“The Satanic Scriptures” is both the title of a book by Anton Szandor LaVey and a useful phrase for considering the varied texts, ideas, and literary traditions associated with Satanism. Yet the phrase can be misleading if it suggests a single holy book, universally accepted canon, or centralized religious authority. Satanism has never possessed one scripture comparable to the Bible, Qur’an, or Vedas. Its literature is plural: philosophical, ritual, artistic, polemical, historical, and deeply shaped by the distinct forms of Satanism that emerged in the modern era.
For many readers, Satanic writing is surprising. Rather than focusing on supernatural evil, many Satanic texts defend individual sovereignty, skepticism, pleasure, responsibility, and resistance to coercive moral authority. Other currents, particularly theistic and esoteric forms of Satanism, approach Satan as a real spiritual being, archetype, initiator, or symbol of liberation. The resulting body of literature is diverse, occasionally contradictory, and often deliberately provocative.
To read Satanic scriptures well is to read them with attention to their context. These are not merely manuals of rebellion. They are documents of religious innovation, social criticism, theatrical self-creation, and ongoing argument about what Satan represents.
Scripture Without a Canon
The word scripture traditionally refers to writings regarded as sacred, authoritative, or foundational within a religious community. In Satanism, authority is generally less centralized. There is no ecumenical council that determines which books are canonical, nor is there a universally recognized clergy empowered to settle questions of doctrine.
Instead, texts become important through use and influence. A book may be read in ritual settings, quoted by practitioners, used to explain ethical commitments, or treated as a point of departure for disagreement. Its authority may be historical rather than absolute: a text matters because it shaped the movement, even when contemporary Satanists reject portions of it.
This decentralized character reflects a core tension in Satanic thought. Many Satanists value autonomy and distrust imposed authority, including religious authority. A rigid canon would sit uneasily beside a worldview that frequently encourages personal judgment. Consequently, Satanic literature often functions less as unquestionable revelation than as a collection of arguments, symbols, aphorisms, rituals, and intellectual provocations.
The distinction is especially important because “Satanism” is not a single belief system. It includes atheistic or non-theistic traditions, theistic traditions, esoteric groups, independent practitioners, and newer organizations whose values and methods may differ sharply. A text revered in one community may be considered irrelevant—or actively opposed—in another.
Anton LaVey and the Modern Satanic Library
The most influential modern Satanic author remains Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997), founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966. LaVey’s writings helped establish what is commonly called LaVeyan Satanism, a non-theistic form of Satanism in which Satan is understood primarily as a literary and mythic symbol rather than a literal deity.
For LaVey, Satan represented qualities he believed conventional religion had suppressed: pride, carnal existence, independence, rational self-interest, worldly achievement, and opposition to hypocrisy. His work emerged in a particular cultural setting—the postwar United States, the sexual revolution, occult revivalism, and the theatrical counterculture of the 1960s. Its rhetoric was intentionally confrontational, designed to challenge inherited Christian moral assumptions.
The Satanic Bible
Published in 1969, The Satanic Bible is the best-known Satanic text in the world. It remains the central book of LaVeyan Satanism, though its contents are neither uniform in origin nor equally accepted by all readers.
The book is divided into four sections: “The Book of Satan,” “The Book of Lucifer,” “The Book of Belial,” and “The Book of Leviathan.” These titles echo biblical language while reversing its moral symbolism. In Jewish and Christian traditions, Satan, Lucifer, Belial, and Leviathan carry associations with accusation, rebellion, chaos, or evil. LaVey reworks them as emblems of intellect, desire, self-assertion, and ceremonial force.
“The Book of Satan” contains anti-clerical and anti-hypocritical rhetoric, much of it adapted from Might Is Right (1890) by the writer Ragnar Redbeard, a pseudonymous and controversial author associated with social-Darwinist ideas. This borrowing is significant. It demonstrates that The Satanic Bible is not presented as ancient revelation but as a modern collage of earlier polemics, philosophy, occultism, and dramatic language.
“The Book of Lucifer” contains essays setting out LaVey’s ethical and philosophical positions. It criticizes guilt-based morality, spiritual escapism, and indiscriminate compassion. “The Book of Belial” presents ritual theory and descriptions of ceremonial practice. “The Book of Leviathan” contains invocations and Enochian-derived material, reflecting LaVey’s interest in ceremonial magic and the writings of John Dee and Edward Kelley.
The book’s most frequently quoted principles include the “Nine Satanic Statements,” “Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth,” and “Nine Satanic Sins.” These compact formulations are often treated as summaries of LaVeyan ethics. They advocate, among other things, responsibility toward the responsible, respect for personal boundaries, avoidance of unwanted advice, and resistance to self-deception. At the same time, some passages employ harsh language about weakness, hierarchy, retaliation, and social worth. Readers should not flatten these tensions. The Satanic Bible is a work of both ethical prescription and deliberate shock.
The Compleat Witch and The Satanic Witch
First published in 1971 as The Compleat Witch, then reissued as The Satanic Witch, this book focuses on what LaVey called “lesser magic”: the use of appearance, timing, social intelligence, erotic charisma, and psychological insight to influence others.
Its language reflects gender assumptions of its period and can feel dated or restrictive to modern readers. Nevertheless, it reveals an important element of LaVeyan Satanism: magic is not necessarily understood as supernatural intervention. It can mean the practical art of producing desired effects through knowledge of human behavior. In this sense, the text belongs as much to the genre of self-fashioning and social strategy as to occult literature.
The Satanic Rituals and The Devil’s Notebook
LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals (1972) expands the ceremonial dimension of his work. It includes rituals inspired by or adapted from fiction, folklore, historical imagination, and earlier occult sources. The book makes clear that Satanic ritual, in its LaVeyan form, is theatrical rather than devotional in the conventional sense. Participants do not necessarily worship an external Satan. Instead, ritual can serve as a focused, emotionally expressive, and symbolic form of psychodrama.
The Devil’s Notebook, published in 1992, collects essays originally written for the Church of Satan’s newsletter, The Cloven Hoof. Its topics range from individualism and aesthetics to technology, politics, animal behavior, and cultural criticism. The essays are often aphoristic and idiosyncratic. They provide an accessible view of LaVey’s later thinking, though they should be read as personal essays rather than systematic theology.
Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Scriptures
Published posthumously in 2007, The Satanic Scriptures gathers essays, interviews, and shorter pieces written by LaVey over several decades. Edited by Peter H. Gilmore, High Priest of the Church of Satan, the collection extends themes familiar from LaVey’s earlier work: individualism, artistic seriousness, skepticism toward spiritual claims, criticism of herd mentality, and opposition to what he saw as sentimental moralism.
Unlike The Satanic Bible, which has a more deliberately monumental structure, The Satanic Scriptures reads as an archive of a public intellectual and religious founder. Its essays respond to particular cultural moments, including debates over media, censorship, religion, sexuality, politics, and the public image of Satanism.
This makes the book valuable in two ways. First, it clarifies the continuity of LaVey’s worldview. He consistently portrays Satanism as a religion of the material world, one that rejects the promise of a compensatory afterlife in favor of engagement with present life. Second, it reveals the limits of any attempt to reduce Satanism to a fixed slogan. LaVey’s positions were developed over time and expressed through satire, performance, interview, and polemic as much as through formal doctrine.
The collection should be approached critically. Its arguments are forceful and often entertaining, but they are not neutral. LaVey wrote to persuade, provoke, and distinguish his movement from both Christian moral culture and the wider occult marketplace. His prose is most illuminating when read as part of a self-consciously theatrical religious project: Satanism was meant not only to be believed, but to be embodied with style.
Ritual Texts and the Meaning of “Magic”
Satanic ritual texts are frequently misunderstood by outsiders. Popular culture often imagines Satanic ritual as criminal, sacrificial, or inherently violent. Modern Satanic literature does not support that assumption. In non-theistic Satanism, ritual is generally framed as symbolic ceremony, emotional release, and aesthetic experience. It may involve candles, music, invocations, costumes, altars, or formalized language, but these elements are not necessarily claims about supernatural beings.
LaVey described ritual as a form of “greater magic,” a psychologically charged process through which participants give ceremonial shape to desire, anger, grief, sexual feeling, or aspiration. The purpose is not moral purification or submission to divine will. It is catharsis, concentration, and personal transformation.
This does not mean every Satanist shares this interpretation. Theistic Satanists may approach ritual as communication with Satan or other spiritual intelligences. Others may reject formal ritual entirely. The important point is that Satanic ceremonial language cannot be interpreted apart from the worldview of the community using it.
A ritual text is therefore not necessarily a confession of literal belief. It may be poetry, theatre, meditation, symbolic inversion, or a method of emotional discipline. Its meaning lies partly in performance.
Beyond LaVey: Other Satanic and Satan-Adjacent Texts
Although LaVey dominates public awareness, Satanic literature extends beyond the Church of Satan. The broader landscape includes texts by the Temple of Set, contemporary non-theistic Satanic organizations, individual theistic practitioners, and writers in adjacent occult currents.
The Temple of Set was founded in 1975 by Michael A. Aquino after a split from the Church of Satan. Setians do not simply identify Set, the Egyptian deity, with the Christian Satan; rather, they develop a distinct esoteric philosophy centered on the principle of Xeper, commonly translated as “coming into being.” Their foundational text, The Book of Coming Forth by Night, is important within the Temple of Set, though it is not generally published as a conventional commercial scripture. Aquino’s later writings, including Black Magic, provide fuller accounts of Setian thought, ritual, and history.
The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, represents another major contemporary current. It is non-theistic and politically engaged, using Satanic symbolism to advocate religious pluralism, bodily autonomy, scientific reasoning, and the separation of religion from state institutions. Its “Seven Tenets” are often treated as its clearest ethical statement. They emphasize compassion, justice, bodily inviolability, respect for the freedoms of others, conformity of belief to scientific understanding, acknowledgment of human fallibility, and the principle that compassion and justice should prevail over literalism.
These tenets differ in tone from LaVey’s writings. Where LaVeyan texts often emphasize stratification, ego, and personal indulgence, The Satanic Temple tends to speak in the language of empathy, rights, and civic equality. The contrast illustrates why it is misleading to speak of “the Satanic view” as though one exists.
Theistic and devotional Satanist writers add further diversity. Their work may describe Satan as a god, liberator, teacher, adversary of tyranny, or bearer of forbidden knowledge. Such texts are often independently published, community-specific, or transmitted through small networks rather than major institutions. Their authority is usually experiential and relational: a practitioner may value a text because it resonates with ritual life or personal spiritual experience, not because it was issued by a central authority.
Literary Ancestors and Symbolic Sources
Modern Satanic writings draw upon a much older cultural archive. The Satan of scripture, medieval theology, folklore, Romantic poetry, Gothic fiction, and political dissent has never meant only one thing. Satan has been imagined as tempter, accuser, tyrant, comic figure, rebel, tragic hero, serpent, dragon, intellectual dissenter, and symbol of human freedom.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is especially important. Although Milton’s poem is fundamentally Christian and does not endorse Satan, its eloquent, defiant Satan became influential for later writers who saw in him a figure of rebellion against arbitrary power. William Blake famously observed that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” a remark that helped establish a Romantic image of Satan as an energizing force.
Other important literary sources include Lord Byron’s dramatic and rebellious heroes, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and the nineteenth-century occult revival. The French writer Anatole France’s novel The Revolt of the Angels (1914) offers another ironic reimagining of heavenly revolt and religious authority.
These works are not Satanic scriptures in a formal sense. They are literary ancestors: texts that supplied language, imagery, and emotional atmosphere for later Satanic thought. Reading them helps explain why Satanism often treats Satan less as an object of fear than as a symbol through which questions of authority, knowledge, desire, and dissent can be explored.
Reading Satanic Texts Responsibly
Satanic literature benefits from neither sensationalism nor uncritical admiration. It should be read historically, ethically, and comparatively.
Historically, readers should recognize the influence of nineteenth-century individualism, social Darwinism, occult revivalism, Romantic rebellion, and twentieth-century counterculture. Ethically, readers should distinguish between symbolic provocation and practical conduct. A harsh slogan may be intended as polemic, but it still deserves scrutiny for the values it promotes. Comparatively, readers should avoid treating one Satanic organization as representative of all others.
The most productive question is not whether a text is “really” Satanic enough. It is what the text asks Satan to signify. Is Satan a metaphor for self-ownership? A spiritual intelligence? A protest against religious coercion? A theatrical emblem of taboo? A framework for ritual transformation? The answer changes from author to author.
This diversity is not a weakness in the Satanic library. It is part of its defining character. Satanic scriptures are records of a continuing argument: about freedom and responsibility, individuality and community, material life and spiritual longing, outrage and compassion. They invite readers to confront authority—but also to examine the authority of their own assumptions.
Selected References
• Aquino, Michael A. Black Magic: Selected Essays. Temple of Set, 2005.
• Faxneld, Per. Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Introvigne, Massimo. Satanism: A Social History. Brill, 2016.
• LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Bible. Avon Books, 1969.
• LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Rituals. Avon Books, 1972.
• LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Devil’s Notebook. Feral House, 1992.
• LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Scriptures. Feral House, 2007.
• Petersen, Jesper Aagaard, ed. Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology. Ashgate, 2009.
• The Satanic Temple. “The Seven Tenets.” The Satanic Temple, official website.