- SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - From the looks of things, the Church of Satan has
gone straight to hell.
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- Two years after its founder Anton LaVey,
the "Black Pope," died of heart disease, legal bickering among
his heirs and his followers has left the church literally crumbling away.
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- "The Black House," the San
Francisco-based church's sinister black-and-purple headquarters where some
of its most notorious gatherings took place, sits dirty and forlorn with
smashed furniture and a rotting mattress in the garden and "Jesus
Rulz" graffiti scrawled on its mail slot.
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- LaVey's last consort, a Satanic "high
priestess" named Blanche Barton who is the mother of his 5-year-old
son Xerxes, has been embroiled in a legal feud with his two grown daughters,
Karla LaVey and Zeena Schreck.
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- And would-be Satanists are beginning
to suspect that the church has become nothing but a shell to collect $100
fees from applicants around the world.
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- The sorry state of the Church of Satan
marks a sorry end to the story of Anton LaVey, a former circus lion tamer
who parlayed a love of the occult and a knack for showmanship into a career
as one of the world's best-known Satanists.
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- MEDIA'S DIABOLICAL DARLING
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- LaVey spent years as the media's diabolical
darling, earning the nickname "Black Pope" by doing everything
from playing Satan in Roman Polanski's 1968 film "Rosemary's Baby"
to performing the world's first Satanic wedding in 1967.
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- But by the time of his death at age 67,
his 30-year-old church was clearly on a slide, and it hit rock bottom over
the past year with lawsuits, evictions and internal dissent.
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- Amid the gloom, the San Francisco Chronicle
reported a grim ray of hope this week, disclosing that Barton and LaVey's
daughters had reached a tentative out-of-court settlement over the property
and artifacts LaVey left behind.
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- The three women agreed to split future
royalties from LaVey's books, which include "Satanic Rituals,"
"The Devil's Notebook," "The Complete Witch" and "Satan
Takes a Holiday." If the agreement holds, they will also divide some
of the memorabilia collected by the church over the years including a bed
of nails, a Byzantine phallus, a horned devil's cap and a signed calendar
of Marilyn Monroe, the newspaper said.
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- A lawyer for the LaVey daughters, Marc
Greenberg, said he could not comment on the report as the case was still
before the court. But Karla LaVey said it would be premature to say the
dispute was over. "This thing isn't settled yet, it could still take
a couple of months," she told Reuters by telephone.
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- 'HIGH PRIESTESS' SAID TO CONTROL SATANIST
CHURCH
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- Blanche Barton, who has moved to San
Diego, also declined comment to the Chronicle. But the newspaper said
that, under the terms of the agreement, she would keep control of "the
nonprofit corporation known as the Church of Satan."
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- To some aspiring Satanists, that sounded
a lot like handing her a license to print money. "The Church of
Satan is dead as an entity," one disgruntled member told the Chronicle.
"Its high priests and magisters have become nothing more than absentee
landlords trying to convince those inside and out that they still exist
so money keeps coming in."
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- Meanwhile, the fate of the "Black
House," a dishevelled Victorian residence that sits incongruously
in the middle of a well-heeled San Francisco neighborhood, remains unclear.
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- LaVey lost ownership of the house in
1991 when a judge ordered him to sell it, along with various other items
such as a shrunken head and a stuffed wolf, and split the proceeds with
his estranged wife, Diane Hagerty. He remained in the house by arranging
to sell it to a friendly real estate developer who agreed to let him live
out his final years there.
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- Now, however, the developer is discussing
plans to demolish the run-down structure and put up condos, the Chronicle
said.
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- Barton, who was evicted last summer,
begged Satanists around the world for donations to help save a house
with roots that go "all the way to hell."
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- With little hope of collecting the $400,000
she estimated it would take to save the house, however, she has called
off the campaign, although she still hopes someone will come forward to
rescue the house.
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- "If someone's in the market for
a notorious home that needs love and attention, he need look no further,"
she wrote in one of a series of communiques posted on the Church of Satan's
official Web site
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- <http://www.coscentral.net/cos/home.html
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