Anton Szandor LaVey[1] (born Howard Stanton Levey; April 11, 1930 – October 29, 1997) was an American author, musician, and LaVeyan Satanist.

[14][15] LaVey claimed he left high school at age 16 to join the Clyde Beatty Circus and later carnivals, first as a roustabout and cage boy in an act with the big cats, then as a musician playing the calliope.

[17] LaVey later claimed to have seen that many of the same men attended both the bawdy Saturday night shows and the tent revival meetings on Sunday mornings, which reinforced his increasingly cynical view of religion.

[11][20] He claimed to have had a brief affair with then-unknown Marilyn Monroe while playing organ in Los Angeles burlesque houses, stating that she was a dancer at the Mayan Theater at the time.

[1][23] During this period, LaVey was friends with a number of writers associated with Weird Tales magazine; a picture of him with George Haas, Robert Barbour Johnson, and Clark Ashton Smith appears in Blanche Barton's biography The Secret Life of a Satanist.

[25][26] Anton Lavey became a local celebrity in San Francisco through his paranormal research and live performances as an organist, including playing the Wurlitzer at the Lost Weekend cocktail lounge.

[27] He was also a publicly noticeable figure; he drove a coroner's van around town, and he walked his pet black leopard, named Zoltan.

Guests included Carin de Plessin, Michael Harner, Chester A. Arthur III, Forrest J Ackerman, Fritz Leiber, Cecil E. Nixon, and Kenneth Anger.

LaVey's image has been described as "Mephistophelian", and may have been inspired by an occult-themed episode of the television show The Wild Wild West titled "The Night of the Druid's Blood" which originally aired on March 25, 1966 and starred Don Rickles as the evil magician and Satanic cult leader Asmodeus, whose Mephistophelean persona is virtually identical to that which LaVey adopted one month later.

[30] Media attention followed the subsequent Satanic wedding ceremony of journalist John Raymond to New York City socialite Judith Case on February 1, 1967.

[47] LaVey included references to other esoteric and religious groups throughout his writings, claiming for instance that the Yazidis and Knights Templar were carriers of a Satanic tradition that had been passed down to the twentieth century.

[48] Scholar of Satanism Per Faxneld believed that these references were deliberately tongue-in-cheek and ironic, but he noted that many Satanists who had read LaVey's writings had taken them to be literal historical claims about the past.

[48][49] Although he regularly derided older esotericists, LaVey also relied upon their work; for instance, making use of John Dee's Enochian system in The Satanic Bible.

[51] Dyrendel argued that LaVey partook in conspiracy culture as he grew older, for he was greatly concerned with modern society's impact on individual agency.

[56] In his 2001 examination of Satanists, the sociologist James R. Lewis noted that, to his surprise, his findings "consistently pointed to the centrality of LaVey's influence on modern Satanism".

As a result he "concluded that‍— despite his heavy dependence on prior thinkers‍— LaVey was directly responsible for the genesis of Satanism as a serious religious (as opposed to a purely literary) movement".

[6] In 1995, the religious studies scholar Graham Harvey wrote that although the Church had no organized presence in Britain, LaVey's writings were widely accessible in British bookshops.

[59] In an article published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1991, the journalist Lawrence Wright revealed that through his own investigative work, he found that many of LaVey's claims about his life had been untrue.

Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke states, "James Wagner, a former Security Echelon (SE) commander, recalls that relations between the NRP and the Church of Satan, founded in 1966 by Anton Szandor LaVey, were cordial.