Anton Szandor LaVey (11 April 1930 - 29 October 1997) was an American occultist who founded the Church of Satan in 1966 and is considered to be the father of modern Satanism.
Biography[]
Howard Stanton Levey was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1930 and raised in a secular Russian-Jewish household in the San Francisco Bay Area. He observed early on how Christians used the term "satanic" to describe anyone and anything disagreeable to them, and he saw the potential of embracing it rather than disputing it. LaVey became an organist and later a photographer for the San Francisco Police Department, and he became a local celebrity through his music and his paranormal research. He formed a group called the "Order of the Trapezoid", which would help him with founding the Church of Satan in 1966. LaVey's movement grew during the 1960s, and he performed the first Satanic baptism in history on his three-year-old daughter, while he also performed Satanic burials. In 1969, he published The Satanic Bible, and he became a renowned author and musician. He died of pulmonary edema in 1997 at the age of 67, and he was known as the father of modern Satanism.