Our Lady of Endor Coven, also known as Ophite Cultus Sathanas, was an American Satanic cult founded by Herbert Arthur Sloane (born September 3, 1905, died June 16, 1975) in Cleveland, Ohio, with a claimed origin in 1948[1] though definitive documentation of the group does not appear until the 1960s.
The Latin phrase Cultus Sathanas translates to "Cult of Satan" A 1967 Toledo newspaper interview with Sloane about his occult and fortune telling business made no mention of the Coven.
[2] Sloane's Coven was first publicly documented in mid-1968, when British occult writer Richard Cavendish shared that he had received a letter from a Satanist "lodge" in Toledo, Ohio.
Sloane himself suggested that he was already operating in the 1940s, but given the many parallels with Wicca the group displayed, it is more likely its date of origin must be located sometime after 1953, the year Gerald Gardner's neopagan cult of witchcraft came into the open.
[citation needed] Hans Jonas offered this gnostic analysis: ... it is the serpent that persuades Adam and Eve to taste of the fruit of knowledge and thereby to disobey their Creator ...