The Satanic bible Introduction br br 'On a winter's evening in 1967, I drove crosstown in San Fransisco to hear Anton Szandor br LaVey lecture at an open meeting of the Sexual Freedom League. I was attracted by br newspaper articles describing him as "the Black Pope" of a Satanic church in which baptism, br wedding, and funeral ceremonies were dedicated to the Devil. I was a free-lance magazine br writer, and I felt there might be a story in LaVey and his contemporary pagans; for the Devil br has always made "good copy", as they say on the city desk. br br It was not the practice of the black arts itself that I considered to be the story, because that is br nothing new in the world. There were Devil-worshipping sects and voodoo cults before there br were Christians. In eighteenth-century England a Hell-Fire Club, with connections to the br American colonies through Benjamin Franklin, gained some brief notoriety. During the early br part of the twentieth century, the press publicized Aleister Crowley as the "wickedest man in br the world". And there were hints in the 1920s and '30s of a "black order" in Germany.