CoS and ToS

by Tani Jantsang

A hard-look comparison and bottom-line view, free of the irrelevancies used to confuse this. This article was written years ago with biased information from Church of Satan administrators. 1. They misled as regards to any Dark Tradition in the TOS and 2. they misled by handing over selected samples of TOS material designed to make the TOS look trivial or silly, combined with information obtained from people who quit the TOS under miserable conditions and then joined the COS as radical TOS bashers. Writing an exegesis is fine - and as with similar things with other religions, as more information comes forth, the old has to be scraped away and written all over again with the new information. People have asked for this article - as such, I feel obliged to present it again - with the updated information.

There are lots of religions out there and most of the major ones are no longer what one might strictly call "religious" because they are more like cultural things, family traditions, even cohesive community units for ethnics living in the USA, politico-religious gatherings, etc., a place to go to just sit when a family member is in critical condition in a hospital, a place to sit quietly, a homey place, a place they can go to talk openly (and at no cost) to a familiar Pastor, Priest, Rabbi, or Reverend if something burdens their hearts. Few Jews are religious, some are even atheists, yet they are still considered Jews by themselves and by society. (E.g.: Karl Marx's grandparents were Jewish. His parents were Christian converts. Karl himself was a fanatical Atheist. He is still referred to as a Jew.) The same goes for today's Catholics and Protestants. Many of their members are scientists, they know evolution is real they know basic physics and they often adopt a grander but very passive view of their deity: "study of such sciences are studying the WAY god made the world." "God" is put into the background as an "as given" and they pursue the study of REALITY with a real love (Eros) for knowledge without ever thinking about this background "god." All of these Western religions tend, today, to view the overly religious type as "unhealthy." They also try to warn such people against joining some of the crackpot cults out there, most of which are Christian cults. These cults harbor such notions as: "Divine Revelations" from disincarnate entity-beings or aliens, Saints, Apostles, "out there;" secret texts that you have to do things or pay money to see; special blessings or absolutions from Priests, and other such things; denial of physical laws long since proven to be absolutely true by empirical sciences; their own evolutionary theory which makes "humans" out to be "something special" but curiously also shows that "humans" also have something wrong with them (either a state of sin or a state of being outcast from nature - these are the same thing) that either humans need to be saved, fixed through Divine whatever, discovered through meditation and/or magical texts they alone can supply and/or otherwise "WORKED ON WITH STRIVING" with the notion that the merely-human must (a rule) strive to reach some sort of PERFECTION that makes absolutely NO sense in terms of anything real: whether that is going to a heavenly kingdom or becoming a unified field (misuse of physics term) of "pure mind." The majority of these cults are extremely adverse to the physical body which is what makes us humans, physical beings, healthy animals and TIES US INTO a web of life. All of them have humans exclusively being created or tampered with or fixed or cursed by some disincarnated entity-being, usually a male one. These are CRACKPOT religions! They often have crackpot Prophets.

Then there is the American Atheist Society which is almost "religious" in its stance against all religion, even the type that is, today, non-religious as stated above. This society can hardly be called a cult. You can join, support, speak for them or not. They sell books, there are no coercive tactics to get people to join and no one cares if you quit or turn against them. They are a group of Freethinkers but they DO have one thing that is not Satanic and against pure fun. They have a strong seemingly humanitarian and ethical, even moral, stance that they take that OFTEN goes against nature and natural law when it comes to humans. They do not regard man as exactly like any other animal which biology, biochemistry and even now neurology has PROVEN to be true. They also tend to be pseudo-skeptical, which means that their ignorance is showing through - they have "religion knee jerk buttons" that can be pushed by things that are not religions, but which they "hear" as religious or mystical.

Here is the Church of Satan which can be summed up by their own spokespeople
LaVeyan Satanism is all about being egocentric, hedonistic and atheistic, as their spokespeople say. Let me comment on that right now:

Focus on the Ego:
The Self is not "just" the ego. The word "ego" in Latin may well mean Self, but in standard American usage, in "LaVeyan" usage, it doesn't. In Freudian terms it doesn't. And in Eastern and LHP terms it most definitely doesn't. The Ego the COS fosters in deed is to supply the delusion (pipe dream) that their members, and they alone, are somehow alien and elite. Yet there is everything about the alien that is "ordinary idiot with inferiority complex" and everything about the elite that is "average or subaverage" about them. It is often demonstrated that COS members engage in hostile activities against others as big elitists, yet when they are struck down they expect Christian sympathy and accuse the attacker of lacking purely Christian morals. They can wish a person to die of the worst possible ailments and are pompous in their "alien elite" capacity to trash the person, but when one of theirs dies and the formerly flamed person dances on his grave, the COS members can be seen to expect Christian sympathy. They even go so far as to use Christian morality to make the person's vengeance come off as "without honor" or some such rubbish. They feel, due to the egocentricism they preach, that they can do these things to others with impunity - but they cower and cringe when they are handed the same treatment back. They, like all others who brag about being superior, are a cult of wailing idiots that feel inferior about themselves. Like all such people, they are bullies but are shocked when they get hit back hard.

Hedonism:
A person living in normal pleasure doesn't "seek after" pleasure. That person is neither hedonistic nor repressed. The COS's general members, in "trying so hard to be hedonistic," subject us all to their wailing, repressed misery. ONLY a repressed person would "think of" trying to be hedonistic. Hedonism is the opposite side of repression - and the CoSsers ended up having to clarify that stance by explaining to idiots that over-indulgence was also bad.

Atheism:
The COS claims to be atheist, yet Anton LaVey has tailored what he said to fit whoever he talked to. Some he told he believed in the Devil, some to he claimed the Devil was his tutelary demon. To others he claimed it was all a joke, pure rubbish. The COS, from the Satanic Bible alone, definitely is mainly focused on ANTI-Christianity - it is an inversion that still has its focus on THE CHRISTIANS. It also is 100% focused on "the herd."

It is known that Anton LaVey took pieces of things that others wrote to "make up" or invent his brand of Satanism. Let us look at these things and who the original writers were.

1. Jack London: he was a Marxist-Leninist radical Socialist that wrote both "man in conflict with, or challenged by, nature" tales, and he wrote "bad white man" tales in Polynesian settings where he really delved into what we call the Inner. Most politically right-wing fans of London don't tend to mention those tales, yet they are the heaviest ones he wrote, they are the most inner tales he wrote.

2. Nietzsche: he was lower level Mason bothered at first by dualism. He was also an ethnic Slav living in Nordic country who called the Nordics untermensch and called the Jews and Chinese ubermensch. He was a man who died insane from syphilis. In many ways, if you compare the Greek of St. Paul to Nietzsche, they are saying the same things: ubermensch would be the Elect of God.

3. deSade, Baudellaire, et al., ad nauseum: twisted, almost anti-sexual freaks unable to ever even have a released orgasm. People wallowing in their own angst or in their insane anti-life delusions; delusions even more anti-life than the most pious Christian monks ever thought up. Slanderers of nature itself and flagellaters of the human body. These people fit precisely into the category that Christians would call "Satanic." Hey, pot/kettle/black. But that would be a Christian definition. Well, according to Christian definition, Missionaries are Satanic - i.e., evil.

4. Ayn Rand: disaffected and disenfranchised Jewish "princess" that was a monstrous, bitch of a tyrant in real life - the very thing she hated. She bemoaned the lack of a merit system but, by the testimony of "Education in a Real Merit System" a person from the system she claimed she hated, she left a real merit system and came into an America that was the complete opposite of a merit system. She also had a "thing" for Aryan types - yet she was the stereotypical opposite. Anton LaVey with his gangster/hooker aesthetic (fetish) also was a Jew with a hang up on albino-looking women. This is important since it affects the Focus of the Will: and Will calls out to Will.

5. Various misapplied pseudo-scientific theories on evolution, such as the rampant misuse of "survival of the fittest" spewed out by the high-school drop out leader (not a slander. LaVey was, indeed, a high school drop out and was unemployable) and the moron followers that have no clue what "survival of the fittest" means biologically. In short, he who has the most descendents 100 years from now, is the fittest - and it doesn't matter if those people and their kids survive using a parasitic strategy or not. If the "parasites" in society (as we'd call them) can manage to suck the life from us while they ascend and increase their number, then they are the fittest in terms of pure biology. Human values don't matter, neither does art or education.

6. Police states. Dictatorships. The bile spewed out by Anton LaVey when he was the most wretched, living and wallowing in filth around himself and within himself, sued blind by an embittered wife and disowned by his cherished daughter Zeena, - and sick to boot. During this most wretched time, he yammered about police states and dictatorships to his officials who turned his bitter meandering into Scripture. With this Scripture, they have turned into bonafide zealots, storm troopers marching off to "purge" anyone else who dares to make a Satanic organization that is very different. Unlike the Atheist Society, the COS cares overly much if people leave it, turn on it, or join something better.

7. A heap, more than a heap, of tired rantings and ravings about the herd. He wrote nothing but commentary about the herd. A heap of rubbish about his personal fetish as if everyone "shalt" share it.

8 His stupid tee hee hee Big Deal about sex, sex, SEX!! Oooooooooo. Unable to realize that non repressed people find his tee hee hee antics to be a royal yawn. The Satanic Witch act does not work on non-repressed men. The Satanic Witch is nothing but a simple-minded text book on "how to be a whore."

9 The Angel Talk con games of Edward Kelly and John Dee, gibberish or "talking in tongues," real Christian style.

10. Inversionist, medieval Catholic rituals complete with Latin talk. A cross is a cross, no matter if it's sideways, upright, or upside-down.

11. Anton LaVey's personal ideas of "how women and men should dress." Somehow, in some delirium, he got it into his head that his preferred attire (men looking like gangsters, women looking like hookers) was "Fascist" and then made a statement about it, which his storm troopers now use as Scripture. It still, the entirety of it, falls strictly within the confines of a Judeo-Christian framework for males and females. Enlightened and progressive males and females both would have no involvement with others who need this silly (monkey) paradigm.

The CoS's use of the term "Satan" can be seen on a few levels, or so they claim in word (but not in deed): all the way from dark-HIDDEN-force-in-nature which permeates and motivates all of nature which is actually NOT part of the CoS at all (unless you agree that Anton incorporated OUR STUFF into his COS), but it's part of the Dark Doctrines people's texts - most of whom had nothing to do with the COS and were not members, would never be members; many of whom were even hostile. Similarly, their Satan can be viewed as that purveyor of undefiled truths, not prettily tailored half-truths to make people feel good and maintain their position "above" the "mere" animals; again, they tend to not understand this concept as they spew forth rubbish about "alien elites." In this sense, their Satan is no different from what is claimed for Jesus Christ, Jesus also comes with truths for the Elect of God! This Satan (and this Jesus) is shown all the time by Darwin, Watson and Crick, the evolutionary biologists and biochemists; however in the COS nothing but pure ignorance of evolutionary biology prevails as they focus only on the social buzz words and rail against equal opportunity. The CoS's Satan can be seen as a politically oriented figure as most of the creative writers in the "Satanic School" have seen it, a champion of free speech, speaking what's in your heart, freedom of expression, and revolt against all forms of tyranny and oppression. Unfortunately the COS focuses on the fascists and Nazis and on some of the writers mentioned above who had nothing to do with Satanism, but they never focus on the Satanist Bakunin or on Marx who were real rebels. The Church of Satan offers psychodrama and literary imagery for anyone who wishes to be a "religious" Satanist: something the American Atheists would never do. While the Atheists would deprive their own children of the joy of a Yule celebration and the fun of a Santa mytheme, the Church of Satan doesn't deprive anyone of anything, but offers up alternatives IF one chooses to go that route.

The Temple of Set? One can not even TRY to imagine that this came out of the Church of Satan by any philosophical means. It's not even possible to connect the two except to see clearly that a few very serious minded people looking for real Dark Traditions got INTO the Church of Satan and set their own ball rolling. That was their agenda all along for there is no OTHER explanation for what they are and no other explanation for these people all leaving en masse when the discovered the Real Anton. The Real Anton was there all along; they just didn't notice it; Anton said different things to different people, and even other different things behind people's backs. That Anton encouraged this research (to Dr. Aquino's face) is not to be doubted. Dr. Aquino was one of the highest ranking people in the COS. We either deduce that Anton just handed him this degree, or Anton appreciated his endeavors. Take your choice.

The TOS is a genuine initiatory organization - and from all evidence, this group within the COS back then, was tending toward the same. No such thing exists in the COS; it never did except for the group that later became the TOS; today, especially with Anton gone, degrees are worthless jokes. Just as it is easy for large organizations that exist right now to select portions from the Christian Bible and prove that Jesus was a Nazi, or prove Jesus was a Communist revolutionary, or prove Jesus was a Peacenik, it is easy to do the same things with TOS material. There is most definitely a way to select certain, out of context, portions of TOS material and conclude that they are not like Catholics, Protestants or Jews, but more like Fundamentalist Christians! It is easy to do this with their material, selected portions, if you ask anyone from the COS to show you what the TOS is about! HA! It can be shown, using a skewed misrepresentative portion of TOS material, that they have a Stoic God a literal Being-Entity-GOD; are against carnality; preach against "the world," in the form of "avoid mundane people"; encourage spending money on literature for mystical meditations in order to further deny the carnal animal in the person; believe their God created or interfered with making human beings; have evolutionary theory with only the MINOR details varying from some Creationist texts; have divine revelations; teach the striving to perfection (Xeper) and insist that man is not perfect as he is but is outcast. It is possible to show a tiny portion in a skewed manner, totally out of context, and then claim that the TOS is about this and ONLY this. Unfortunately, I was shown this and trusted the people showing me this and saying that "it's all like that, the same stuff" - hence the need for an update here.

There is NO bridge from COS to TOS. NONE. There is NO "logical transformation" that anyone can possibly see or even FORCE into this picture. There is NO doubt that Dr. Aquino and many others were IN the COS - and that they had their own ball rolling with confidence that Anton LaVey was behind them all. I think they all really believed this - at least, Dr. Aquino really believes it.

As to the assertions, and "deliberate attempts to confuse this clear picture," by Dr. Aquino? They are not attempts, he is not trying to confuse or deceive. He believes what he is saying because he spoke to Anton and dealt with him while in the COS. But the problem is this - it's subjective. Others also dealt with Anton and were told other things by Anton. Opposite things. One can easily imagine "two Same Religion people" in a room sitting and talking. Both are dressed alike and in the same profession. When one says "Anything About the Religion" he means it, he is sincere. When the other hears it or says "Anything," he is thinking of ways to con someone. Since both are saying the same words and speaking on the same subject, neither gets to know what the other one specifically MEANS, or really feels, or really intends. Neither would know this about each other. Only further discussion and/or actions and clear deeds would expose the HUGE differences. As with the Christians and Jesus - a Christian that sees Jesus as the Prince of Peace, another Christian who sees Jesus as Communist Revolutionary and another who sees Jesus as a Nazi, would not immediately know that they all referred to a very different persona when they said "Jesus." When it became more than obvious that Anton's COS was a sham, Dr. Aquino finally noticed it - and so did others, or perhaps they did not notice it but had it shown to them by Dr. Aquino. They left en masse to form the TOS. What was the COS left with? Neo-Nazi trash from James Madole's riff raff, kinky sex bullshit, S&M aesthetic, an Amsterdam whore house and nothing much else. No Dark LHP Tradition of ANY sort. What did Dr. Aquino take with him when he left? Well, for sure, Egyptian Set stuff. Perhaps other stuff too. I don't know.

So then, one might say that Protestantism "grew out of" Catholicism. But they are so different. Did one "grow out of" the other or did a bunch of Catholics REVOLT? A bunch of Catholics revolted and threw out every single Dionysian AND feminine idea that the other had. But they also revolted in the name of reason over superstition (at first). Catholics became, evolved into, a syncretistic religion containing many varied groups of ethnic people combining native folklore with the Mary first and Jesus second mytheme and hundreds of Saints. The other became stoic and rigid with God the Father being peripheral and Jesus the Ascetic being uppermost and with Mary being nothing and no Saints at all. Here one can clearly see two TYPES OF PEOPLE that split away from each other. Easy going, flowing, joyful types in the Catholic groups versus Victorian ethic, work-ethic, joyless types in the Protestant group. Neither Protestants nor Catholics can be compared 1:1 with COS versus TOS, but it's an example of a similar occurrence in history. Also, Catholic clergy were truly learned men at the time with access to ancient doctrines and books and capable of speaking and reading Greek and Latin original texts. Protestant clergy (thought not at first) came out of the bohunk variety of backwoods farmer, uneducated and stupid. This has all changed NOW, but that's the way it was back then.

Dr. Aquino's history of Egypt and Set are another matter, at least at first. These show themselves to be ludicrous at first, but with more information and serious inquiry into Egypt, some new stuff has emerged. Still, this all flies in the face of the Hermetic or "Egyptian Mystery" tradition which is very well known to people involved in real, but exclusive lodges. Aside from that, Egyptians, disliking "Jews" who were not called Jews back then (Judah's tribe didn't exist yet as a well-known BIG tribe). Egyptians called the "Jews" (what would be called Semites by us) "SET" and/or "SETH," not the other way around. Jews never had any concept of a devil or dualist "other side" to their own Deity which is nothing like what Christians imagine it is. "Satan" was not even a proper name in Hebrew, it was merely a WORD. Jews had "dark messenger" concepts such as Samael and Azazel and Malech ha Moveth, Sam Moveth Az, but there was no such thing as Satan as any kind of angel or messenger like this. Satan to them, at most, was like the "diabolus" which was a COURT APPOINTED extreme prosecutor and very well known in the ancient customs in regular court cases! The ONLY people who used the pentacle, the PURE pentacle, back then, were the Pythagoreans, the precursors of the Freemasons as is TOO WELL KNOWN to even belabor this point. The Eastern Star is on buildings today, still, for all to see: two points up. The ritual ceremonies, when done are identical in every single way to the ones their own ancestors performed, including walking "around the star" in pent-alpha formation. This is called the Egyptian Mysteries, but they are in reality Eleusinian Mysteries. Set is not part of this tradition AT ALL. Set meant Seth, son of Adam: Egyptians used it accordingly to refer to what later became the Ishmael and Israel states. The word "Semite" was unknown back then and is, in fact, modern in usage for these ethnic groups and could not be older than the word "Shem" in ANY usage.

Dr. Aquino or some others perhaps, has it that Set plus "en," which he claims means "God" in Hebrew, is where Satan came from and blames the Jews for slandering Set. This is false. "En," in HEBREW and in Chaldean, is a negative particle. It means "NOT." "En soph" means "NO THING," but in their religion refers to the unknowable and IMpersonal, limitless and boundless kind of no-thing OUT OF WHICH came all things. In Hebrew, "EL" means God! In Chaldean, a related language, "en" means "not" and is identical to the "a" negative particle in Greek and Sanskrit. In ancient Greek, "en" means "one" and "to en" (the one) refers to the Apeiron that Pythagoreans talked about which is EXACTLY what Philip Marsh claimed that Anton LaVey spoke of literally. (Page 16, Satanic Bible on "dark, hidden force in nature.") Did Anton say that or did Burton Wolfe say it? Did Anton mean that? According to the Administrators who have been caught lying and talking out of two sides of their mouths, Anton did NOT mean that. (Odd, Anton said he meant it, but he's dead now: can't go back and ask him again).

In our opinion? Satanists need to see this in this very clear cut way here. The CoS is a scam, it was always a scam, it was never about any Dark Lord or Dark Force, it was about Anton LaVey, his hang ups and fetishes. He never believed any of it, he never cared about any of it. That's all it's about now. They are a cult! And Setians? They need to strive their best to try to see that they were a group of people within the COS, very much like the Dark Doctrine crew with some big exceptions. Most of the Dark Doctrine crew were NEVER in the COS, they predate the COS but there were later members of the COS in the crew - and two Dark Doctrine proponents were made into Magistrates by Anton LaVey (not upheld by the current regime). The non-COS Dark Doctrine crew saw through the COS and never had any illusions about it. They had NO respect for it or for its founder, not at any time. The TOS were people similar in that they were in the COS but delving into, or trying to find, these doctrines. Most of the TOS's membership was introduced to the occult by the COS. This is NOT the case with the core Dark Doctrine people.

Hr. Vad and others had to apologize for "luring" people into a con game, a fascistoid type cult of "poison" as they soon saw the COS was ("everything in there is poison, nothing to do with Satanism is in the COS, except these Dark Doctrines"). The COS, by putting the Dark Doctrines on this website and bragging about Phil and I being Magistrates, managed to lure a lot of people into it - this we do know now, after the fact. It also begs the question: why did Anton make Phil and I Magistrates? Well, we wrote up these Dark Doctrines which he saw. He apparently never saw the much older stuff, available for years, that we had been selling or sharing for years. After Hr.Vad put that up, Anton made him into a Priest. So this is one indication that Anton respected this information, highly so. It is not presented in a mystical fashion at all, not on Vad's website. The current administration can try to revise that all they want. The fact of the matter, it never mattered to me if Anton respected me or what I knew. I know he did. He also respected Madole for his vast knowledge of history and traditions. Did Madole respect Anton? Madole saw Anton as a usurping Jew, as garbage and as the eternal enemy of the Aryan race! Did I respect Madole? I saw Madole as a worthy enemy and a cunning man with some high connections and knew what he was up to. Did I respect Anton? I know people who knew the young Anton before he was Anton LaVey. I personally saw through Anton ages ago when he sat in Madole's living room; that was long before the current administration - but it was DURING the time Dr. Aquino was IN the COS! Do I have respect for a self-hating "anything" that is motivated to do self-destructive things "for the benefit of those that hate him" in order to be "noticed by them" and try to gain their acceptance, even negative acceptance? No. I have no respect for Thanatos behavior. I did have respect for his music.

Just as Vad and others had to apologize for mistakenly luring unknowing people, sincere people, into the COS. Vad doing this was totally 100% against my intent and Will - the entire PURPOSE of sharing the Dark Tradition. I couldn't see it; and he didn't know that. He couldn't know it even if I had explained it. By the same token, I have to apologize for misrepresenting the TOS in an article that got put up on Vad's website for so many to see. The TOS is structured very differently from how real Dark Doctrine LHP things are structured, or from how our organization is structured; you have to join and there are fees, there are obligations, etc. That's fine. It's rather American of them :) By the same token, reason for the apology, by relying on COS material against the TOS, I wrote this document up back then in a way that would lure people away from the TOS - when the TOS does have Dark Tradition in it. I could have written to Dr. Aquino and asked him about it - but he doesn't share his information with non members (that is a MAJOR PROBLEM). Likewise, he could have written to me (as eventually one of the TOS members did) and asked me, "Where did you get this information?" I'd have told him where I got it, as I did. Told it was misinformed and then told where to look for publicly available TOS stuff, I'd have found SOME way to get hold of it (I had no computer, but someone could have printed it out). I'd have come to the same conclusion about the TOS that I wrote right here.

Our organization is Satanic Reds: www.geocities.com/satanicreds/
We, Ole, Brendan and I, formed it 3 years ago due to the POISON we saw in the COS - and thus we had our core members at that time. It was not publicly announced or online, for the most part. Check us out. Do not be fooled by words designed to scare you off.

Visit: Satanic Reds