The Satanic Bible and The Vampire Bible

The Vampire Bible – ???
Temple of the Vampire – 1989

The Satanic Bible – Anton Lavey
Avon – 1969

I’ve just finished reading The Vampire Bible from the Temple of the Vampire. I’m going to talk a little about that and a little about the Satanic Bible. I want to get LaVey out of the way early on.

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(The fonts and imagery are one of the sweetest things about this book.)

 

I am glad that I bought my copy of the Vampire Bible in a parking lot, off some dude from craigslist. I sure would feel like a dummy if I had given the person who wrote this tripe any of my money.

To join the Temple of the Vampire, you have to buy a copy of this book from them. I would hope that they also give you extra material to make sense of it, or maybe call you up to explain the crazy nonsense that’s included. The book doesn’t even include a definition of what they mean by ‘vampire’. The vampires described are non-violent vampires who don’t murder or drink blood. These vampires just float about in the astral realm, giving thanks to the undead gods and sucking life-force from their prey. It’s not very clear as to what effect this floating has on the vampire’s prey though, and the book specifically says that it doesn’t harm them. That sounds like a pathetic vampire to me.

The content is an awkward mix of instruction and fantasy. The book states that its contents are based in fantasy, yet it prohibits any kind of violence. If this is all fantasy, why shouldn’t I swally down the blood of my enemies? At least the Satanic Bible has some balls and tells you to ‘SMASH’ people that you don’t like. My favourite part of the entire book was the second item on the the list of things that suggest that you are in the presence of the Undead:
“2. Tingling sensations in the fingertips”
Perhaps the author has gotten mixed up. These vampires sound a lot like fairies to me.

2(I haven’t read my copy of the Satanic Rituals yet and probably won’t ever get around to it. It has a nice pink cover though.)

 

The Vampire Bible is dumb. Like the Satanic Bible, it makes no effort to emulate the actual Bible in any way. Unlike the Satanic Bible, it’s not even remotely clever. I actually enjoyed reading the LaVey’s Bible. It’s camp and silly, but there is some actual reasoning behind it. You get the feeling that he actually believed in some of what he was writing. There’s not an ounce of reasoning behind anything written by Vlad, or whoever the fuck shat out the Vampire Bible. The ideas in the Satanic Bible are obviously not completely original, but I think that LaVey did a decent job of synthesizing them into an entertaining whole.

Coincidentally, perhaps my least favourite part of the Satanic Bible (apart from the silly Enochian bits) was the section on Psychic Vampires. It seemed like it was a metaphor for something that had happened in LaVey’s own private life that was too embarrassing to clarify but too upsetting for him to leave out completely. It’s funny looking back at that section now and reading the lines: Psychic vampires are individuals who drain others of their vital energy… They fill no useful purpose in our lives. Perhaps he was in contact with some of the members from the Temple of the Vampire! Well, actually… probably not; the Satanic Bible was written 20 years before the Temple was founded.

Anyways, to conclude, I’m giving the Vampire Bible a generous 3/10. It looks and sounds pretty cool as long as you don’t take the time to actually read it. It’s not nearly as spooky as it could have been. The Satanic Bible gets a 7/10 for being good hellish fun. Even if you don’t like the writing, this book is worth owning just for the sweet portrait of LaVey on the back.

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What a charmer!

Image of the Beast + Blown – Philip José Farmer

Playboy Paperbacks – 1981 image of beast

Snuff films, sleazy detectives, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, intergalactic rivalries and Gilles de Rais; what more could you ask for? How about a dash of ultra-perverted hardcore pornography?

That will suit me nicely.

This novel is trash, you never get the impression that it’s anything but trash, but reading it will convince you that trash can be absolutely glorious. I loved this book. It is exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy reading. It’s based on a perverse sex murder and the whole story has a really seedy atmosphere. It’s full of bizarre characters, weird sex and supernatural violence. There was no chance of this book giving me anything but extreme enjoyment. There’s never any clear explanation given of the antagonists’ motivation but that doesn’t matter. Evil is doing evil because it’s evil. Fuck an explanation.

My version of Image of the Beast also includes the novel’s sequel; Blown. Blown is both more science-fictiony, and less grim than Image. It’s still very nasty and odd though, and I think it probably contains more weird sex acts too. It offers an explanation of some of the events in Image, but personally I didn’t find this explanation to be completely satisfactory. I don’t want to say that I was disappointed by any element of this book being too far-fetched, indeed it is in the sheer ridiculousness of these tales that their glory lies, but I felt that the intergalactic explanation in Blown seemed a little absurd in relation to the events it was explaining.

Let me use an analogy to describe this book. It’s like a pizza topped with all of my favourite toppings. Each ingredient is delicious in itself and complements most of the other ingredients on the pizza; but unavoidably, some of the combinations taste kinda weird.

Another minor critique is that this book contains bizarre amounts of geographical detail. It must mention every street name in Southern California.

It has some minor flaws, but ultimately, this is a delicious pizza of a book that I would strongly recommend. 8/10.

Dictionary of Witchcraft – Collin De Plancy

Philosophical Library – 1965

This was a very disappointing purchase. I bought my copy online and never had the chance to look through the book before buying it. Based on the title, I naively presumed that this book would be a translation of Dictionnaire Infernal by De Plancy. I was mostly wrong.
Instead of a straight forward translation of the Dictionnaire Infernal, this book is largely an alphabetized list of French witches. Some of the entries are vaguely entertaining, but none of them are particularly believable. I liked the entry on Tanchelin:

In 1125 a heretic named Tanchelin was revered to such a degree in some provinces that people drank his urine and preserved his excrement as a relic. The money that came to him…enabled him to have good food and superb service. Fathers begged him to sleep with their daughters and wives.

That’s all it says. This is certainly a valuable nugget of information, but there’s no mention of Tanchelin’s witchy heresies! (I googled him. His name was Tanchelm, his heresies weren’t particularly wicked and he was dead by 1115.)

Now I’m not one to get upset when a book isn’t convincing, but this book isn’t merely unconvincing; it’s deceiving. It actually refers to itself as ‘The Dictionary of Demonology’ in Wade Baskin’s introduction, and then on the very next page it uses the title ‘The Dictionary of Witchcraft’. The slightly embarrassing entry on the book’s own author mentions, ‘this dictionary, of which the first edition appeared in two volumes in 1818’ (1818 being the year Dictionnaire Infernal was published!), and also specifically references the book as the ‘second edition of the Dictionary of Demonology’. In 1965 the Philosophical Library publishing company  released this book and a different book titled ‘Dictionary of Demonology’.   Perhaps Baskin was trying to recreate the ‘two volume’ feel of the 1818 edition of the book and purposely split the entries into the categories of witchcraft and demonology. That would be acceptable if it was actually alluded to somewhere in this book. Baskin’s shitty editing makes it all the more irritating.

I can’t be entirely sure if the books are a pair; the other book costs far more than this one, and I’m not willing to risk another expensive disappointment. Also, it’s difficult to compare the entries in this piece of crap with the French text online. It is a translated dictionary after all. I know I’ve written a lot about this frustrating inconvenience, but I couldn’t find any discussion on this topic and I’d love to hear from anyone who could clear up this confusion.

To add insult to my frustration, I noticed that the covers of the two books differ slightly. In every image that I have found online, the Dictionary of Witchcraft has a purple rectangle and the Dictionary of Demonology has a blue rectangle.

My Dictionary of Witchcraft has a blue rectangle…

Overall I’ll give it 4/10. It was more trouble than it was worth but still fun.

I also have a copy of the Dictionary of Satanism by Wade Baskin that was published by the same company. I might review that if I manage to forgive Baskin.

(October 2016 update: The mystery over this publication and its mysterious companion has now been solved. Dictionary of Demonology is word-for-word the same book as the Dictionary of Witchcraft. Click here for full details.)