ornoth

I had this entry all ready to go last week, but I couldn’t help but defer it when I saw that Friday the Thirteenth was coming. So now that it’s here…

Imagine this scenario: you’re the parent of a child in seventh grade. In the evening, you casually ask them how school went, and are told that English class had featured some students doing book reports. Did any of them stand out as particularly interesting? Well, one kid gave a ten-minute presentation on a book called “The Satanic Bible” by this guy Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of The Church of Satan…

Yeah, that was me at thirteen years of age. The same year that Mrs. Bernier read “The Hobbit” and “A Wrinkle in Time” to our English class, I was getting my kicks by introducing my impressionable prepubescent peer group to LaVeyan Satanism.

This was suburban Maine in 1976, so to this day, I’m still surprised that there were no repercussions… at least none known to me.

I clearly remember hanging out in Mr. Paperback on my way home from school one day, looking for anything that piqued my curiosity. And there’s not much that’d capture a twelve year old boy’s attention faster than a black book titled “The Satanic Bible”, with the inverted pentagram of Baphomet on the front and back cover, with the latter serving as background for a crimson portrait of its grim-looking, goateed, bald author with a piercing gaze. I hope my grammar school classmates enjoyed my book report!

The book – along with LaVey’s followup piece, “The Satanic Rituals” – continued to provide a unique conversation piece that followed me through high school, college, career, all the way to the present day. And it paved the way for several other infamous occult acquisitions, including Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow”, Aleister Crowley’s “The Book of Lies”, Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Monster of the Prophesy”, and the Simon “Necronomicon”.

As for our dear Anton, he provided a lasting final connection with me by passing away on my birthday.

Cue the “Twilight Zone” theme…