Satan Lives in New York City

Being curious and hoping to take advantage of the wonderful diversity of religious and cultural institutions in New York City, I was hoping to attend a Satanic mass and write about its proceedings. I e-mailed the media contact of the Church of Satan (www.churchofsatan.com) and was informed that outsiders were not allowed to attend Church rituals. However, the representative informed me that the Church of Satan was now headquartered in New York City, and that I might be able to meet with its high priest or another representative. Soon I was scheduled to interview Peter H. Gilmore, the high priest of the Church of Satan.

Gilmore is a longtime Church member and, luckily for me, a New York City resident. He lives, appropriately enough, in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan. It was there that I met him and had lunch at McHale's on Eighth Avenue and 46th Street. He dresses mostly in black, has a goatee, and his eyebrows are fixed in a way that give him a more demonic countenance. Despite his eccentric appearance, Gilmore speaks intelligently and is pleasant to deal with, and is not the spooky crank one might expect from someone in his position.

Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966. LaVey published The Satanic Bible and developed his own Satanic philosophy that was atheistic and self-indulgent. The Church of Satan doesn't believe in Satan as a supernatural being at all, but that "Satan" is the representation of humanity's "true carnal nature."
"Satan means 'adversary' in the Hebrew," Gilmore said. "We're the adversaries of all spiritual doctrine." Gilmore became a Satanist after reading The Satanic Bible as a teenager. "You're a Satanist by nature. That's just the way you're hardwired. Once you read our literature, you recognize yourself as one. You can't become one, you can't convert to be one, you either are or you aren't. It doesn't matter what you were born into beforehand."
In addition to running the church, he does freelance graphic design work. He has scored music for horror films and is writing a vampire novel and a book about Satanism. His wife, who is also a church leader, has a job outside the home, but he would not disclose what it is. "I've been an outspoken Satanist since I was in high school," said Gilmore. "I hid nothing." He said that his and his wife's families have been very supportive.

Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, whose biographical claims were widely exposed as fiction, passed away in 1997. After his death, Karla LaVey, his oldest daughter, and Blanche Barton, his companion and mother of his young son Xerxes, entered a legal dispute over control of the Church and other assets. The matter was settled with Blanche Barton taking control of the Church of Satan as high priestess.

In April 2001, Blanche Barton handed over the reigns to Peter Gilmore. Karla LaVey started her own church, the First Satanic Church, headquartered in San Francisco. There is another group called the First Church of Satan, run by a former member of the Church of Satan named Lord Egan. Neither organization lists contacts in New York and neither replied to my requests for interviews.

Gilmore said that many members are secretive about their membership. "There are people who are priests in our organization who actually have some fairly interesting positions in the world, who would never tell anybody that they were in our organization.

"We have people in Saudi Arabia. They are totally quiet about it. We have members in the Philippines and that's a pretty repressive society. We have a whole bunch of members in Singapore who are really terrified that they'll be found out by the government and killed. We have members in communist China."

One member of the Church of Satan, according to Gilmore, is the "mayor of a major city in Europe." He declined to say more about the mayor, other than he was a Magister in the church located in a large NATO country, and that only a small handful in the church knew his identity. "The guy's really super underground."

A Church of Satan member that Gilmore put me in touch with was Jon Rechner, better known as Balls Mahoney, the infamous 'Chair Swingin' Freak' of professional wrestling. "I started like any other kid that was fed up with bullshit religious confines," said Rechner. "Why should I go into a confessional and tell a child-molesting scumbag what I did wrong?"

As a teenager breaking into professional wrestling, Rechner picked up a copy of The Satanic Bible to get ideas for a wrestling gimmick. "I've always had a copy of The Satanic Bible since then." While being a professed Satanist since his teens, Rechner officially joined the Church of Satan only recently, after being introduced to the group by James Mitchell, a professional wrestling manager known as the Sinister Minister. Rechner says that although he has a loyal fan following and a reputation for being a good worker in the pro wrestling world, becoming more open about his Satanic beliefs may be hindering his career.

In 1975 one of the Church's priests, Michael Aquino, left the Church and founded the Temple of Set (www.xeper.org). Set, an ancient Egyptian god, is an early predecessor to the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of Satan. In the early 1990s Anton LaVey's estranged daughter Zeena publicly denounced her father and joined the Temple.
I met with Walter Gallo, a priest in the Temple of Set, along with two other members at Kyber Pass, an Afghani restaurant on St. Mark's Place. The other members were Aaron Vlek, who said she recently joined the temple after many years of involvement in other occult groups, and Jarl, who was conservatively dressed in a business suit and asked me not to use his last name. Vlek works as an editor and writer, and Jarl works as a management consultant. Like Gilmore, these Setians were intelligent and pleasant to speak with.

Gallo, who is a manager for a large supermarket chain (he declined to say which one), was a member of the Church of Satan but left, saying that the church didn't have anything new to teach him. "I also regard the nature of the Prince of Darkness not really to be embodied by Satan anymore. I view him in his original manifestation, which is Set."
Members of the Temple of Set must believe in Set in some fashion in order to progress into its priesthood. All said that they believe in Set but that there is no orthodoxy of thought on Set in the temple. "You could have five priests or priestesses of the Temple here," said Gallo, "and you could have five different concepts of what Set is." Vlek points out that the Temple's view of Set is not in line with traditional Western concepts. "The notion that seems to be different with Setians is that there is no worship of Set as a lord and master."

The Church of Satan does not require regular meetings. Each grotto is free to meet as frequently or infrequently as it likes. Last year about 50 of the church's members met in Mesquite, Texas, to visit a large haunted house and horror exhibition called Thrillvania. The church plans to have another such gathering this year somewhere in the United States.
The Temple of Set does meet more regularly. Its members in New York meet about every other week. Once a year, the Temple of Set holds a convention known as a "conclave." Its last conclave was in Las Vegas; this year it will be held somewhere in Europe.

Both the Church of Satan and the Temple of Set screen applicants for active membership to weed out "the wrong kind of weirdoes," according to Gilmore. The Temple of Set's Gallo insists on meeting all potential members in person and said that he rejects approximately one third of those seeking to join.

Neither the Church of Satan nor the Temple of Set would say how many members they have in the New York City area. The Village Voice interviewed Aaron Vlek for an article about her apartment and, in addition to giving her name as Karen Estes, quoted her as saying of the Temple, "there are just about six of us in New York."

The Church of Satan, which claims to have many followers in New York City, has only one chartered grotto in the city. Gilmore, who has his own "magic circle," said the average grotto contains about 10 people, but many church members are not affiliated with one. Critical press accounts put the number of members in both organizations at around 300 worldwide, but members of both groups laugh this off as being ridiculously low.

Both groups claim to be expanding in New York and worldwide, and want all those who come into contact with them to know that they are productive members of society and are nothing to be afraid of.

"We seek knowledge and we're the soul of honor," said Vlek.
"Set doesn't do us any favors except for good parking spots, which is worth a lot in New York, let me tell you," joked Jarl. "We're here, but do your research before contacting us."

"The way I am is the way I am," said Rechner. "I don't murder people, I go fishing."