The Long, Strange Trip of Michael Aquino

How a heterodox intellect remade Satanism—and caught hell for it

Snapshot of Michael Aquino, Sammy Davis, Jr, and Anton LaVey circa 1973.

“In almost everything I’ve written there is a thread of this: man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.” Rod Serling said this in the Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1967. In our world of war, uncertainty, and disease, this piece—this piece—is the most controversial I have ever written. Because it challenges the convenient boogeyman. I stand by every word. -M-

* * *

The search—if it is real—is not a blanket of bromides or group-sanctioned routine. Its practitioners rarely appear in familiar lanes.

In 1969, an authentically seeking and heterodox U.S. Army officer—and specialist in psychological operations or PSYOP—entered the orbit of Church of Satan (CoS) founder Anton LaVey. This was Michael Aquino, whose efforts opened a new chapter in Satanic and Left-Hand spirituality.

Aquino first briefly encountered LaVey in 1968 at the San Francisco premiere of Rosemary’s Baby, the social connector for so much in the modern Satanism LaVey defined. A recent graduate of UC Santa Barbara and commissioned officer, Aquino spent part of 1968 to 1969 at Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne Division and later as a PSYOP/Special Forces officer at the base’s JFK Special Warfare Center. [1] In early 1969, the second lieutenant found himself questioning life’s purpose. A study of existential philosophy had only deepened his despair and he was contemplating suicide. [2]

While on leave in March in San Francisco—where he was soon to be married—Aquino spotted an ad in the underground newspaper Berkeley Barb for a Satanic circle at Anton’s Black House. Although the evening featured its share of garish theatrics, including a robed henchman stationed at the door (in actuality a lecturer in history at the University of San Francisco) and Anton’s emergence from an Egyptian sarcophagus, the gathering itself featured ideas that spoke to the soldier-seeker. And then there was the figure of Anton himself: relaxed, self-assured, good humored, powerful but not arrogant, smiling not in a cruel fashion but “full of the purest metaphysical good humor,” Aquino wrote. It was sealed: “I reached out and took the apple.” [3]

“At that point,” Aquino later wrote a friend—the same doorman at the Black House, “Anton LaVey said, ‘Where there is no meaning, we ourselves can create it. Thus we are not creatures, but creators: we are gods.’ It took me a long time to understand the full implications of such a hypothesis, but even in its most immediate sense it was a philosophical lifeline.” Back at Fort Bragg, Aquino and his new wife (“a nominal Mormon”) sent in their membership applications.

The erudite and enterprising Aquino was exactly who Anton wanted around him. The founder was loathe for the Church of Satan to become a reserve of nudniks and ne’er-do-wells. He insisted that the mark of a Satanist, versus a hapless “occultnik,” entailed success in outer life. “Membership inquires continue to increase,” Anton wrote Aquino in 1972, “but brain surgeons and Congressmen are still in short supply. Clearly increased membership per se will not elevate us beyond our present level but only hold us down.”

Aquino in 1968.

Aquino proved his mettle not only organizationally but literarily. When returning to an active tour of duty in Vietnam in June 1969, Aquino brought with him a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

In combat, Aquino’s PSYOP job included “experiments to disorient Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers by using amplified sounds—sometimes complete with ‘demonic screams’—blaring from helicopters flying over their heads,” writes Stephen E. Flowers. When done with such tasks, the officer dedicated himself to Milton, which inspired a short and remarkable literary effort of his own, The Diabolicon.

Aquino’s strangely precise and singular prose provides a haunting record of how he wrote his Satanic manifesto in battle. As Aquino puts it in his privately published, two-volume omnibus The Church of Satan:

I had taken with me a copy of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, which I considered then, as now, one of the most exalted statements of Satanism ever written. Satan is its true hero; its Christian moralisms are so pale and watery in comparison that I am surprised it and its author were not summarily burned upon its appearance in Cromwellian England. That it not only survived Puritan censorship but was actually lauded as a compliment to Christianity is yet another of those titanic ironies which have accompanied the Prince of Darkness on his tortuous journey across the eras of human civilization.

As much as I admired Paradise Lost, I was annoyed at its ever-present, if pro forma bias. The die was loaded against Satan; he might put up a good fight, but in the end he was doomed to defeat.

It was not so much that I wanted to see him triumph. Rather I felt that his power and position were equal to God’s if not more potent, and I wanted to see a contest that would more accurately represent the struggle between the Powers of Darkness and those of Light.

In early 1970 I took pen in hand and, during the moments when I was not occupied with military responsibilities [at the time I was based in the village of Lai Khe, directing PSYOP teams for the 1st Infantry Division], I began to write a restatement of certain themes from Paradise Lost. It was hardly an “ivory tower” meditation. I wrote in old, bombed-out buildings dating from the French occupation, in helicopters, in tents, and in the midst of underbrush . . . Part of the text of the “Statement of Beelzebub” had to be reconstructed from notes at one point when an incoming rocket blew a packet of papers [and the storage room holding them] to atoms. Often . . . I would be interrupted from my musings by the sudden necessity to dive for a sandbagged bomb shelter.

Slowly but inevitably, however, the manuscript crept towards completion. I say “inevitably” because I began to develop a most peculiar feeling about it. As I wrote the sequential passages, I seemed to sense, rather than determine what they should say. And if I penned words or phrases that “didn’t fit”, I would experience continual irritation and impatience until I had replaced them with the “correct” combination. It was as though the text had a life of its own . . .

Aquino’s statement should be kept handy by anyone who complains, “I don’t have time to write.” The officer completed his manuscript in March 1970 and sent it to Anton, who responded enthusiastically.

The Diabolicon reinterprets the war in heaven from Revelation 12:7–10, which led to the expulsion of the Great Rebel and his legions. The concise Diabolicon re-visions, according to Aquino’s insights, the friction between his gnostic view of a passive, hypocritical force of conformity—God and his legions—versus a radical, unbending individualism and wish for growth and development—Satan and his forces, who are fiercely committed to man’s progress.

With Anton’s showmanship and vision, Aquino’s literary efforts and organizational skills, national media at the beckon, and elbow-rubs with celebrities like Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jayne Mansfield (Anton engineered mutually beneficial publicity photos with the bombshell actress), all seemed well in the Infernal Empire. But, as with nearly every community of belief, cracks emerged.

InMay 1975, Aquino was editing an issue of CoS’s newsletter The Cloven Hoof and read a draft article by Anton that made him double-take. The leader was offering to sell initiatory ranks from within the church. Aquino knew money was tight and proposed alternatives; but he considered sale of ranks dishonorable and corrupt. Anton had his own reasons both commercially and, possibly, linked to attracting haves versus have-nots. Whatever the case, the men clashed and in June Aquino resigned, taking the liberty of telling Anton that the church’s “infernal mandate” was hereby withdrawn. Not only was Aquino leaving but he explained that the church, while serving as a preliminary vehicle, could no longer function under the “Will of Satan.”

Was there any such will? And had Aquino any right to invoke it? The first question points to an underlying debate: whether Satanism is a strictly atheistic philosophy employing iconography and metaphor as symbols for self-development—or whether there are, in fact, extraphysical intelligences and dimensions in connection with the Satanic search. Current leaders of the Church of Satan emphasize the former; Aquino emphasized the latter. Where did Anton stand? Aquino claimed, based strictly on recollection, that in 1974 Anton revealed to him a written pact with Satan, suggesting literal belief in the Prince of Darkness. To my knowledge, no one else has seen this pact. The best I can surmise, based on Anton’s nonbinary intellectual style, is that the church leader cracked open the door to either interpretation—I doubt theism versus atheism was a barbed-wire dividing line for him. There are longtime church members today who, at least in conversation, acknowledge the existence or possibility of the metaphysical.

Aquino stuck by his interpretation of the extraphysical side to Satanism, which he believed was a shared experience in the early circles:

Satanists participating in rituals of Black Magic quickly became aware of an “interest” or “influence” in the atmosphere of the chamber that felt somehow alien to their own personalities. The pageantry and the oratory would fade into the background, and the participants would find themselves gripped in a sensory empathy so piercing, so powerful that it would leave them exhausted, drained, and shaken at the conclusion of the rite. It was not a chance occurrence, but an inevitable, recurring one. After such experiences participants were subdued, introspective, and disinclined to exchange comments on their feelings. There was perhaps even a slight feeling of embarrassment, as though one had somehow “slipped” from being a proper psychodramatic atheist.

And Anton LaVey was himself the most familiar with this sensation. His behavior during a ritual was not that of an actor, nor of a megalomaniac, but rather of a High Priest in the sincere sense.

Feeling possessed of prophetic authority, Aquino that year crafted a new manifesto—The Book of Coming Forth By Night—and with it a new movement: The Temple of Set. Aquino said that the Great Rebel communicated to him that he no longer wished to be known by the adulterated Hebrew Satan but by his proper name Set, Egypt’s god of storms and the desert, usurper and murderer of his brother Osiris, and sometime rival of Horus, alternately described as Set’s nephew (the avenging son of Osiris and Isis) or brother.

Relief of Set and Horus. (Egypt Museum)

In at least one bas relief at the Egypt Museum in Cairo, Horus and Set are shown intertwining plants of Upper and Lower Egypt, thus uniting two lands, during the reign of Senusret I, c. 1971–1926 B.C. In Egyptian hieroglyph and symbol, Set appears with sharply protruding vertical ears, like twin bars, and a long, aardvark-like snout, his head perched upon a male human body. The deity is sometimes called the “Set animal”—a creature of unknown provenance.

In The Book of Coming Forth by Night, Set recalls deputizing Anton, now honorably deposed, to carry out his will: “Known as the Hebrew Satan, I chose to bring forth a Magus, according to the fashion of my Word. He was charged to form a Church of Satan, that I might easily touch the minds of men in this image they had cast for me. In the fifth year of the Church of Satan, I gave to this Magus my Diabolicon [delivered through Aquino], that he might know the truth of my ancient Gift to mankind, clothed though it might be in the myths of the Hebrews.”

Set then describes manifesting to Aleister Crowley in 1904 through The Book of the Law, appearing to the magician as Horus, the deity’s “Opposite Self.” Crowley’s work, potent but erratic, was felled by his “mindless destructiveness.” Hence, The Book of Coming Forth by Night posits a modern lineage running from Crowley to Anton to Aquino, who is now charged with bringing the message of the Aeon of Set. The Book of Coming Forth by Night continues:

The Satanist thought to approach Satan through ritual. Now let the Setian shun all recitation, for the text of another is an affront to the Self. Speak rather to me as a friend, gently and without fear. Do not bend your knee nor drop your eye, for such things were not done in my house at PaMat-et [the original priesthood center to Set in Upper Egypt]. But speak to me at night, because the sky then becomes an entrance and not a barrier. And those who call me the Prince of Darkness do me no dishonor.

To the second question I posed about whether Aquino possessed any right to invoke Satanic Will, I conclude only this: Virtually every religious movement in history begins with an individual’s testimony of a purportedly greater vision. The evaluation of such a vision rests chiefly on its evocative persuasiveness, as well as the personal gravity of its messenger. In that vein, I rank Aquino among the primary theoreticians of any modern religious movement.

Rumors persist that Aquino attempted to conjure “the Devil” in Heinrich Himmler’s one-time redoubt, Wewelsburg castle in the Northern Rhine. Not exactly — but nor is the matter invention, either.

Wewelsburg Castle (Wikimedia Commons)

In October 1982, Aquino participated in a series of tours of European NATO installations. Later that month, through considerable personal effort, he located and entered the Renaissance-age castle, discovering Himmler’s original ceremonial rooms. Historian Nevill Drury writes in Stealing Fire from Heaven:

The specific links between the Setian philosophy and the magical practices of the esoteric Nazi group led by Heinrich Himmler are hard to identify but are nevertheless present. Although Aquino states very clearly that there are many aspects of the Nazi era that are repugnant to him, he is also convinced that the Nazis were able to summon an extraordinary psychic force which was misdirected—but need not have been.

In another of his two-volume omnibus editions (the Setian was nothing if not assiduous), the 2016 Temple of Set, Aquino reproduced his correspondence to Temple members explaining his intent “to summon the Powers of Darkness at their most powerful locus.” The results of his “Wewelsburg Working” are opaque but I briefly quote one insight:

Strengthen, exalt, and encourage the willful self, and you can- not avoid strengthening the natural instincts as well. No human being is free from these; they may be kept in check for years, but in eventual moments of stress, weakness, or stimulus they will break free. They may be either creative or destructive; this is not a mere “Jekyll / Hyde” scenario.

The passage highlights the intrinsic problem of actually maintaining any kind of Satanic order. Aquino observed that when a seeker is dedicated, unsentimentally and realistically, to self-development, whatever progress is experienced inclines him or her less toward an organization. As soon as members discover things of their own, they want to leave or become leaders themselves. In his social history, Satanism, Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne observes: “These problems, Aquino insisted, were not due to the personalities of the leaders or the members of the Church of Satan or the Temple of Set. They were due to the paradox that, the more an occult Satanist order is successful in strengthening self-consciousness, the more it sows the seeds of its own ruin by strengthening at the same time natural instinct.”

Crowley’s Book of the Law reads, “Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not over much!” The Left-Hand Path may finally entail solitary work.

Lilith and Michael Aquino in Los Angeles, 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)

In1987, Aquino and his second wife Lilith faced a years-long period of agony, legal wrangling, and exoneration after being falsely accused of sexual abuse by the three-year-old daughter of a Presidio Army base clergyman during a flare up of “Satanic Panic” hysteria. Investigators found that in the weeks of the claimed incident the Aquinos were not even in San Francisco but rather were living in Washington, D.C. No charges were filed. The Aquinos unsuccessfully attempted legal action against the girl’s chaplain father and an Army psychiatrist who stoked the false claims. But the couple faced the barrier of gravitating between civilian and military law.

“Despite these setbacks,” writes historian Gareth Medway, “the Aquinos were successful in legal actions against two books—Carl A. Raschke’s Painted Black and Linda Blood’s The New Satanists—that suggested they had been guilty. Both cases were settled out of court, and the Aquinos report themselves ‘satisfied.’” [4] In an example of how these canards endure, a podcaster in 2021 attempted to play “gotcha” with me using thirty-year-old news coverage impugning Aquino, either unaware or unconcerned that the allegations were long since discredited.

A promotional image of Aquino.

In 1994, Aquino retired from the military as a lieutenant colonel and was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal. News of his death began circulating online in 2020. The Setian apparently intended to keep his passing private, at which he succeeded remarkably well in a digital age. According to San Francisco County records, the Temple of Set founder died at seventy-five on September 1, 2019.

As historian Massimo Introvigne observes, “Satanism is fueled, if not created, by anti-Satanism, much more than anti-Satanism is generated by a real prominence of Satanism.”

Indeed, anti-Satanism is a far vaster ideology although possessed of a largely imaginary target. Even where self-identified Satanic organizations or intellects exist, their outlook and philosophy, as seen, are almost always misunderstood or mispresented. This is true of a more recent organization, The Satanic Temple, which uses innovative protests and legal challenges to defend First Amendment rights. A non-theistic group (although views of individual members may vary), the Temple is, by and large, a brilliantly conceived work of guerrilla theater on behalf of constitutional liberties and church-state neutrality.

Because Aquino and his wife were victims of the anti-Satanist narrative—marked almost entirely by fantasy, preferential reading, and leaps of supposition that rarely involve even basic definitions of the “Satanic” outlook under siege—I close this portrait with consideration of this violative history. Indeed, even magickal practitioners with no Satanic interests, such as magician Damien Echols, were caught in the web of 1980s–1990s Satanic Panic hysteria—sometimes with results almost impossible to fathom.

In 1994, a teenaged Echols and two friends, known as the West Memphis Three, were tried and falsely convicted in Arkansas of triple homicide, which prosecutors depicted as a Satanic ritual murder. Echols was sentenced to death. After years of appeal and public outcry, with Echols incarcerated on death row, the three were finally freed in 2011. Space has allowed me to review only a few of the imprisonments, false accusations, and life-altering persecutions arising from Satanic Panic falsehoods in the media, legal system, and among self- appointed therapeutic experts, many of whom were found to plant, coerce, or otherwise encourage lurid and debunked testimonies from children or recovered memories from vulnerable adults. [5]

In fact, most of the myriad accusations of the 1980s and early 1990s were directed against people with no occult ties whatever: daycare workers, teachers, librarians, and happenstance pedestrians. By 1989, more than 50 such cases were underway in the U.S. legal system—involving literally thousands of unsubstantiated accusations of Satanic ritual abuse. [6] These allegations produced some of the longest-running criminal trials in American history—and all that the record finally bore out was that innocent lives of the accused were irreparably damaged. [7] The most sensational and longest running case involved California’s McMartin Preschool, of which journalist Heather Greene wrote in her 2021 Lights, Camera, Witchcraft:

In 1983, accusations were made against owners and childcare workers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. They were accused of ritual child abuse, including sodomy, rape, and other forms of molestation. Stories circulated of animal sacrifice, secret tunnels, blood drinking, the placing of pentagrams on children’s bottoms, and more. In 1984, 384 McMartin preschool children of the 400 interviewed were diagnosed as having been sexually abused. Arrests were made. Despite all early doubts as to the credibility of the children’s testimonies and the legitimacy of various reports, the McMartin trial continued for seven years, becoming the most expensive and longest running criminal trial in American history.

All charges were dropped in 1990. And yet, despite myriad debunking, related canards endure in some of the episodes mentioned as well as in conspiracy narratives popularized by the QAnon movement in the early twenty-first century. The implications sometimes emerge on the geopolitical stage. In justifying his attempted annexation of four regions of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin announced in a speech of September 30, 2022, “The repression of freedom is taking on the outlines of a ‘reverse religion,’ of real Satanism,” claiming that Western liberal outlooks on matters like gender identity amounted to a “denial of man.” [8]

Amid sensational charges or waves of paranoia, it is always instructive to consider what schisms are concurrently playing out in a given society and how they are dealt with or digested. Very often, abuses in the mainstream or anxiety over cultural shifts are displaced onto scapegoats, real or imagined, on social fringes. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s seems to have arisen, at least in part, from anxiety over women entering the workplace, which in turn got projected onto daycare centers and workers. Similar projections were made against heavy metal musicians and fans who presented a convenient target for themes of adolescent suicide and despair. [9]

Indeed, the crisis that occurred concurrently with the 1980s Satanic Panic was a wave of unreported or underreported child abuse in mainstream institutions, most prominently the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America. This was so much the case that in 2020 the Boy Scouts of America declared bankruptcy to defend itself against class action lawsuits from tens of thousands of claimants and survivors. [10] Likewise, as of this writing more than thirty Catholic dioceses or organizations in the U.S. alone have declared bankruptcy for the same reasons. [11] Similar events have played out, sometimes on a larger scale, in nations including France, Canada, and Germany. [12] This is not “whataboutism”—it is the same issue: During the peak of the Satanic Panic, people with relatively no social power—daycare workers, counselors, teachers, heavy metal musicians, artists—were accused of crimes later proved fraudulent and non-existent. This reflected an age-old cycle in which abuses and criminality within powerful quarters, sometimes precincts of social prestige, are dislodged onto outsiders who can do little to defend themselves. Historically, we have seen this occur in witch hunting, red scares, lynching, racism, Jew hatred, gay bashing, and mass arrests of nonviolent users and dealers in the War on Drugs.

I must add to this short record an observation based on experience, which is that most anti-Satanists dwell upon lurid and grotesque accounts of abuse, pockmarked with historical and legal gaps and inventions, in ways I have never witnessed among those they target. I venture that some who collect and brandish these records nurture a prurient interest of their own perfumed and reprocessed through activist “research.”

The search for a hidden foe is a constant in human history. The Satanic Panic fit the impulse and to some degree still does. I wish space permitted greater justice to the lives of innocents caught in the stone-throwing; if there exist any victims of “sacrifice” in this narrative, it is them.

This article is adapted from the author’s Modern Occultism.

Notes

[1] Lords of the Left-Hand Path by Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D. (Inner Traditions, 1997, 2012)

[2] Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism by Ruben van Luijk (Oxford University Press, 2016)

[3] The Church of Satan by Michael A. Aquino, Sixth Edition, 2009 — here and the two quotes following.

[4] Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism by Gareth Medway (New York Univer- sity Press, 2001)

[5] E.g., see “It’s Time to Revisit the Satanic Panic” by Alan Yuhas, New York Times, March 31, 2021; “I’m Sorry” [the recantation of a former child witness] by Kyle Zirpolpo as told to Debbie Nathan, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2005; and “Why Satanic Panic never really ended” by Aja Romano, Vox, March 31, 2021.

[6] Medway (2001)

[7] E.g., see “The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: An Account” by Douglas O. Linder at Famous-Trails.com

[8] “Putin’s speech on annexation paints a stark picture of a face-off with the West” by Anton Troianovski, New York Times, September 30, 2022

[9] E.g., for a sensational and spurious case against band Judas Priest see “Rock Group Cleared in Suicide Case,” Washington Post, August 25, 1990

[10] See “Boy Scouts Of America Files For Bankruptcy As It Faces Hundreds Of Sex-Abuse Claims” by Laurel Wamsley and Wade Goodwyn, NPR Morning Edition and “U.S. judge signs off on $850 million Boy Scouts sex abuse settlement” by Maria Chutchian, Reuters, August 19, 2021.

[11] See “Catholic Church Bankruptcies,” The Meneo Law Group, AbuseLawsuit.com.

[12] See “French report: 330,000 children victims of church sex abuse” by Sylvie Corbet, Associated Press, October 5, 2021; “Pope Francis vows to root out sexual abuse in Catholic Church after McCarrick report” by Nicole Winfield, Associated Press, November 11, 2020; and “Report finds 196 clerics abused minors in German diocese,” Associated Press, June 13, 2022.