Origins & history

LaVey founded the Church on Walpurgisnacht (the night of 30 April–1 May) 1966, declaring that year “Anno Satanas I.” The Church grew quickly through the late 1960s and early 1970s, drawing on a mix of carnival showmanship, Nietzschean and Randian individualism, and theatrical ritual that LaVey explicitly framed as psychodrama rather than supernatural petition.

From the late 1970s onward the Church became increasingly cathedral-style: closed grottos were dissolved in favour of a model in which most members never meet one another in person and pursue Satanic practice individually. After LaVey’s death in 1997 the organisation continued under Blanche Barton and then Peter H. Gilmore, who relocated the administrative headquarters from San Francisco to New York.

The Church of Satan is distinct from The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013 in the United States. The two organisations share an atheistic stance but differ on doctrine, on political activism (which TST embraces and the Church of Satan does not), and on organisational structure.