and who look upon the Earth with clearness
of sight: Arise in your glory, behold the
genius of your creation, and be prideful of
being, for I am the same - I who am the
Highest of Life.
- 302 -
- 303 -
The Sixteenth Part
Ils viuialprt Salman balt ds acroodzi
busd od bliorax balit dsinsi caosg
lusdan Emod dsom od tliob drilpa geh
yls Madzilodarp ZACAR od ZAMRAN odo
cicle qaa zorge Lap zirdo Noco MAD
hoath Iaida.
O initiates who now enter this Temple of
perfection, who shall come into being in
glory and who shall proclaim perfection,
who shall look upon the Earth and
Understand its creatures: You shall be as I
who am the Overpowering One. Arise in
your glory, behold the genius of your
creation, and be prideful of being, for I am
the same - I who am the Highest of Life.
- 304 -
- 305 -
The Seventeenth Part
Ils dialprt soba vpaah chis nanba zixlay
dodsih odbrint Taxs hubaro tastax ylsi,
sobaiad Ivonpovnph Aldon daxil od
toatar: ZACAR od ZAMRAN odo cicle qaa,
zorge lap zirdo Noco MAD hoath Iaida.
O aspirants to come, who shall bear the
Flame and wield the Powers of Darkness in
the name of my vengeance, awaken and
hear: Arise in your glory, behold the genius
of your creation, and be prideful of being,
for I am the same - I who am the Highest of
Life.
- 306 -
- 307 -
The Eighteenth Part
Ils Micaolz Olpirt ialprg Bliors ds odo
Busdir oiad ouoars caosgo Casarmg
Laiad eran brints cafafam ds ivmd aqlo
adohi MOZ od maoffas Bolp Comobliort
pambt ZACAR od ZAMRAN odo cicle qaa,
zorge Lap zirdo Noco MAD Hoath Iaida.
O thou mighty light and burning flame of
comfort that brings the Majesty of Set to
the Earth; in which the secrets of the
principles of perfection reside; whose name
is that of a stone ever sought, never found,
save through the Gate of Darkness: Arise in
your glory, behold the genius of your
creation, and be prideful of being, for I am
the same - I who am the Highest of Life.
- 308 -
- 309 -
The Nineteenth Part
Madriax dspraf [___] chis Micaolz
Saanir Caosgo odfisis balzizras Iaida
nonca gohulim Micma adoian MAD Iaod
bliorb
Sabaooaona
chis
Luciftias
peripsol ds abraasa noncf netaaib
Caosgi od tilb adphaht damploz tooat
noncf gmicalzoma lrasd tofglo marb
yarry IDOIGO od torzulp iaodaf gohol
Caosga tabaord saanir od Christeos
yrpoil tiobl Busdirtilb noaln paid orsba
od dodrmni zylna Elzaptilb parmgi
peripsax od ta Qurlst booapiS Lnibm ov
cho symp, od Christeos Agtoltorn mirc Q
tiobl Lel Ton paombd dilzmo aspian, Od
Christeos Agltortorn parach asymp,
Cordziz dodpal fifalz lsmnad, Od fargt
bams omaoas, Conisbra od auauox tonug
Orscatbl noafmi tabges Leuithmong
vnchi
omptilb ors
Bagle Moooah
olcordziz Lcapimao ixomaxip odcacocasb
- 310 -
gosaa Baglen pii tianta ababalond
odfaorgt telocvovim Madriiax torzu
Oadriax orocha aboapri Tabaori priaz
artabas Adrpan corsta dobix. Yolcam
priazi arcoazior Odquasbqting Ripir
paaoxt sagacor Vml od prdzar cacrg
Aoiveae cormpt TORZU ZACAR od ZAMRAN
aspt sibsi butmona ds Surzas tia baltan:
Iadnamad.
The AEthyrs of the Nineteenth Part
30 - TEX 29 - RII 28 - BAG
27 - ZAA 26 - DES 25 - VTI
24 -
NIA 23 - TOR 22 - LIN
21 -
ASP 20 - KHR 19 - POP
18 -
ZEN 17 - TAN 16 - LEA
15 -
OXO 14 - VTA 13 - ZIM
12 -
LOE 11 -
ICH 10 - ZAX
9 -
ZIP 8 - ZID 7 - DEO
6 -
MAZ 5 -
LIT 4 - PAZ
3 -
ZOM 2 - ARN 1 -
LIL
O vision of the [# AEthyr], whose power is
upon the Earth and reflects a perfection of
the Highest of Life: I summon you that I may
see with the eyes of Set your creator, the
Eyes of Starlight. He it was who conceived
you for an Understanding of the Universe,
to make all things of which you partake
intelligible; as against the aimlessness of the
nature of lower existence. The Earth is but
- 311 -
a part of this nature: Its course is without
purpose; its creatures ever change. Even
those of the second ordering of nature are
confused and aimless; they have forgotten
their past, and their greatest works are
defaced and destroyed, finally to become
dwellings for the beasts of the first ordering.
Why? The second ordering was mere
accident of chance. For a moment the Earth
becomes conscious, then it becomes
forgetful and savage, and finally it shall be a
land of death. O vision, appear! Manifest the
existence which partakes of you. Create
that which is newly of you; abandon that
which turns away from you; strengthen that
which increases of you; and destroy that
which knows not of you. Let nothing of
nature escape your touch; enter and depart
throughout the farthest reaches of the
Universe. Arise in your glory and honor the
Word of Set, which he has spoken to us in
his perfection. Behold the genius of your
creation, and let us partake of undefiled
wisdom.
- 312 -
- 313 -
V
Yankee Rose
Gloria Tenebrarum
- 314 -
- 315 -
17: City of Dreadful Night
A. Hotel California
Inside of seventy years ago some writers
hatched a revisionist notion that, contrary to
commonly-held gospel, America was the wrong
place at the wrong time, led by the wrong leaders,
feeding a wronged population a line of jive that
sounded good but had to go wrong because the
entire American venture was a freak curve ball
arcing the wrong way; gathering power and
veering out of control, held temporarily aloft by a
pervasive corruption intrinsic to its momentum,
but bound to hit the gutter anyway. 152
If Satanism were going to materialize on Earth,
it would be in San Francisco.
America’s other cities, towns, locales are
celebrated for a a colorful palette of prideful
peculiarities, from Boston’s colonial quaintness to
Cincinnati’s zoo, Denver’s omelettes to Miami’s
vices, Seattle’s needle to Chicago’s typ
ewriter.
In this country everything seems somehow to
know and find its place. Disneyland basks in
Anaheim; it wouldn’t fit in Idaho or Vermont.
Country music music grows Gracefully in Memphis.
152 Ellroy, James, Fallen Angels. New York: Grove Press, 1993.
- 316 -
But then there is the other place, that William
Burroughs once glimpsed while in the merciless grip
of a narcotic nightmare:
America is not a young land: it is old and
dirty and evil before the settlers, before the
Indians. The evil is there waiting. 153
H.P. Lovecraft thought he had localized this in
“His Lawful Majesty’s Province of Massachusetts-
Bay”, where it seemed that you couldn’t go anywhere
without tripping over an Arkham or Dunwich. 154
But with more than a few suppressed shudders,
I maintain that it is in California, not New England,
where Nameless Rites and Unspeakable Orgies
abound most lasciviously and luxuriantly.
Germany’s Walpurgis-haunted Brocken pales
before California’s Mount Shasta, spaceport for
saucers and licentious lair of Lemurians. 155
No one has ever survived a midnight swim in
the gilded grotesqueness of Hearst Castle’s enclosed
pool, 156 and one of the historic Spanish Missions had
to be abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere because of
the horrors which so cursed it that its founding
153 Burroughs, William S., Naked Lunch. New York: Grove
Press, 1959.
154 Indeed I found myself agreeing with HPL after rashly
agreeing to a series of four lectures at the Order of Dagon Hall
in Innsmouth, as recounted in IlluminAnX (2017), from which
I barely escaped with my life and sanity. Perhaps not the latter.
155 Cf. M. Aquino. “Nameless Rites at Bunny Flat”. The Temple
of Set. San Francisco: Barony of Rachane, 2016; also Chapter
#17, Ghost Rides, SF: BoR,2018.
156 Ghost Rides, op.cit. , Chapter #12.
- 317 -
Father’s body had to be cut in half and buried in far-
distant graves. 157
Lovecraft’s malevolent Mountains of Madness
are fictional, but according to the Hopi Indians, a
primeval subterranean civilization of lizard-people
exists in a cyclopean city beneath Los Angeles,
centered below Dodger Stadium. These saurians are
not noted for their hospitality: In 1934 mining
engineer W. Warren Shufelt began an excavation
below Chavez Ravine and disappeared without a
trace. 158
Even fabled Disneyland isn’t immune. When in
the early 1960s Walt purchased the antebellum
Gracey manor in New Orleans and brought it back
to become the “Haunted Mansion”, more than a few
real ghosts apparently came along with it. 159
Worse still, when in 1993 Disney and AT&T
acquired the ruins of an ancient temple in India and
rebuilt it in the Park, many visitors who entered it
were never seen again. 160
But if California seethes with supernatural
scares, the epicenter of Eek! is San Francisco, in
which being destroyed by earthquake and fire in
1906 was merely one incident in a perilous parade of
perfidy.
The future city was cursed by its original
Indian inhabitants when the Spanish slaughtered
157 Ibid., “Grail Mission”.
158 Bosquet, Jean, Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1934.
159 Aquino, Michael, Ode to Esmé: Memoirs of Captain Nemo.
San Francisco: Barony of Rachane, 2017.
160 Ghost Rides, op. cit., Chapter #14. Disney finally alleviated
most of the danger by hiring a retired archæologist to supervise
visitors to the Temple of Mara. Most now make it through.
- 318 -
them in the name of El, the result being a Mission
almost as lethal as the abandoned one at Point
Conception; so much catastrophe blighted this one
that it was named “Dolores”.
San Francisco emerged as more cemetery than
city, with Russian Hill so-named because of the
burials beneath its residences. What is today the
Financial District is one of the world’s largest
graveyard of sunken ships, abandoned there in the
Gold Rush of 1849. New office buildings’
excavations regularly encounter spectral ships in
their basements.
B. The Black House
There was a house in the great Metropolis
which was older than the town. Many said that it
was older, even, than the cathedral, and, before the
Archangel Michael raised his voice as advocate in
the conflict for God, the house stood there in its
evil gloom, defying the cathedral from out its dull
eyes. It had lived through the time of smoke and
soot. Every year which passed over the city seemed
to creep, when dying, into this house, so that, at
- 319 -
last it was a cemetery - a coffin, filled with dead
tens of years.
Set into the black wood of the door stood,
copper-red, mysterious, the seal of Satan, the
pentagram.
It was said that a magician, who came from
the East (and in the track of whom the plague
wandered), had built the house in seven nights.
But the masons and carpenters of the town
did not know who had mortared the bricks, nor
who had erected the roof. No foreman’s speech
and no ribboned nosegay had hallowed the
Builder’s Feast after the pious custom.
The chronicles of the town held no record of
when the magician died, nor of how he died.
One day it occurred to the citizens as odd
that the red shoes of the magician had so long
shunned the abominable plaster of the town.
Entrance was forced into the house and not
a living soul was found inside. But the rooms,
which received, neither by day nor by night, a ray
from the great lights of the sky, seemed to be
waiting for their master, sunken in sleep.
Parchments and folios lay about, open,
under a covering of dust, like silver-grey velvet.
Set in all the doors stood, copper-red,
mysterious, the seal of Satan, the pentagram. 161
San Francisco’s Richmond District is “way out
there”, sitting next to the Pacific Ocean, nestled
between the Presidio to the north and Golden Gate
Park to the south. In contrast to the city’s various
“spectacular” neighborhoods, the Richmond is
placid and peaceful: trim and tidy residences with a
Russian émigré accent of golden-turnip-topped
Eastern Orthodox churches. Until 1966 Richmond’s
only claim to weirdness was its “Land’s End”
161 von Harbour, Thea, Metropolis. New York: Ace Books, 1927,
page #47. [The following year this book was made into the
classic movie by Thera’s husband Fritz Lang. The inverse
pentagram also famously appeared in Rotwang’s laboratory
behind his robotrix Parody as she is brought to life.
- 320 -
wilderness
of craggy sea-cliffs, where 19th-Century
Comstock Lode millionaire & San Francisco Mayor
Adolph Sutro had built his fairytale Cliff House
restaurant and adjoining “Sutro Baths” swimming
palace.
- 321 -
Anton’s parents had moved out of 6114
California Street in the 1950s, and in 1971 they
formally deeded the house - now wearing its famous
black paint, to their son and his wife Diane. 162
Before starting the Church of Satan, Anton held
musical court as organist of the nearby Lost
Weekend Nightclub. Decades later, when the club
and its Wurlitzer had given way to a restaurant,
nostalgic patrons would point out the ghostly
ceiling-relief of the organ dais, and regale
companions with I-knew-him-when-he-had-hair
162 6114 California Street Grant Deed, Michael J. Levey and
Gertrude A. Levey, July 9, 1971.
- 322 -
anecdotes. Some might even recall Anton’s signature
finale, the love-song “Yankee Rose”. 163
Otherwise, until Satan inaugurated his Earthly
embassy at 6114, the LaVeys were just like any other
respectable family with two daughters and a lion. 164
But once they started a church that didn’t
sport a turnip-top, other Richmonders weren’t quite
so sure. Remarked one lady neighbor in the 1969
documentary film Satanis:
Actually I don’t know what kind of man he
is. His appearance is very nice. He makes a very
good impression. He has a very soft voice, and he
talks so smooth, so pleasant. As soon as you meet
him, you think he is a very, very nice man.
But there is definitely something going
wrong over there. I just have a feeling I can’t
trust him.
There are women there who are without
clothes - naked. And the men wear a - a kind of
black hooded robe.
And sometimes from my window I can see a
kind of red light and silhouettes like devils. And
one silhouette, a big one - maybe it’s him,
standing over the whole crowd and preaching.
A comprehensive 6114 tour is beyond the scope
of this book; for that see my The Church of Satan.
Here some vignettes may suffice:
Past the front door visitors would need to
negotiate a black hallway guarded by a sentry-
163 This same “signature” appeared mysteriously as the “finalé”
of the original Satanic Bible, with Satanists worldwide puzzling
over its esotericism as a Barbarous Evocation.