Lord Larehip

Going through my library, I dug these out and decided to write about them. A Black Book is manual, novel, treatise or written account that explores the dark, seedy underbelly of a topic or deals with a topic that is of itself dark and seedy or generally shunned by the mainstream. The attitude of the author or authors is not critical but either sympathetic or ambivalent towards the subject matter. This is a compendium of Black Books of all types. Some of them you have at least heard of and may even have read or browsed, most you probably never knew existed.

The Book of Black Magic and Ceremonial Magic by Arthur Edward Waite



Waite, a Christian mystic, was a member of the Victorian English secret society called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The membership included other noted occultists as Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Samuel Liddell MacGregor-Mathers, Moina Mathers, Constance Wilde (wife of Oscar), William Butler Yeats, Israel Regardie and others. Waite also made perhaps the most popular tarot card deck—the Waite-Rider pack. This book by Waite is an invaluable source of the type of magic that flourished in Europe from the 18th century that were originally disseminated in pamphlets that would almost certainly be permanently lost to us today. Waite also criticizes various translations and providing what he feels are more accurate readings and this gives us a bit more latitude in understanding the material.

Books of true Black Magic, Hollywood notwithstanding, are often brutish. Waite mentions a magical treatise called The Method of Honorius which contains a sacrifice that goes thus:

“After sunrise, a black cock must be killed, the first feather of its left wing being plucked and preserved for use at the required time. The eyes must be torn out, and also the tongue and heart; these must be dried in the sun and afterwards reduced to powder.”

And if you think that’s bad, to become invisible, Honorius instructs the magicians thus:

“Begin this operation on a Wednesday before the sun rises, being furnished with seven black beans. Take next the head of a dead man; place one of the beans in his mouth, two in his eyes and two in his ears. Then make upon his head the character of the figure which here follows [Waite does not reproduce it as it has been deleted from all available source material]. This done, inter the head with the face towards heaven, and every day before sunrise, for the space of nine days, water it with excellent brandy. On the eighth day you will find the cited spirit, who will say unto you: What doest thou? You shall reply: I am watering my plant. He will then say: Give me that bottle; I will water it myself. You will answer by refusing, and he will again ask you, but you will persist in declining, until he stretch forth his hand and shew you the same figure which you have traced upon the head suspended from the tips of his fingers. In this case you may be assured that it is really the spirit of the head, because another might take you unawares, which would bring you evil, and further, your operation would be unfruitful. When you have given him your phial, he will water the head and depart. On the morrow, which is the ninth day, you shall return and find your beans ripe. Take them, place one in your mouth, and then look at yourself in a glass [mirror]. If you cannot see yourself, it is good.”

Honorius does not say where or how to procure the head of a corpse. Why so brutal? Magicians of the Middle Ages, as Waite points out, were brutish people shunned by the rest of society. They lived on the fringes of society. They practiced as they wished, had no regard for the law or morals. Waite does not point out, however, that most of these magicians were born as Jews. Indeed, qabala was a fixture in medieval magic and is still practiced to this day (Madonna is a confirmed qabalist). I have been informed by Jewish qabalists that the type practiced in Christendom is not true qabala which requires many years of intense study of the Hebrew language and alphabet under a master qabalist of the type that can only be found in Jewish schools. Christian qabalists, however, have also informed me that this is not true and the medieval brand of qabala practiced in Europe is the true qabala. Be that as it may.

We should point out, however, that kings and aristocrats were often fascinated by occultism and were avid practitioners themselves. Some were placed under the instruction of these magicians and believed wholeheartedly in black and white magic. Many privately rejected the Christian god and embraced the Infernal One. The French king, Henry III (who reigned from 1574-1589), at least made a show of practicing devil-worship and kept an altar which had an alleged piece of the true cross which Henry had had mounted in gold. This was, in turn, laid in a crucifix upon which two devils wrought in silver are rubbing their posteriors. Small wonder then that most of the Black Magic information in Waite’s book came from French pamphlets.

One of the most famous secret occult societies was England’s so-called Hellfire Club. They were really known as the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe and contained some of the most powerful men in England. St. Francis was Sir Francis Dashwood, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who founded the club. John Montagu, the fourth the Earl of Sandwich and Secretary of the Navy, was also a member and a rather depraved one at that. Benjamin Franklin also joined the club when he visited England at Dashwood’s behest. The club had its own abbey where they gathered to practice ritual sex on various prostitutes. They also had an altar where they would gather to intone Satan to appear before them (it’s not known if Franklin participated in these although the other members would certainly have wanted to see him prove his prowess and he did have illegitimate children and so was not above a bit of rakishness). They had a black scripture although no one is sure what is was but the available information indicates it to be the Key of Solomon (also known, according to Waite, under the title True Black Magic).

Dashwood obtained his Black Magic books from a bookseller of low repute named Edmund Curll who ran a bookshop in Covent Gardens in London. Curll specialized in pornography for certain clients (aristocrats and nobility) and Black Magic books were viewed as pornography back then which would obviously hold a fascination for the Friars.

Much of the material in Waite’s book would have been the type of thing that the Friars would have encountered since they lived at the same period. How much of it they incorporated is anyone’s guess. Waite’s book, although more a commentary, contains enough entire manuscripts of various Black Grimoires, many of them too rare to be found anywhere else, that it itself qualifies as a Black Book.

Principia Discordia: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger

For those who have read the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Principia Discordia should at least ring some bells. Malaclypse the Younger is Greg Hill who, along with Kerry W. Thornley (Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst), founded the Discordian order and wrote much its material. The First Edition of Principia Discordia appeared in New Orleans in 1964. Hill wrote it and gave it to Lane Caplinger who worked in the office of the District Attorney who just happened to be none other than Jim Garrison (the person played by Kevin Costner in the JFK movie). Caplinger typed up the manuscript and ran off copies on the mimeograph machine in Garrison’s office (all without his knowledge). Working from this, Hill added and expanded to the Holy Writ of Discordianism over the next five years. Thornley was himself questioned due to some tenuous ties to Oswald.

In short, Discordianism worships Eris the goddess of chaos and discord. While clearly a gag religion expressed with much humor, as with most gag religions, the founders often find themselves wondering just how much of gag it really is (i.e. a joke disguised as religion or religion disguised as a joke). Oftimes, the pithy and witty comments do seem to have a kind of unintended wisdom to them:

“But before I was a Discordian, when I entered my room only to be reminded by its disarray that it was a mess, I felt a sense of defeat. These days when that happens I just say ‘Hail Eris!’ – our customary salute to any embodiment of chaos – and then I cheerfully carry on, secure in the knowledge that the constellations look no better.”

“You must discipline yourself under a certified Slackmaster until you are capable of drinking beer and watching television with total concentration.”

“Elayne Wechsler was just some broad with a funny bone until she read the Principia and asked the question that led to my great definition of theology. ‘Why,’ she wanted to know, ‘is the Discordian Society, which worships a female divinity, so male dominated?’ Recalling that more women than men are devout about Christianity with its male God and His male Son, I decided that people like religions that blame reality on the opposite sex. So let that be a lesson to us males. Behind every great idea there is a broad with a funny bone.”

The Discordian symbol resembles a tai-chi containing a pentagon and an apple with Callisti written on it in Greek. It is called the Sacred Chao a.k.a. the Hodge-Podge:



Malaclypse the Younger explains it thus:

The Sacred Chao is not the Yin-Yang of the Taoists. It is the Hodge-Podge of the Erisians. And, instead of a Podge spot on the Hodge side, it has a pentagon which symbolizes the Aneristic Principle, and instead of a Hodge spot on the Podge side, it depicts the Golden Apple of Discordia to symbolize the Eristic Principle. The Sacred Chao symbolizes absolutely everything anyone need ever know about absolutely anything, and more! It even symbolizes everything not worth knowing, depicted by the empty space surrounding the Hodge-Podge.

The Greek legend holds that a banquet was thrown by the gods but Eris was not invited. In retaliation, she tossed a golden apple to the banqueters. On it was written “Callisti” or “For the fairest.” Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all began to bicker that the apple was obviously meant for herself. It was decided that the prince of Troy, a fellow named Paris, would award to the fairest one. He gave it to Aphrodite and thus began a chain of tragic events that led up to the breakout of the Trojan War. The golden apple is known as “The Apple of Dischord.” The pentagon within the Hodge-Podge has to do with the Law of Fives which Robert Anton Wilson writes about at great length. Basically, the more one looks for the way five fits into things, the more one finds. For this reason, the number 23 is holy to Discordians (2+3=5). The death of Harlem gangster, Dutch Schultz, was so firmly hitched to the 23 that Illuminatus! refers to him as “a cluster of synchronicity.”

Discordianism has made a lot of inroads into American culture and was even featured on The Colbert Report (and THAT is making it in America, folks!).

Am I correct to label Principia Discordia a Black Book? I think so. The Discordians would probably be upset with me if I didn’t.

The Picatrix: Liber Atratus Edition translated by John Michael Greer and Christopher Warnock (2010-11, Adocentyn Press)





Originally four books of astrological magic from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance assembled into one volume. Its origins are murky but legend has it that it was originally written in North Africa in the 9th century and titled Ghayat al-Hakim (The Goal of the Sage) and attributed to the Sufi scholar al-Majriti although the attribution is likely spurious.

Ever since the Moorish invasion in the 8th century, there has been an avenue open between Spain and North Africa and so the book made its way to Spain where it was translated into both Spanish and Latin by someone in the court of the Castilian king, Alfonso the Wise in 1256 where it received the title of Picatrix. According to the Latin text, Picatrix was the name of the author of the book.

As with all Black Magic treatises of that day, you have to wonder if anybody actually performed these rituals to see if they worked or how they came up with the ingredients that they did. “The Operation of Saturn,” for example, calls for sacrificing a cow or calf and “suffumigating” it with a mixture of hemlock, myrrh, St. John’s Wort and the brain of a black cat.

To affect the obedience of men (as per a military leader, for example) “…take equal parts lion brains, leopard fat, and wolf blood. Liquefy the fat, and mix it with the brains; then pour the blood into it, and it will take on a spotted color.” Don’t touch it, get it on your clothing or breath it because it is a deadly poison, says the instruction.

For acquiring the love of a woman, there a couple of nifty formulas given. One requires a half-ounce each gazelle marrow and beef fat. Melt them together then add a half-ounce each of camphor and rabbit brain. Another formula requires two ounces each of rabbit rennet (that’s the stomach lining) and wolf brains and three grains of melted beef fat. Then add in the blood of the person for whom you are doing the working. Yet another formula requires two ounces each of wolf vulva and rabbit penis, one ounce the eyes of white mice and two ounces of the fat of a white dog. Now if that doesn’t win a woman’s love, what will?

But what if you would rather make war and not love? Well, then, a half-ounce each of black cat bile and the brains of a pig, two ounces of the fat of a black dog and two grains of sweet myrrh should do the trick. “When this confection is eaten it attracts spirits of enmity and ill will.” I don’t doubt that but I do doubt that this concoction qualifies as a “confection.”

If that formula didn’t work as planned, try three grains of black dog bile, two ounces each of pig’s brains, black cat bile, pig grease, sulfur, sweet myrrh, black cat’s eyes and oil of caubac. Then add two grains of copper, four ounces of the brains of a black dog, and one ounce of hair from its tail.

And if you really want to cause some enmities, powder up four ounces of black cat brains and mix with the same amount of powdered human feces. “Give this food to whomever you wish, and he will hate.” No kiddin’.

Some of the folk cures surpass belief:

“Whoever has a deadly illness in his thighs, let him wash his thighs in water of feces that has been distilled three times, and put powdered, calcinated feces on it, and he will be quickly healed.” You would only need to threaten to put that on me and I will be instantly healed.

“Take your sweat in a very clean and beautiful basin, and then put it in a glass vessel. Put into it scrapings from the soles of your feet, and a little of your feces dried in the Sun, and one root of the herb that is called fu in Arabic, and in Latin valerian. Give this in a drink to whomever you wish, and he will delight in you. I, Geber, have tested this, and it is entirely true. Women, however, add water with which they have washed their thighs, while keeping their buttocks turned toward the east.” Yeah, if they were turned toward the west then I’d really be grossed out.

And don’t make me print all the formulas that require toad’s testicles! And since the author identifies himself as Geber then I suppose we know who actually wrote The Picatrix.

Lord Larehip

The Psychopath’s Bible: For the Extreme Individual by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. with Dr. Jack Willis (1994, New Falcon Publications)



A true Black Book if there ever was one. The basic contention of the authors is that most religions don’t encourage the individual but rather use up the individual to further the goals of the collective. Unable to work on developing the self, religions hold back enlightenment. This book—both a social philosophy and a technique—will help the individual develop not only the self but what it claims to be the best part of the self—the Psychopath. It warns the reader that the book is evil but, as Ben Franklin once said, if God created everything then God created evil too. All cultures celebrate evil as we do with our Halloween. The evil is in us and it is not going anywhere so we invent these holidays to acknowledge it and let it out as a kind of safety valve.

I have personally always believed that all of us are psychopathic to an extent and this book agrees and instead of trying to stifle or sublimate that side of us, it seeks to instead liberate it. It teaches the individual to become a “Toxick Magician.” Nicholas Tharcher, who authored the book’s foreword, describes the Toxick Magician as someone who “is not afraid to be deliberately malicious and malevolent. From society’s standpoint, he is the worst of the psychopaths because he does his Work intentionally.” Above all, he is FREE—mainly from delusions that cloud the thinking of homo normalis. He maintains anonymity while plotting the downfall of everyone around him.

Tharcher also makes the interesting observation about the bible of psychiatry known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) or DSM-IV. Tharcher writes:

If you’ve never picked up DSM-IV, we strongly recommend that you do so. You’ll find yourself in it. You’ll find your friends and associates in it. You’ll find your family members in it. Indeed, you’ll find everybody in it. In other words, from the point of view of psychiatry, everyone has a “mental disorder.” For psychiatry, there is no such thing as mental health, only types and degrees of pathology.

Some of what I read in this book is close to the dadaist philosophy expressed a little differently. Dada taught that wars are useless for anything other than spreading around the very thing it has declared war on and it doesn’t matter if it is war on poverty, on racism, on sexism, on abortion, on capitalism, on saving the ecology, on war itself. PB teaches that such wars bring about Toxick Chaos that opposes the actions of the party that has declared war. For example, a war on abortion will only result in over population that inevitably leads to a rejection of the anti-abortion sentiment and will destroy the ones who declared the war. The animal rights activists who declared war on the fur trade anonymously slash up hundreds if not thousands of fur coats as a protest which accomplishes nothing but forcing the fur coat manufacturers to have to slaughter yet more animals to make up for the coats that were uselessly destroyed. More animals have died rather than less.

The book takes a brutal position that the human race’s loftiest goals are but ruses and farces of destruction, stupidity and mediocrity. The book asserts that “all goals reduce to control” and “[l]earn how to help everyone achieve what they want. It will, in the end, destroy them.” Hence the goal of the Toxick Magician is simply to sow the seeds of destruction by helping others achieve their goals. A true psychopath learns to disguise his contempt of his fellow humans by appearing to be one of them—he goes to church, helps a stranded motorist, gets married and raises children but he is NOT a human being. This is done “for the good of the gross force field which is forever struggling to give birth to new life forms as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost to the older forms.”

The Toxick Magician is a Manipulator and a Manipulator always gets what he or she wants by disguising it as a lofty goal. This is the reason a white collar criminal who robs his clients of millions of dollars spends less time in prison than a guy who held up a gas station and took off with $50. European kings declared the triumph of Christendom which earned the adulation of the Christian masses who didn’t give a f-uck that it was achieved by slaughtering thousands of pagans, “witches” and druids and taking their land. The same was done in the United States by declaring “Manifest Destiny” as the goal—the god-given right to expand—by killing off Indians and herding the survivors onto wastelands (until the white man decided he wanted those as well). There is no difference, for example, between the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the goal of global literacy. The result is the spread of illiteracy. Since knowledge is power, illiteracy is the guarantee of powerlessness. Why would the few Manipulators at the top want everybody to be as powerful as them? Where is the fun in that? And to prevent the intelligentsia from conspiring against them and overthrowing them, the Manipulators developed the goal of “tenure” which has effectively neutered the intelligentsia and turned them into compliant work beasts. That’s why they will do anything to help the intelligentsia attain and maintain this goal—because it actually destroys them and preserves the Manipulators’ power. Never miss a chance to destroy others who are not useful to you as allies by helping them to destroy themselves. Be an enabler and help others destroy themselves—that’s control.

A true Toxick Magician also understands his place on the food chain. A pretender always thinks he’s at the top of it all but a true Manipulator knows he is just food to someone else. He accepts this and controls how much of himself he allows to be eaten. He does not want to stand out. As Dylan once so sagely put it: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Know how to do that and don’t fight it or you will only damage yourself and badly. As an example, I was once telling my father (a Navy veteran) how much I hated certain people in the Navy who outranked me and that I was not inclined to recognize their authority or follow their orders and didn’t care what they thought or did as a result. My father said, “Don’t try to rebel and have things your way because you know it won’t work and all you’re gonna do is make some sonofabitch’s day.” I realized he was right. I was helping them to destroy me. The smart thing to do was to never give them that satisfaction and I did a complete 180. They knew I hated them and that I wanted them to hate me with a burning, smoldering passion but I was strictly by the book from that point on about everything and so there was nothing they could do about it except wait for me to slip up, which I never did. In this way, I triumphed over them. “You are your own end. You are not the means to anyone else’s end. However, it is wise to let others believe you are a means to their ends.”

The problem is we come into the world as infants and are treated as such our entire lives. The authors call this “infantilizing.” As children, we fear the dark, we fear the bogey man, we fear the monster in the closet and under the bed, we fear mommy and daddy catching us doing something bad. The fear never leaves us but just gets applied to other things because, we tell ourselves, we’re adults now and we know better than to believe in that kid stuff. The kid stuff is the fear itself. Otherwise it is translated over to fear of sickness, fear of taxes, fear of unemployment/bankruptcy, fear of old age, fear of crime, fear of government, fear of lack of government, fear of life, fear of death, etc. Fear is irrational but we won’t admit this because we want to be infantilized. We want government to take care of us but we fear that it may know too much about us. We fear crime so we bury ourselves under firearms which has done nothing but increase the crime rate a thousand-fold (remember, whatever we try to stop we only perpetuate in reality). Doctors and dentists push people to get surgeries they don’t need because people allow doctors to be the adults in the doctor-patient relationship.

At some point somewhere, however, we get to assume the adult role. Maybe we are a supervisor at work and people have to answer to us (even though someone over us made us that supervisor). Maybe we are a parent. Dr. Hyatt states, “The entire structure of the world is a food chain of infantilizing.” We get to play parent and child depending on the circumstances. We use fear on others and have others use it on us. The Toxick Magician understands this and plays up on the fear in order to force things to fall apart because that’s when the Toxick Magician is then at his most toxic. He will go about forging connections and making allies through a combination of fear and deceit.

He does this because:

The psychopath acknowledges that he is born a fool and is living in an insane asylum. He does not seek to make sense of the senseless, he does not look to find reason in chaos. Being convinced that those around him are nuts, he commits to the law of the self rather than the blatherings of the herd.

The book is full of strange, little exercises as:
“[D]isplease someone you really like, and please someone you really can’t stand. Write down your actions and their reactions in your journal.”

“Watch three sitcoms a month…… Now! you know what people value and what they compare themselves to…… Count their lies, their assumptions, their social tricks, how they inculcate values and ideals in the viewer. Record a few different sitcoms and begin to break them down. Notice how they use laughter to get the audience to accept their implicit values.”

The book does not recommend the use of violence. It differentiates between the psychopath and the sociopath. The sociopath will resort to violence to get what he or she wants. The psychopath simply but knowingly gives those around them who are of no other use to them enough rope by which they will inevitably hang themselves.

Lord Larehip

An Age for Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality and the Quest for Godhood by Robert C. Tucker (1999, Holmes Publishing Group)



This is one of the most eye-opening of the various Black Books I have read. Tucker does a lot of work with young people who practice or claim to practice Satanism or Black Magic/Left-Handed Path-type spirituality. In his years of doing so, he began to notice a certain similarity in the subjects of his study. One of the things he realized quickly was that he had to educate himself, immerse himself, in the Left-Handed or Black Arts because without an intimate knowledge of the subject, the people he wanted to interview would not talk to him. They saw themselves as a new type of organism and other humans as lesser organisms towards whom they felt a deep contempt and arrogance. If you know nothing of their type of spirituality, you are less than a piece of s-hit and even less worthy of being addressed. To gain their respect, Tucker had to learn how they think and why. I’ll let him describe what he found:

This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable.

I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them. A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.

What follows is a kind of manifesto of this new human. Tucker refers to this new human predator as a “Luciferian.” Lucifer means “light-bringer” and the subjects that Tucker has interviewed over the years do regard themselves as bringing the True Light to humanity—the light of predation. Tucker claims that the book is part imagination, part conjecture, part fact. He writes in a combination of Luciferian and therapist. While he wouldn’t go so far as to say the book is channeled, he says he would just let his thoughts flow while he took it all down. But this is not a stream-of-consciousness book, it is, in fact, well organized and extensive (376 pp.) Here are some examples:

In chapter 3 entitled “Devouring,” Tucker-as-Luciferian states, “Luciferianism can be understood in part as a philosophical and spiritual extension of eating and consuming. When compassion, empathy and conscience are killed, then devouring and consuming can swell proportionately. When the impediments to personal power acquisition are removed, the devouring the life energies of other beings becomes easy: I become stronger as you become weaker, I absorb strength as yours flows into me. I am capable of this because I do not experience your pain, I do not care about your loss, and I feel no remorse or regret about using, abusing and devouring you.”

“This system of devouring is not limited to the animal world. Large corporations devour and consume smaller ones; large nation states devour the resources of less powerful ones. On a personal level, human beings constantly consume the emotional and intellectual energies of others. The hierarchy of devouring rips into our personal and collective lives like a dripping claw.”

“To a Luciferian, life is as it is. Cruelty and devouring are the way of things, so why not adapt? Why not admit the obvious and become good at it? All else is simply illusion. There is only one reality, and that is acquiring the power to devour ‘up the hierarchy’ biologically, personally, socially, and politically.”

The Luciferian drains her victim by isolating him from everything else he loves. If not, then he might find the strength to pull away. She will make him love her and only her by cutting him off from friends, family, hobbies, interests and even habits. She will rule his universe completely. He will kill and die for her. He will be incapable of thinking a bad thought about her. His every thought and deed is done with only her in mind. Tucker terms this as the Luciferian “becoming the object of focus.” She will drain him until he “collapses,” i.e. when his entire core energies have been sucked clean. This is called “assaulting the core.” Even if he begins to understand the hold she has on him and starts to struggle, she will hold on and continue to drain. Even if he starts to hate, loath and despise her, these emotions provide just as intense an energy as the love and adulation and she will continue to feed off them until the victim’s core collapses.

He will not be allowed to recover his energies for a second draining, the reason being that he might then find the strength to pull away which is defeat for the Luciferian which results in a loss of energy in the form of self-esteem and pride issues which is difficult for the Luciferian to recover from because she is an arrogant and supremely self-confident being. The only way to damage a Luciferian other than outright killing him, is for the intended victim to damage his ego by cutting off his predation before he is finished. Secondly, the collapse is like an orgasm in that it brings a rush of new, intense energies with it that can be had no other way—like breaking open the bone to get to the marrow. To the Luciferian, this rush of energy is deeply satisfying.

After that, with the victim entirely drained, collapsed and ruined, the Luciferian moves onto the next victim. Of course, the relationships don’t have to be romantic in nature. A Luciferian can procure victims while posing as a clergyman, a guru, a financial advisor, a psychologist, a salesman, a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a lawyer, a banker, a boss, a psychic, a cop—just about anything that puts him or her in a position to isolate and devour victims.

Luciferianism can be generational in that a parent can feed off a child until its core collapses and the child will, in turn, turn to emotional cannibalism in all its future relationships. Why don’t victims break away sooner? The fact is, they rarely do. Scientology is a good example of a Luciferian organization. First, it isolates the new recruit (victim) from friends and family and destroys any outside interests or hobbies that cannot be put to use for “the Org.” They punish members for various infractions within the Org. Why don’t they leave? In the words of one man who did leave after many years of the Org’s abuse: “I don’t know anything else.” He had spent three decades in the Org and simply did not know how to handle life without it. We see the same with people who have been caught up in predatory romances. When asked why he doesn’t leave, he answers, “I can’t! I love her!” Or she says, “I can’t! He’s all I know about love!”

How does one go about assaulting the core? Tucker points out:

A known set of techniques can be used to commit psychological assault. These techniques have evolved in the last twenty years [a little over 30 years at the time of this writing] and can now be described as a sophisticated technology. (These techniques will not be discussed here: please refer to Singer, Schein, Lifton, and others for details). To be effective, the technology must be systematic: it must be used over time and in a specific sequence.

An abusive spouse is a Luciferian to a slight degree. He beats his wife, controls her, insults her, intimidates her and makes her hate herself. Above all, he makes her feel powerless. That without him, she is nothing. This is a core assault but it is not Luciferianism precisely, it’s more of an analogy. Perhaps one of the best true Luciferians I can think of is Charles Manson (although Tucker’s Luciferian denies it). He never beat or even insulted the women under his command. Quite the opposite—he told them they were beautiful. He simply “moved in.” His core assault was complete and systematic. Instead of being traumatized into giving in psychologically as with an abusive spouse, Manson assaulted their core identities without them even realizing it. They gave themselves over to him with complete willingness.

A follower named Paul Watkins stated, “Everything I was, was Charlie. There was nothing left of me anymore.” Of the other Family members, Watkins said, “There’s nothing left of them anymore either. They’re all Charlie too.” Now that is textbook perfect Luciferian core assault. When the father of Susan Atkins, a military man, went to confront Manson and kill him, he instead fell on his knees before the scruffy, little guru and began to worship him. So complete was his domination that when Family members heard him speaking inside their heads, they truly thought it was telepathic communication. Susan Atkins stated some years after the murders for which she was sentenced to life in prison that it took five years for her to get Charlie out of her head.

Manson stunned other cult leaders because they had to promise their followers a reward such as enlightenment or passage to heaven or godhood and they practiced rituals and wore ceremonial costumes and wrote books or pamphlets and had occult bookstores and coffeehouses and rock or folk bands to spread their word but Manson had none of that. For the Family, the only reward was simply to be with Charlie. And it worked.

Manson is as close to a true Luciferian as I can think of and he is a scary guy because of this amazing power he has to psychologically dominate people completely without expending much effort to do it and without their even suspecting what he was doing to them.

We have to hope he is unique and that there was never anyone like him before and never will be again but, if Tucker is correct, Manson is just the vanguard of a new race.

But Manson has been called a psychopath. So isn’t the Luciferian just a self-glorified psychopath? According to Tucker, while there are a great many similarities between a psychopath and a Luciferian, there are profound differences. To a Luciferian, a psychopath is merely a lower order predator. A psychopath is a hyena that scavenges the bones left behind by the lion. The Luciferian and the psychopath share a love for the glory of the hunt and moment of the kill but this is only a means to an end for the Luciferian but is the end-all for the psychopath. The Luciferian has learned to crush out all feelings of empathy and conscience, seeing them as an impediment to power while the psychopath was simply born without them and has no experience of them to draw from. The psychopath wastes his predatory instincts only to enrich his sexual, materialistic and/or narcissistic urges while the Luciferian hones his skills to achieve personal godhood. To a Luciferian, a psychopath is beneath contempt but they still recognize that the psychopath may be an ancestor of the Luciferian or that they spring from the same source with the Luciferian being more evolved.

Tucker writes:

Psychopaths do not even rate as good food for devouring, because they lack nourishment. Luciferians cannot live off them. Hence the great disrespect that Luciferians have for psychopaths. They are not even worth the effort of predation. At least other victims stand for something—for decency, love, compassion, morality. Their stand gives them a certain kind of nobility (and hence edible energy), albeit the nobility the predator assigns to his prey. But psychopaths have never possessed this nobility and never will. As a result, they are to be despised and destroyed, not cultivated. They are an experimental prototype only, and not worth supporting or devouring.

This debate will probably remain unresolved. Some Luciferians will try to cultivate and use psychopaths, others will simply erase them whenever possible.

However, in The Psychopath’s Bible, psychopathy is very definitely touted as a form of spirituality and a path to immortality. There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of difference between a Toxick Magician and a Luciferian. Hence the Luciferian appears to be a psychopath with a certain spiritual view different from what many psychopaths exhibit. As a result, he sees himself as different from and superior to the psychopath that just wants to take people’s life savings or live high on the hog without doing anything to earn it or torture and kill prostitutes or little kids to get off sexually. Even having a spiritual view is not enough to elevate a psychopath to a Luciferian.

Zodiac, for example, believed his psychopathic worldview was a path to “Masterhood” and that those he killed would be his slaves in the afterlife. But his predation simply consisted of killing rather than the eating of another’s emotional and intellectual energies for power and ultimately the attainment of Godhood. No Luciferian would waste his time writing taunting letters to the cops and the newspapers for kicks. He doesn’t get his kicks that way and doesn’t respect anyone who does. To a Luciferian, Zodiac is an amateur and a hack in need of being liquidated. To the Toxick Magician, he is simply a sociopath and incapable of internalizing the spirituality that psychopathy offers and therefore just another foil to be assisted in his own destruction. The only difference I see between the Toxick Magician and the Luciferian is that the latter cannot feed off a sociopath like Zodiac and so would just kill him to be rid of him and keep him from killing the types of people that the Luciferian seeks to devour (i.e. they are competing for the same food sources) while the former would still gain power and control by helping this individual bring about his own demise.

Lord Larehip

The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey
(Avon Books, 1969)



The most accessible Black Book to date and owned by just about every goth and metalhead in junior highs across America. To give some background, San Francisco was a wild and crazy place in the 60s and undoubtedly the mecca of the counter-culture and the underground. It started off as a kind of social experiment by certain freethinkers in the late 50s. These were largely people with college degrees in chemistry and physics and other sciences looking for an escape from their dreary 9-to-5 jobs and academic existences. Many practiced Eastern religions, American Indian religions, various philosophies, some started their own religions and many did mind-altering drugs in an effort to expand the human consciousness and they believed in free love.

The problem was that all sorts of others heard about it and set up shop in San Francisco. These included the dreary Christians who relabeled themselves “Jesus Freaks” and who dressed in counter-culture clothing but were really just the same old boring, repressive Christians that the founders of the social experiment wanted to escape from. High school dropouts and runaways flocked to Haight-Ashbury only to be recruited into cults, turned into prostitutes, or ended carted to a hospital after overdosing on some drug or other. Free love turned into free venereal disease.

By ’62, most of the founders were disappointed with the experiment and began to leave. Most were gone by ’64 and by ’65, none were left. Haight-Ashbury was now nothing but runaways, junkies and the worst kinds of hucksters imaginable. The 1967 so-called Summer of Love was a joke. The “hippy” had already been declared dead and the founders of the movement were long gone.

Cultic groups at work recruiting members in the area were the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the OTO, Scientology, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai, and the aforementioned “Jesus Freaks.” Many of these groups had no affinity for the values that kicked off the hippy movement. In fact, most were steadfastly opposed to it and highly contemptuous of it. Many Christian cultists looked and talked like hippies but had no trouble explaining to the media that they regarded the Haight as the devil’s world and were willingly wearing the devil’s uniform (i.e. long hair, love beads, tie-dyed shirts, peace signs, sandals, etc.) in order to save the souls of those so obviously in his clutches. But other cults were far more rightwing than this. Some were downright and even openly fascistic—some to the point of being neo-Nazi. Many were dangerous.

Satanism, according to some a product of this hucksterism, started in San Francisco with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. The prime mover behind this was Howard Stanton Levey. Levey claimed to have been everything from a lion-tamer to a police photographer to an organist before landing his gig as the premier Satanist and changing his name to Anton Szandor LaVey.

LaVey didn’t come from the Norman Rockwell apple pie scene of the 50s era. He wasn’t someone you would see on Leave It To Beaver but he might be sophomorically lampooned on a show like Dragnet (and likely get a big kick out of it). LaVey emerged into the 60s from the carnival/girlshow seedy underbelly of the 40s and 50s complete with his “Step right on up, folks, and peek behind the curtain at a real, honest-to-god Satanist” type sideshow campiness fully intact. He entered the 60s in the same way Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn did but he drew no attention doing it. He snuck in stealthily like the black leopard he kept as a pet.

What shined through that era mostly for LaVey was the hypocrisy of the whole thing. All appearances had to be kept up despite what was seething down below. This was something America had inherited from its earliest days as a nation. The blackface minstrel era, for example, allowed white people to dress, walk, talk and sing in the carefree lifestyle that they perceived blacks to be living. All the societal pretensions of propriety and respectability could be dropped for a while and the Lord of Misrule could have full reign. The old Roman festival of Saturnalia where slaves became masters and masters became slaves was an even earlier version of this. When minstrelsy gave way to vaudeville and vaudeville gave way to carnivals and circuses and girly strip shows, it was carried on in new ways. LaVey stated, “On Saturday night I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning, when I was playing the organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday night they’d be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man’s carnal nature will out!” Well “carnal” and “carnival” sound alike for a reason.

LaVey’s experiences as a carny and now as a prototype phone-in psychic on the SFPD hotline made him realize that people are driven by three basic needs: entertainment, hypocrisy, and self-deceit. He began wondering how he could combine all three into a single occupation. Oh, what fun he could have then! The realization that there was no difference between the carny barker, the guru, and the evangelist got him to thinking.

He started a “magic circle” of like-minded individuals in the Bay area. They held get-togethers at his home. Among this strange group of businesspeople, lawyers, cops, and real estate dealers, was the occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger (whose films have included everyone from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page and have large cult followings). At first, the meetings were simply to satisfy curiosity regarding taboo subjects as cannibalism but soon the circle began to take on quasi-religious overtones. The magic circle became known as The Order of the Trapezoid. The idea was to admit that indulgence is at the heart of human nature but that people need to be responsible for their own actions and stop groveling before God for forgiveness for their carnal weaknesses.

One thing this Order did that changed the occult culture of America and ultimately the world was promoting the writings of H. P. Lovecraft culled from the trashy and lurid pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. Today you can go to any bookstore and buy entire Lovecraft anthologies but back then, he was almost unknown to the vast majority of Americans and completely unknown to the rest of the world. LaVey began crafting his own religion based on the modern American myth rather than the old esotericism gleaned from musty tomes and Lovecraft fit in perfectly. Many of Lovecraft’s friends were happy to see someone taking an interest in their mentor and were frequent guests at LaVey’s meetings. LaVey stated that Clark-Ashton Smith was a good friend and that August Derleth helped the Order to assemble a history of Weird Tales for their lectures. “The writings of H. P. Lovecraft are far more Satanic than those of most occultists.” LaVey said. “Lovecraft was the first writer I discovered who really scared me. Lovecraft was pretty heady stuff back then, and has proved a hard act to follow since.” In LaVey’s mind, Lovecraft’s fiction gives the reader something immediate, something undeniable—that sense of creeping horror—which Crowley’s writings were too oblique to convey. And, well, how do you know anything’s any good if it can’t evoke the proper emotions within you? LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals even contain “The Ceremony of the Nine Angles” and “The Call to Cthuhlu” during which various Lovecraftian deities are invoked including Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath and, of course, Cthulhu.

LaVey then announced the founding of the Church of Satan on April 30, 1966 (April 30th is sacred to Satanists and various pagan groups and is known as Walpurgisnacht or May-Eve and is also the day on which Hitler committed suicide) where mass was held at his own home, painted entirely black and called the Black House not only for its color scheme (or lack of) but also to perhaps provide a West Coast offset to its opposite across the country in D.C. His church and style of ritual combined the best of Halloween with a great cult classic B movie. Not only was his house entirely black on the outside but he made it dark and mysterious on the inside—like a carnival house of horrors—and used beautiful naked nubile women for his altar. When hippies and occultists began to populate the Haight, the Church of Satan was a prime hangout for many of them.

In 1969, LaVey penned perhaps the single most important document in Satanism, The Satanic Bible. In it, lay the entire creed of the Satanist movement. Such as not turning the other cheek or wasting love on ingrates. There was nothing difficult in understanding it. LaVey was no Hobbes or Kant by any means. Kenneth Anger summed up LaVey’s Satanic philosophy by stating, “LeVeyan Satanism is an amusing, if somewhat superficial, take on the concept of self-indulgence.” In short, the Church of Satanism is dedicated to hedonism more than anything else. But the hedonism was conscious with the participant fully aware of why he or she was doing it. It wasn’t just to be a church of mindless enjoyment.

To symbolize his church LaVey chose the image of the goat’s head within the two-points-up pentagram enclosed in a circle with the five Hebrew letters for “Leviathan” spread around it, one letter at each point of the pentagram. These were surrounded by yet another circle. It is referred to as a Baphomet although I am not clear how it acquired the title from the Templar Knights whose own Baphomet was said to be a black cat or a head with three faces.



LaVey referred to his Sigil of Baphomet as “ex calibur.” The lower point is the sword thrust in the stone (which, according to Arthurian lore, was not ex calibur which was actually the sword given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake) and “represents the opening of the gates of Hell.” This is by far the most salient symbol of Satanism known to the public today.

The Trapezoid Order did not dissolve upon the founding of the Church of Satan, however. According to LaVey, it is “the exclusive governing body of the Church of Satan.” The Trapezoidal Order’s symbol became the very epitomy of evil and Satanism in the modern age.

Smack dab in the middle of that hippiedom, LaVey detested them. Whatever the hippies did, LaVey did the opposite. They liked psychedelic music, he liked classical and even circus organ pieces which he had once played for a living. They wore their hair long, LaVey shaved his head. They wore long, shaggy beards and mustaches, LaVey sported a black, well-trimmed mustache and goatee for that Satanic touch. They wore faded denim and buckskin with peace signs and tie-dyed t-shirts and love beads, LaVey wore black robes and black biker jackets and caps with a silver Baphomet medallion. The hippies reveled in drugs, LaVey eschewed them. He was on another wavelength entirely. But that was cool with the hippies. To them, LaVey was a guy doing his own thing and more power to him, man, even if he does hate hippies! Parents knew not what to make of him. He was a frigging Satanist, for Christ’s sake! But then again he hates hippies and claimed to have put a curse on the entire movement so he couldn’t be all bad. LaVey made both sides scratch their heads in bewilderment and that was exactly how he wanted it.

Another of LaVey’s cohorts in the founding of the Church of Satan was Arthur Lyons who functioned as a sort of “High Priest.” Among those who joined the Church of Satan in those early days of its formation was actress Jayne Mansfield and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. Some modern fairly well known entertainers include avant-garde artist Boyd Rice (a.k.a. Non, who was the inspiration of Marilyn Manson and Depeche Mode) and Marc Almond of the band Soft Cell. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” would become a big hit for the band Coil, one member being Peter Christopherson who was formerly with industrial music pioneers, Throbbing Gristle, along with another LaVey cohort, Genesis P-Orridge.

A lesser known member who would become quite famous or infamous was a runaway named Susan Atkins. She became involved with “High Priest” Arthur Lyons’s Witches’ Sabbath—a topless show basically cooked up by LaVey and his carny-style Satanism—where she played a vampire. Lyons wrote a book called Satan Wants You in which Atkins also appears. Another follower of Lyons was a young woman named Leslie Van Houten.

LaVey claims to have written The Satanic Bible because all other systems of magic nothing but fraud going all the way back to the Middle Ages and not just in the West but over the entire globe (yet the book contains the 19 Enochian Keys of the magic system invented or revealed—depending on how you look at it—by the Elizabethan English astrologer and alchemist Dr. John Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelley). This bible contains a “Book of Lucifer” but is not meant for the Tuckerian Luciferian. The sixth statement of the Nine Satanic Statements reads: “Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!” But a Luciferian is a psychic vampire—that is exactly what a Luciferian is—although LaVey refers to a certain type of unsavory but otherwise ordinary person (i.e. a jerk-off).

The book contains some rituals which can be easily performed. It is clear that LaVey wanted to write something easily accessible to just about anybody and that is why the book has so much appeal to kids looking for new kicks. There is nothing particularly evil being expressed in the bible. Much of the tenets expressed in its pages most people who call themselves Christian already agree with whether they think so or not. How often do you meet a Christian who truly believes in forgiveness or turning the other cheek? They only do it if you remind them to do it, their natural inclination is as reactionary as it gets—eye-for-an-eye. So LaVey asks why don’t we just cut out all the sanctimonious phoney baloney and say that eye-for-an-eye is just and I’ll forgive you only if I feel like forgiving you? At least then we’re not being hypocrites.

LaVey’s system also requires no initiation or a period of being an adept. One need not know what a tarot card looks like or how to calculate the position of a star. Hence, the teachings are immediate and therefore a big draw for young people looking to rebel against the norms and the mainstream and don’t want to have to wait much less study.

In 1972, the Church of Satan was large enough that LaVey stopped holding meetings at the Black House. Instead, chapters were set up in various cities and were called “grottoes.” Detroit’s chapter was the Babylon Grotto while New York had the Lilith Grotto and so forth. A degree system was also put in place and a certain amount of study was necessary to advance and each advancement required a fee. Not that advancement fees were anything new to degree systems. They are standard in Freemasonry, for example. LaVey said it was time to stop performing Satanism and start practicing it.

In no way can we underestimate the importance of LaVey in the formation and direction of modern occultism. Satanism in its various forms descended almost without exception from him. Former-members of the Church of Satan formed many different offshoots with varying degrees of success such as the Temple of Set, the First Church of Satan, the Werewolf Order, the Church of the Satanic Brotherhood, the Church of Lucifer, Ordo Templi Satanas and others. Many of LaVey’s writings are considered required reading on the subject of Satan even by LaVey’s rivals. These books include The Satanic Bible (first and foremost), The Satanic Rituals, The Devil’s Notebook, The Satanic Witch, and Satan Speaks. He was also largely responsible for thrusting Lovecraft into the modern occult. Thanks to LaVey, there are now approximately 20,000 Satanic orders, cults and lodges worldwide. Not bad for being in business little more than thirty years before his death on October 29, 1997.

Coincidentally, LaVey portrayed Satan in Roman Polanski’s now legendary 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, Polanski was the husband of Sharon Tate, who would be murdered a year later by Susan Atkins on the orders of her new master, Charles Manson. True to her vampiric fantasy, Atkins freely admitted to tasting Tate’s blood, which she described as “warm and sticky and nice.”

In fact, LaVey stated that the curse he put on the hippie movement resulted in the Manson murders which was the beginning of the end of the hippies. If we combine LaVey’s philosophy with that found in The Psychopath’s Bible, we can conclude that indulgence is good because it feels good and because with “normal” people it is the rope by which they hang themselves. So give them as much as they want.

Finally, on the last page, the two final words of the bible are "YANKEE ROSE." No one is sure why.

Lord Larehip

More to follow.

Lord Larehip

The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
(Barricade Books, 1971)



A modern day alchemist’s manual to work evil only it’s not with horse dicks mixed with ewe ovaries sprinkled over with crushed wolf nads soaked with hemlock. The potions to be mixed and applied in this Black Manual will kill, maim and disfigure—guaranteed. Within its unholy pages are instructions on how to build bombs, how to make a garrote, how to booby-trap anything from a ballpoint pen to a smoker’s pipe to a policeman’s whistle (the last two will blow the person’s head off), how to make a blackjack, how to make poison darts, how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher, how to sabotage a moving vehicle without firearms or explosives (but with results every bit as messy), how to mix chemicals for explosives or hallucinogens, how to make weapons out of hat pins, beer cans or a pair of gloves, how to conduct electronic surveillance, how to jam electronic signals, how to broadcast free radio, how to place explosives to take down buildings, how to make and dispense poison gas, how to make silencers and what types of firearms to procure to conduct guerilla warfare.

A dangerous book? Certainly. An evil book? It could certainly be employed for evil purposes. The Cookbook definitely has been read by evil people although I do not know if they concocted any of the explosives, bombs or booby-traps shown therein. These people include Tim McVeigh, Jared Loughner, the Boston Marathon bombers, the London railway bombers, the Columbine killers, the anti-abortion radicals and a host of other imbeciles.

Powell wrote the book when he was 19 and filled with revolutionary fervor. It was published in 1971. My copy was published by Barricade Books but, in 2002, Billy Blann bought the copyrights of the book and sells it online through his publishing house, Delta Press, along with a host of other books that detail things like how to build a dirty bomb to how to build homemade hand grenades with butane lighters. But, Blann admits that The Anarchist Cookbook is his biggest seller. Delta Press’s catalog has earned Blann a $3 million-a-year business and netted him a nice income on which he lives comfortably in semi-retirement. Since Blann owns the book now, Powell gets no say in whether the book will continue to see publication. Blann states that he has no intention of stopping. Nor have Amazon nor Barnes & Noble stopped selling the book (I bought my copy some 20 or more years ago at Border’s—with cash).

Of his book today, Powell states, “The Anarchist Cookbook should go quietly and immediately out of print.” Blann, in turn, states, “You know, we don’t ban books in America.” To be precise, Powell is not calling for an outright ban. The book would still be available but there would be no new copies being printed up. Eventually, there won’t be any more copies around. This is more a banning by attrition or what I call “soft-banning.”

I must say that I find Powell to be a disappointment. His position today looks disingenuous—washing his hands of a book he knows is not ever going to go out of print. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. His attitude is, “Yeah, I wrote it and it changed the world but since I don’t own the copyrights, I can distance myself from it so I don’t have to answer for anything. But it will still and almost certainly always will be available to anyone who wants it.” The young revolutionary has turned into the world’s biggest old hypocrite.

His opening paragraph in the book’s original published form laid a perfectly valid rationale for making such a book available to the public:

“This book is written for the people of the United States of America. It is not written for the fringe political groups, such as the Weathermen, or The Minutemen. Those radical groups don’t need this book. They already know everything that’s in here. If the real people of America, the silent majority, are going to survive, they must educate themselves. That is the purpose of this book.”

I have talked with a few different types of people to get a range of views on this. One man I spoke with felt that the book should be banned because it made killers of people with kooky views. “But didn’t they always have the ability to commit mass murder in them to begin with?” I asked. After all, I read the book as have some two million others and the vast majority of us didn’t become crazed guerilla assassins. He agreed with that but said the book nevertheless helped them formulate this loose assemblage of ideas they had into something coherent that could be and eventually was acted upon.

Others said that if we ban this book, we are opening a door to banning other material because some group or other finds the content objectionable. There are parents who want Huckleberry Finn banned from schools because of its liberal use of the word “n-igger.” As it is, many school districts now issue a censored version where the word “n-igger” is now replaced with “slave.” Some groups think The Communist Manifesto should be banned while others want Mein Kampf banned. This is upsetting to me because in a free society, YOU have the right to read this stuff if you so desire. If you decide to act on anything you read, YOU take the responsibility for your own actions. That’s the deal and that’s always been the deal from the day this nation was founded. Some people are acting like they only just figured this out and don’t agree with it on top of that.

The bottom line is, who gets to decide what gets banned and what doesn’t? Not the government as the First Amendment makes clear:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The people, then? Which people? If you ask me which books should be banned, my answer is “None of them.” Others would disagree. So NOBODY gets to make that decision. No books should be banned by default. It is no one’s decision. Anyone who detonates a bomb they learned to make from reading Powell’s book is responsible for that bomb and whatever damages it caused not Powell and not his book. With freedom comes responsibility. But then we always have to be watching what people are doing. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” NSA snooping notwithstanding.

Lord Larehip

Apocalypse Culture I and II edited by Adam Parfrey
(Feral House, 1987 and 2000)





Trying to cover everything found in these two books is impossible and no review I give could do them justice. These have to be read to be truly appreciated but I will do my best to convince you of it. A lot of the people, organizations and places I learned about for the first time, I read in the pages of these books. Parfrey has thrown together disparate writings on virtually every controversial subject under the sun. Some are scholarly works such as John Zerzan’s superb article Agriculture: Demon Engine of Civilization to his The Case Against Art to Eugenics as a lost science written by Parfrey to David Paul’s Man is a Machine.

One of my favorite articles is from Book I entitled The Cereal Box Conspiracy Against the Developing Mind by Michelle Handelman and avant-garde musician Monte Cazazza. The article states that young children “are to have a tv show, a top movie, a record album, a video game, and a toy doll to accompany their eating experience.” Since this article was written in the 80s, the language seems a bit archaic but the thrust of it as pertinent as ever. In the 80s, the most harmful foodstuffs were processed, today the most harmful are processed like a motherf-ucker. Yesterday, the corn in your cornflakes may have been worthless being so processed but at least it was real corn. Today, it’s all GMO corn so it’s worthless from the git-go.

The worst of the foodstuffs are breakfast cereals for young children. They are utterly worthless as nutritional commodities but are designed to be cartoon friends to the kids in a deliberately non-tangible way in order to create an emptiness in children that they will seek to fill up with cereal. The cereals are designed to appeal to children in their oral and anal stages and so the boxes are designed to have open, happy mouths ready to receive large, oh-so-yummy, heaping spoonfuls are stuff that resemble…well…feces.



To the anal-expulsive tot, images of s-hit are subconsciously welcome sights. They represent a good bowel movement that, if nothing else, makes mommy happy. The cereal is often shown shooting or hopping or zinging about or splashing into the bowl and this, of course, symbolizes the acting of s-hitting, of expelling.






In this image, notice how the corn pops (formerly sugar pops) are popping out of an “O”. This represents the loosening of the sphincter muscle and the expulsion of yellowish-brownish blobs from the anus which then dutifully plop into the toilet bowl.

This ties in with an article in Book II entitled “Brown Magic.” As we have seen from the Black Magic tomes already reviewed, fecal matter is considered a powerful magical agent. The greatest alchemists as Paracelsus intensely studied feces to learn the secrets of “putrefactive fermentation.” This led to a branch of study called scatology. In 1696, Paullini gathered together all the treatments he could find that used feces and assembled a comprehensive book on the subject, New and Improved Healing Filth-Apothecary. In this book, s-hit was found to be a healing agent for virtually every ailment.

In the Middle Ages, people routinely ingested, rubbed on their bodies or carried about with them the feces of an animal with a property they wished to possess or increase. Ingesting bulls-hit was said to make a man more potent. Rubbing falcon s-hit on the eyes was said to increase the sharpness of ones sight. Someone wishing to remain youthful would ingest the s-hit of a young boy or girl. Carrying rabbit feces in a little pouch was believed to increase a woman’s fecundity. In the 19th century, the Dalai Lama’s dump was considered so sacred that it was formed into amulets to be worn around the neck or pills to be ingested.

Aleister Crowley believed a woman’s feces was sacred in his sex magick ritual where the man and woman would have sex. During the course of orgasm, she would evacuate and the man would swallow it in an ecstatic fit.

Carl Jung’s interest in alchemy stemmed in part from a dream he had as a 12-year-old lad in which he saw God take a huge s-hit and it fell from the heavens to the earth and crushed the church.

S-hitting was central to the Christian understanding of Jesus. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, various Christian schools would argue over the nature of Jesus—was he human or god? The question was termed this way: Did Jesus ever take a s-hit? If so, was it just for the sake of appearances or did he really have to go? Corruption cannot coexist in one body with divinity, they said, so if Jesus dumped, he was human. Others said that, yes, Jesus dumped but it was just to be of human-like appearance. Still others said, no, Jesus did not ever pinch a loaf. But, said their critics, the gospels tell us of Jesus eating and drinking, the stuff had to go somewhere, he didn’t just fill up with food. The response was that Jesus was divine so the food upon being swallowed just slipped into a kind of never-never land and so was never to be digested and hence Jesus did not lay brick. But others said that corruption and divinity could exist in one body because divinity can do anything and so Jesus could be divine and still have a bowel movement or perhaps it was even divine doody. I don’t think Christians have ever resolved the Big, Brown Question and probably never will. For those who doubt any of this, bear in mind that the planet Uranus comes from the Roman god of the sky, Ouranus, which is derived from the Greek ourow which in English is “urine.” In Ancient Rome, the word for heaven and chamber-pot were the same. So you see, cleanliness is NOT next to godliness.

There are two particularly disturbing articles in Book II—Pedophilia and the Morally Righteous by Chris Campion and Prime Time by Peter Sotos. Campion’s piece is a defense of Thomas Watt Hamilton, a pedophile who murdered 16 schoolchildren between 6 and 7 years of age in Dunblaine, Scotland in 1996. The article states that Hamilton carried on an ancient tradition (the article stops just short of saying an ancient and honorable tradition) of pedophilia. The article doesn’t defend the killings but only that Hamilton was driven to it by a society that made him an outcast for being a pedophile.





Campion writes:

“That this ‘slaughter of innocents’ occurred in a school gymnasium is no mere coincidence. Two and a half thousand years ago, at the height of Greek culture, the gymnasium (from the Greek gymnos meaning naked) was the epicenter of intellectual and erotic energy. There, men and boys would engage in the pederastic pursuits of loving, learning and Olympic sports, during which the youth performed unclothed for the unadulterated pleasure of their teachers.”

Campion compares this to today where he claims the pedophile is misunderstood and mischaracterized as a psychopathic baby-raper and child molester. But, he points, out pedophilia has its roots in prehistoric culture as demonstrated by the Sambia tribe of New Guinea where, he claims, male children by age seven are taken away from their mothers to live exclusively among older males. The boys are taught to perform fallatio on the “elders” to prepare them for manhood. He also cites Aristotle’s account of King Minos of Crete who instituted pederasty as a form of population control. From Crete, it went to Greece where it found enthusiastic support among such notables as Plato (and hence the term “platonic relationship”). There is also the story of Zeus and the youth Ganymede with whom Zeus had a “platonic” relationship naming the boy as his consort and cup-bearer.

Campion’s contention appears to be that as long as pedophiles (the people with the long history of “platonic” contact) continue to be lumped in with true molesters and rapists, “society will get the devil it deserves.”

Soto’s article doesn’t try to couch pedophilia into something less horrible than child rape. It talks about child rape with complete frankness:

“Have you ever masturbated with child pornography?

“ The way one is meant to? For the reason it was created? The difficulty in obtaining it, the dangers of even owning it, the sickness one has to trundle through to come to one small, barely realized desire.

“With a f-ucking magazine. The manufactured and professionally reproduced and planned issues like the European INCEST 4. The only one the police took from me.

“Or with videos. Or with five-minute 8 mm films. The way I did when I was younger. The kind I used to buy from a f-aggot pedophile out of his gold coast basement in Chicago. Who I met while pursuing a entirely different form of entertainment.”

“It’s just one small part of one small girl. In a high-contrast black and white snap done in extreme close-up. And if it didn’t look so small next to the fat fingertips and stretched so tightly painfully barely open, one could argue that it could be anything. Anything like some adult fresh out of illegality, shaved and trimmed and short for her porn star by-the-piece peroxide age. But this shot. In its violence. Is unequivocal.”

“A tiny baby held upside down. Between two large hairy arms and meaty hands clasping its delicate toddler shoulders and head aimings its tiny naked cold c-unt spread towards the beast’s ugly thick semi-flaccid cock very close to where penetration would be a screaming killing rape. Less than a girl, this one. Too young to know anything. Too young to take in anything but the spin. Far too young to f-uck even beyond this particular pose unless one’s customers, like me, are primarily interested in buying filth that proves death and pain. I’d like to see her head nailed to a f-ucking board afterwards. When the frustration gives way from cock to coke bottle.”

Yes, it’s pretty brutal stuff. There are articles on white supremacy, interviews with psychopaths as well as cool article as Who Rules Over the Earth? The Archetype of the World Ruler and the Work of Universal Regeneration by Tim O’Neill and The Call to Chaos: From Adam to Atom by Way of the Jornada del Muerto by James Shelby Downard. I’m not sure how many of the Apocalypse Culture installments there might be. I have these two. If there isn’t a third, there needs to be. Definitely Black Books—get you some.

Lord Larehip

The Necromantic Ritual Book by Leilah Wendell
(Westgate Press, 1995)



This thin, little monograph is a thing of beauty. Black covers inlaid with silverleaf written throughout in old English font with beautiful artwork and page borders. It is clear from the title that the author has a love affair with death itself—not romantic but necromantic. She makes clear that the rituals she describes constitute neither black nor white magic but “rites of twilight.” She writes:

“In High Necromantic practice, the cadaver is simply a consecrated catalyst—an empty chalice, if you will, that we will attempt to fill with a potent spirit. It is the host body. The death house is not violated, nor is the host. All elements are treated with the love and sacrosanctity a true magician must have if he or she ever hopes to succeed in contacting and sharing consciousness with a divine entity.” The divine entity is Death himself (Wendell refers to Death in the masculine although a male magician might just as easily regard this entity as female).

Despite the romance of death, Wendell makes clear that necrophilia or using a corpse for sex is never to be done. She stands opposed to Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt” philosophy. What is obvious is that Wendell does herself feel sexual desire when practicing necromancy on a corpse. In her book, Encounters with Death, the cover features a comatose or even dead woman in the arms of a black veiled corpse or this is Azrael, the angel of death.




This life-size piece called “The Gift” was created by Leilah Wendell and George Hisham and depicts Wendell herself in the arms of Death. It stands at the Grand Midway Hotel in New Orleans which is also the location of Westgate Press.

I have always been intrigued by the statuary found in charnel houses and mortuaries. There is undoubtedly a kind of romance we have with death:











Wendell’s system is a kind of astrological magic but rather different from the kinds you most encounter while perusing the Black Books. She believes in star gates and earth gates that serve as portals to other dimensions including that land beyond the veil. Where these points coincide is where temples should be built so that the right energy is channeled through the place for which the rituals work the best.

For the record, I’ve never performed these rituals. I’m not much of a necromantic. These are not rituals that Wendell recommends to a total novice. She feels that one must introduce oneself to Death first to overcome the normal fear we have of it. She says all fear must be overcome and the best way to overcome it is attend funerals, work in funeral homes or mortuaries, stroll through graveyards and the like. Get used to death until it becomes as a friend. When doing the rituals, first learn them from someone skilled in their use.

One must then procure the proper materials and charge them. The charging is done via the emotions. You must assemble a “golem” from an armature and a base. The armature can be a skeleton of simulated skeleton or it can be made from tree branches which must be fashioned and glued together to form the golem’s skeleton. Afterwards, let it dry and settle and then put “flesh” on the bones using clay in layers. After you build the frame and prop it up, you must pose it and “clothe” it so that it exudes the appropriate feeling you want to it convey. The cloth must be stiffened and the whole thing should be varnished over.

What should your golem look like? It can look like whatever you want it to for the rituals. You can make an image of Azrael or perhaps a transi or maybe someone you love who has passed on. Whatever puts you in the mood to contact Death during your rituals.





The golem, however, is not an idol. It is a talisman to help you focus your energies. It must treated respectfully but not worshiped. The most important ritual is “High Necromancy” where you become one with Azrael and see through his eyes. This requires a private temple and a corpse and should be performed at the times of the year when the “West Gate” is aligned with the earth. I won’t describe it too much. You’ll have to get the book if you’re interested (I think if is available in pdf format online). Again, I’ve never performed this ritual as this kind of thing is not my bag but Wendell’s writings are good for seeing death in a different light.

Lord Larehip

Lord Larehip

The Book of the SubGenius: The Sacred Teachings of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs
(Fireside Books, 1983)



Although the book claims no writing credits the main author is one Ivan Stang. He apparently founded the Church of the SubGenius with friend Philo Drummond in 1979. The SubGenius literature claims the Church was founded by J. R. “Bob ” Dobbs in 1953 but every religion claims a false ancient beginning.


The Book spells out the SubGenius belief system. The source is Jehovah-1, the teacher is J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, the goal is slack, the obstacle is the Conspiracy and its dupes and the normals, the way is the casting out of false prophets and the weapon is time control. I’ll add that two of their slogans are “The SubGenius must have slack.” And “Pull the wool over your own eyes!”

So who or what is Bob? Bob is the Supreme Salesman. Bob is the Master of Slack. In fact, as the Book makes clear, Bob is slack. I first encountered the Church of the SubGenius in the service while I was stationed in Philadelphia in 1985. I found the Book on a shelf in a bookstore. Where else? As if Bob was going to do some dippys-hit thing like part the heavens and drop it into my hands while a chorus of angels ululate. That just betrays bad marketing skills. Nope. Bob, the Prophet of Profit, put it on the bookshelves and if I wanted a copy I had to shell out for it like everybody else.








Bob appears everywhere in many forms so that he might reach everyone.

The Book is bizarrely edited and quite hilarious. There is no point to trying to describe it as it defies description. There is also an accompanying video that a friend showed me that was similarly bizarrely edited and hilarious. The following is a different one from what I saw but you get the point. The SubGenius rallies shown are real, I attended one in Philly and it was quite an experience.


ARISE, the SubGenius - YouTube

Does the Church of the SubGenius clash with the Erisians of Discordia? No. One can belong to both religions and many do. In fact, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to be a Discordian and not be a SubGenius and vice-versa. You can have both your gods—you’re paying for it.

So is the Book really a Black Book? Well, what does black symbolize—fear, the unknown, evil, etcetera? Any book that attempts to tear the cover off reality and expose it naked and uncensored to the world is not a Black Book but the Book of the SubGenius doesn’t tear the cover off reality. Bob already did that and the naked, anorexic, splotchy-skinned, shingle-ridden, deformed glump that lay quivering and trembling beneath toothlessly grinning while muttering in senility was enough to create a book that throws the cover back on and quick! We can’t handle the truth and that’s the truth. So the Book is indeed a Black Book. And be grateful for it. Thanks, Bob, we owe you one!