to cash in on this too. And I'm going to get my face on these mainstream media things. So let me ask you a closing question. It's a complicated one. So you've alluded to two things as the pathway out of the mess that you were in

Well, until you left the church in the 80s. The first thing you talked about was the fact that you increasingly became aware that things weren't as they had been described and that there were things going on in your private life of your family and then in the church itself that were...

violating the integrity of your conscience. And you said that was an incremental process across time. And so I would say that that was the effect of conscience on you accumulating across time. But there's another element too, which we haven't spoken about. We won't be able to delve into it deeply.

there was also something that was attracting you forward. And that was what manifested itself eventually as the realization of this Buddhist path that was an alternative for you to the structure that you had inhabited within the family and within the church. And so can you describe the dynamic between your realization that there were nefarious things afoot and also this new path that you saw as possible

as good as an alternative making itself manifest because those things were kind of happening in parallel and so we didn't elaborate much on the buddhist call let's say as a as a positive way out yeah and that honestly that would take a lot more i know i know description well we may talk about that that was a journey wire side a week because we could delve into that more but but i know that

I'm asking you to compress a lot, but I would like it isn't only that you saw that things were wrong with what you were tangled up with. You also started to become aware of a different pathway forward. So what maybe you could just describe for us what it was that was calling to you, do you think? So I was developing I was developing a kind of.

broader compassion for people that I didn't even know, strangers, you know, people that I would hear about that were being subjected to accusations that was ruining innocent people's lives, not just our own membership population that was being affected by this. That was one side. But then

I was still, you know, like I said, these things don't just happen like a flip of a switch. They don't happen overnight. So the irony is because I was raised as a Satanist and because I was raised with the idea of...

you know, revenge. Revenge. And if somebody does something to you—my father wrote it in the Satanic Bible—if someone smites you on one cheek, smash them in the other. Don't turn the other cheek. Smash them in the other. You retaliate. You get revenge. And if you teach this to your children, and you're not kind and compassionate to your own children,

And you do something that jeopardizes their life again and again, but then at one time that is really very precise and very clear. What do you expect? You know, what do you expect? Do you think that...

You've taught retaliation, you've taught revenge. You don't expect that that's going to then come your way too, if that's what your message has been all through the development of your child. So I honestly felt, when I left the Church of Satan, anger.

I mean, I went through all the myriad emotions, and it took me a very long time to sort out all of my emotions, but my immediate instinct was, "I'm going to be a damn worse Satanist than you can even imagine, to my father."

And I thought, not only am I going to sever ties with you, and I'm going to look into the origins of all the lies that you've said, and I'm going to look into the origins of even terminology and jargon that you use. And for example, in the Satanic Bible, he's got a list of

gods and demons and things that he considers satanic, but that's ridiculous because so many of those have nothing to do with Satanism. And it's just his misinterpretation, I would say, of really what he was doing is he was taking

a Christian idea of deities such as Kali, the Hindu Kali, or the Egyptian deity of Set. He was taking a Christianized interpretation of these deities and just, again, inverting it and saying, "I'll Satanize it. I'll make it all about Satan then." So then I went on my own journey.

to look into the origins of these things and what is the reality of a lot of the things that I was not only raised to believe, but even my own baptism, certain entities that were invoked during my baptism. And my initial thought was, "Okay, you've done this now to yourself, and you deserve everything you're going to get too."

Just in the same way that his attitude was, you know, if a sucker lets you do something, then they deserve anything they get. So that was what I was taught. So I carried out his message onto himself. And how I did that, that's a whole other story.

That's a whole other can of worms that I don't have time to get into today. But ultimately, after I completed a certain ritual that spanned over three consecutive days, and then the fourth day, I sealed it.

And after I sealed that ritual, and when I didn't look at it again, then I actually physically sealed it in a contained container.

in a container, and I didn't look at it again, except for only one precise day a year that I had chosen to kind of reinforce it each year on one particular precise day. And that was a ceremony that you used to sever yourself from the Church? Am I understanding that properly? Or was this in relationship? In fact, no. In fact, my ritual that I severed from the Church

was in April of '90 on Volpurgisnacht, which was the anniversary of the founding of the Church of Satan. That was the date that I chose to ritualistically sever myself from the Church of Satan. This, what I'm referring to, was a malediction. It was actually a curse. On your father and the church? Yes. Yes, and on the name LaVey. And so,

And so that came many months later. I had to first get myself to safety, to a safe place, which was Vienna, so I left the country.

And my intention was to leave permanently, which I have. But interestingly, I moved to a country sight unseen. It was a very stressful time for me because not many people, I mean, I was literally a refugee. But I didn't have the legal status of a refugee, but I was literally seeking refuge there.

away from my insane family, away from my insane country, away from all the insanity that I had been experiencing. And once I got to a safe place, then, and once I was able to gain some sense of mental equilibrium, then I

I don't know why I was inspired on this one particular day, except for that it was coming near to Halloween, but I don't think that particularly had anything to do with it. But yes, so I did this ritual that was... It took three days to complete and the fourth day to seal. So then after that,

ritual, as I said, then I sealed it away, didn't think about it. I only allowed myself one day a year in which I would reopen it and kind of reinforce it. Because I thought, okay, he always said, if someone smite you on one cheek, smash them on the other. If your father admits to you over the phone that he actually sent someone after you,

Well, I didn't send a hitman to him. I didn't send a physical hitman after him. But I did take matters into my own hands magically. How did you reconcile that with, well, I mean, you've gone on a journey down the Buddhist path, which is, by the way, for everyone listening and watching, that is something that I'm going to delve into more later.

on the Daily Wire side of this interview, so some more autobiographical details and more of the positive development of this journey. I'll close with this: how did you reconcile that highly tempted tilt towards vengeance, let's say, that you sealed with that ritual? How did you, or do you now reconcile that with the emphasis on compassion that you've been developing as a practitioner of Buddhism? Yeah, quite simply because I was not a Buddhist yet.

And I was fresh, I was fresh, fresh out of the church of Satan, but just because you have just freshly stepped out of a mindset, it doesn't mean that that mindset has just miraculously evaporated. So, this was, in my understanding, this was in keeping with the satanic doctrine. Right, so you were still operating within that framework.

Correct. I had not yet dropped all of the belief in that whole system, because that was too deeply ingrained. So that took a lot more time over the years, over the ensuing years. But in the following couple of years, I actually began to... Because I thought, well, okay, maybe I should look into some compromise alternatives, different spiritual paths, whether...

you know, European paganism or even Tantra, Indian Vedic Tantra, different spiritual paths that I was exploring and researching and trying out in practice through prayers and rituals and things like that. So, I was beginning a path of exploration. Right. Okay. And as an outgrowth of the path of exploration, then I began realizing

The satanic way of life is not sustainable. It just isn't. It is self-destructive. Self-devouring, yes. It's self-destructive.

I mean, even if you think, "Well, I'll just use it for..." because the whole point of Satanism is exaltation of the ego. That is, at the core of the doctrine is exaltation of the ego. It's allow your ego to make the decisions. Do what your ego wants and just go with it, and you'll feel better, you'll have no guilt.

But the problem is, the ego is also a false construct, and it's also... it will trick you, and you'll do things that will then, you know...

it will ricochet, it will like boomerang back onto you. Well, we can talk more about that issue of sustainability too, because that's a key realization. Sort of logically, I began realizing, no, this is not a sustainable way of life. And actually it's so malignant that it erodes your health even. It erodes your physical health. Yeah, got it. Okay, well...

For everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue this conversation. I think I'll delve more into the redemptive pathway. I'm very interested in how Zina put herself back together. She made a very astute observation here at the end. You made a very astute observation, which is, you know, when the Israelites leave the Pharaoh,

They're in the desert for three generations. And the reason for that is, as you pointed out, just because you escaped from something doesn't mean you're now where you should be. Now you're lost. And that might be better than being under the thumb of a tyrant, but you're still lost. Being lost is actually a blessing.

being lost is where you need to be because you need to get so you need to be so down you need to lose everything before you can realize what you really are and what is really there at the core so being lost that's exactly what we'll talk about can be a blessing yep right got it got it we'll delve into that so for all of you watching and listening well thank you first for your time and attention thank you very much for being so forthright and for agreeing to do this uh there's

Like we barely scratched the surface, you know, and that's too bad because there's a lot more that could have been explored productively. But we'll do some more of this on the Daily Wire side. And pleasure to meet you. And it's quite remarkable, really, that you're still standing as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, congratulations on that. Oh, I'm more than standing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to talk about that too. I'm not only standing, but I'm very...

Joyfully, joyfully standing. Well, great, great. That's remarkable. So we better, on the Daily Wireless side, maybe we'll, I'd like to find out how you managed that. So everybody, if you're interested in continuing, that's where we'll do it. And again, Zena, thank you very much for agreeing to do this today. Well, thank you too. Many blessings to you.