A suburban Satanist once showed up at a lodge meeting carrying both The Book of the Law and The Satanic Bible. He wanted to know which one to follow. The answer, then and now, depends entirely on what you think magic is for. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) founded Thelema, a religion of cosmic will and ceremonial initiation. Anton LaVey (1930–1997) founded the Church of Satan, a materialist philosophy that used ritual as psychological theater. The two systems share ritual tools but oppose each other on the nature of divinity, the purpose of magic, and whether spirits exist outside the human mind.
What did each actually believe about God?
Crowley called his supreme principle Will. Not personal preference, not ambition, but the True Will: the unique trajectory each soul must discover and enact. He wrote in The Book of the Law (received 1904, Cairo) that “Every man and every woman is a star.” A star does not collide with other stars. It follows its own orbit, and the great sin is to deviate from that orbit or to force another off theirs. His god was Hadit, the point of infinite energy, and his goddess was Nuit, the infinite expanse of space. Together they described a cosmos where the individual will dances within an unlimited field of possibility. Crowley was a mystic. He believed these entities were real, objective, and accessible through disciplined ceremonial work.
LaVey published The Satanic Bible in 1969. He believed in no gods at all. Satan was a symbol: the adversary of hypocritical morality, the flesh, the carnal self that Christianity had spent two millennia crushing. LaVey’s god was the magician. “Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence,” he wrote in the Nine Satanic Statements. There is no soul to discover. There is only a body and a mind, and the goal is to satisfy both without apology. LaVey called this rational self-interest. Where Crowley sought transcendence, LaVey sought liberation from guilt.
The disagreement is total. Crowley’s universe has meaning built into its structure. LaVey’s universe is a marketplace where you take what you want and call it ritual.
Where did each system come from?
Crowley was raised in the Plymouth Brethren, a strict Protestant sect. He rejected it, then spent years inside the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (joined 1898), learning Enochian magic, astrology, Qabalah, and tarot. When the Order fragmented, Crowley traveled to Egypt, Mexico, and India, studying yoga and Buddhist meditation. The Book of the Law arrived in Cairo in April 1904, dictated by a being he called Aiwass. The core message was the Aeon of Horus: a new age of strength, will, and the child-god who devours the old. Crowley spent the rest of his life refining Thelema through rituals, commentaries, and the organization of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which he led from 1922 onward.
LaVey had a different education. He worked as a carnival performer, hypnotist, and police photographer. He saw the underside of American life: the frauds, the hypocrites, and the people who paid to be lied to. In 1966 he declared the Year One Anno Satanas and founded the Church of Satan in his San Francisco home, painted black. The early members included musicians, filmmakers, and ex-psychiatric patients. LaVey drew from Ayn Rand’s objectivism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and a handful of occult sources like The Book of the Law itself, which he admired for its rejection of slave morality. He mixed these into a system he called Greater Magic: ritual as emotional catharsis and psychological manipulation.
One man built a religion from a mystical vision. The other built a philosophy from observation of human weakness. Both were reacting against the Christian civilization that raised them.
How do their rituals differ, concretely?
Open Crowley’s Liber AL and you find instructions for banishing, invocation, consecration, and the Gnostic Mass, a formal liturgy with a priest, a priestess, wine, cake, and the recitation of the Law. The magician wears a robe, draws a circle, performs the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to clear the space, then calls upon named spirits or divine forces. The goal is union with the Holy Guardian Angel, a term Crowley borrowed from medieval grimoires to describe the higher self or divine guide. Rituals can last hours. They require study, memorization, and the precise pronunciation of Enochian words. Failure to perform correctly means failure to achieve contact.
Open LaVey’s The Satanic Bible and you find destruction rituals, lust rituals, and compassion rituals. No circle. No invocation of spirits. The magician sits alone or with a group, directs intense emotion at the object of the ritual (a written name, a photograph, a symbolic object), and releases it. LaVey called this intellectual decompression. The ritual does not contact a demon. It vents rage, amplifies desire, or focuses sympathy. The pragmatic effect is psychological relief and, sometimes, the projection of enough emotional force to influence events by means LaVey left deliberately vague. He admitted magic might work through unknown natural laws or simple placebo. He did not care which, as long as it worked.
Crowley’s ritual is a technology for contacting the divine. LaVey’s ritual is a technology for regulating the self. One requires faith. The other requires nerve.
What do they share, despite the divide?
Both men rejected Christianity with total seriousness. Both wrote their primary texts in an authoritative, prophetic voice. Both built organizations that outlived them, though the Church of Satan has survived largely because LaVey’s successor Peter H. Gilmore (High Priest since 2001) kept the message anti-spiritual and anti-metaphysical. The OTO has survived by doing the opposite: preserving Crowley’s initiatory structure and his claim that Thelema is a genuine religion, not a self-help system.
Both systems also use the figure of Satan or Set or the Adversary as a positive symbol. Crowley identified with the number 666 and called himself the Great Beast, but he was not a Satanist. He saw Satan as the lower self that must be integrated, not worshipped. LaVey made Satan the central figure of his aesthetic. The confusion between them is old. In the 1970s, the OTO newsletter sometimes received letters addressed to “the Satanist group.” They sent back polite corrections.
Both men also believed that the individual, not the collective, is the unit of moral value. Crowley’s star does not collide. LaVey’s Satanist does not sacrifice animals or children (LaVey explicitly condemned both). The individual is sovereign. That principle binds them more than any symbol does.
Crowley vs LaVey: direct comparison table
| Aspect | Aleister Crowley | Anton LaVey |
|---|---|---|
| Primary text | The Book of the Law (1904) | The Satanic Bible (1969) |
| Supreme principle | True Will (discovered, not chosen) | Indulgence (chosen, not discovered) |
| Divinity | Real gods (Nuit, Hadit, Horus) | Symbolic Satan (no gods exist) |
| Magic | Ceremonial, spirit-contact, theurgical | Psychological, cathartic, theatrical |
| Afterlife | Reincarnation of the star-soul | None |
| Organization | OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) | Church of Satan |
| Core ritual | Gnostic Mass, Holy Guardian Angel work | Destruction or lust ritual |
| View of self | A star to align with cosmic will | A carnal being to liberate from taboo |
Can you follow both systems?
In practice, no. The metaphysical foundations contradict. If spirits do not exist, you cannot invoke them. If the True Will is real, you cannot reduce magic to therapy. Some people borrow elements: a LaVeyan might perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram because it centers the mind, without believing it banishes spirits. A Thelemite might read The Satanic Bible for its critique of Christianity without adopting LaVey’s materialism. But the two paths diverge at the root.
The confusion usually comes from the word Satan. Crowley used it as a title for the lower self that must be mastered. LaVey used it as a name for the liberated self that rejects all masters. They meant opposite things by the same word.
FAQ
Did Crowley call himself a Satanist? No. He identified as a Thelemite and a mystic. He used Satanic imagery occasionally in his poetry but explicitly rejected Satanism as a religion.
Did LaVey ever join a magical order? No. He claimed to have studied occult systems as a young man but founded his own church precisely because he found existing orders either fraudulent or too spiritual.
Which system has more members today? Available numbers are unreliable, but the OTO reports lodges in over fifty countries, while the Church of Satan maintains a smaller but vocal membership via online registration. Both are small relative to mainstream religions.
Can a LaVeyan perform Crowley’s rituals? They can, but they must reinterpret them as psychological exercises. The Church of Satan officially discourages ceremonial magic as superstitious. The OTO requires belief in the metaphysical reality of the rituals.
The two men represent a fork in modern occultism. Crowley drove the tradition toward mysticism, initiation, and the claim that reality is conscious and responsive. LaVey drove it toward atheism, pragmatism, and the claim that the only power worth having is the power you already possess. Neither answer is complete. Both are serious.
If your interest lies in understanding how Western magic evolved through the twentieth century, these two figures are inescapable. Read their primary texts. Compare their rituals. The argument between them is not resolved. It is still happening in lodges and coven meetings across the world, in the choices practitioners make about what to believe and what to do.
For a deeper look at related traditions, see our guide to the history of ceremonial magic and the glossary entry on what the Satanic Bible actually teaches. The full scope of modern occult philosophy is mapped in our vertical hub on Western esotericism.