The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Exposing Satanism: Fear, Manipulation, & Suffering | Zeena Schreck

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with ex-high priestess of the Church of Satan and daughter of Anton LaVey, Zeena Schreck. They discuss her upbringing in the church, the pathology of her mother and father, how and why she severed ties, and the spirituality she has come to know today. Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, musician, and writer. Prior to her solo music career, she was musical co-director and graphic art designer for the experimental musical project Radio Werewolf during its most prolific European phase. She is also an ordained Tibetan Buddhist yogini and leading Western teacher of Buddhist meditation, spiritual awakening, and the nature of mind. She brings to her creative work a lifetime's experience and expertise in both ancient magical traditions as well as still-living, unbroken Tibetan Buddhist traditions. She expatriated from the U.S. in 1990, living first in Vienna, Austria, and since 1999 in Berlin, Germany.  - Links - For Zeena Schreck: Website and blog https://www.zeenaschreck.com/blog FAQ https://www.zeenaschreck.com/general-info.html Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeena_Schreck Instagram https://www.instagram.com/zeenaschreck_art/ Bandcamp https://zeenaschreck.bandcamp.com/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/ZeenaSchreckOfficial Facebook https://www.facebook.com/ZEENA.Official.ZeenaSchreck Etsy https://www.etsy.com/de/shop/KCHforZeenaSchreck

Hello everybody! Today I'm speaking with Zena Schreck, whose original name was Lavey, and who is the daughter of Anton Lavey, who was the most famous Satanist of the last half of the 20th century. And so she grew up with the man who established the modern Church of Satan. A very intelligent man, very charismatic, very creative, very Machiavellian, psychopathic, manipulative, a carnied barker, an admirer of P.T. Barnum, a man for whom there was a sucker born every minute, a man who deeply believed that the world was an act and that life was a carnival and that if you had the wool pulled over your eyes to his benefit, then so much the worse for you, and I suppose as well you deserve it for being so foolish and gullible. That's the eternal self-justification of the carny barker psychopath.

And Zena grew up in that household as, by all appearances, a dutiful woman, young woman, committed to the well-being of her father, to the degree where in the 1980s, when a panic about satanic practice arose in the general population, quite a widespread panic, she felt compelled to defend him and took on the mantle of High Priestess

of the Satanic Church for five years before coming to the realization that she had been immersed in a pack of lies, in a web of lies, before understanding as a consequence of the promptings of her conscience that she was participating in something that was not what it claimed to be and in a life that wasn't what she thought it was and was also called by promptings, you might say, of a genuinely religious nature to forswear the church, to leave her father and to set out what would you say into the desert of her own doubt. And so that's what we talk about. The crazy 1970s, the hangover from the hedonistic bliss of the summer of love hippies, the dark side of let it all hang out and tune in, turn on and drop out, right?

The catastrophic underbelly of immature hedonism, right? And well, who better to guide us through that absolute bloody catastrophic mess than the daughter of the prime Satanist from the 1960s and the 1970s? Join us. Zena, thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me and everyone today. I guess I'm curious, you've had a very strange life and I want to describe that. I guess I'm curious first for myself before we delve into any of the details, what do you think we could accomplish with this conversation?

What's the utility of the conversation as far as you're concerned? Well, that's a good question. Well, it only comes up anecdotally in relation to where I am today. I always prefer to live in the present. That's in accordance with my Buddhist practices. But if I were to think of an overall accomplishment of what we get across today, I think it might be to reassure those who might be watching who live in difficult situations or difficult families or really dysfunctional conditions in life, that they

should not give up hope, and that there is a way out, and to always remember that everything minute, if we practice patience and diligence in trying to find our own course that is in alignment with who we truly are. I think that the only thing I really have to offer, because everybody has adversity in their life. But in my case, maybe the only thing I have to offer is that people who are raised with certain conditioning or certain belief systems that they've learned through childhood, that they really never had an opportunity to question. Or even if they did question it, they always felt they had to defend it on behalf of their parents, whatever that may be, whether it's religion or politics or corporations or, you

know, profession or anything. That if there are people who felt that because of their early life conditioning that they're just stuck and that's their destiny and that's their fate and they really can't do anything about it and there's no way out, that I would at least hope that my life's experiences and my life's story can provide an example, amongst many others in this world and in history, of the fact that if you have strength of character, if you have a greater vision, if you have a willingness to change, that it is possible to break the conditionings that were placed upon you against your wishes. Well, so there's a couple of themes in there that are, I think, personally and sociologically relevant. I mean, on the, we all, what would you say, are the beneficiaries and victims of the actions of the past. And

I suppose that's true most proximally with regard to who it is that you have in your family of birth and your parents. And they have their individual idiosyncrasies and talents. And then they are also exemplars of the much broader culture. Now, your father was a very famous man and extraordinarily controversial person. I was reading the satanic rituals this morning and back, I'm old enough so I kind of caught the tail end of the hedon rituals this morning. And back, you know, I'm old enough, so I kind of caught the tail end of the hedonistic sixties, you know, I'm really a kid of the seventies. And

the seventies was where the sixties went to die. As am I. I always say that the seventies are the hangover of the sixties. Yeah, that's exactly right. The drunken hangover. Because there is a really ugly hangover. Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. It really was. And you know, when I was 18 or 19, I spent a fair bit of time investigating Alistair Crowley and also your father's works and familiarizing myself with the dark side of the 1960s, you

know, looking at how that had affected the music, for example, of the Rolling Stones and the vicious underbelly of the, what would you say, carefree hedonism, let it all hang out, tune in, turn on, drop out ethos of the 1960s. It's like, that's all fine boys and girls, but you know, there's a pretty dark shadow that comes along with that and it's like the shadow of the Marquis de Sade for the French enlightenment and these aren't the sorts of things that people like to delve into except carelessly and foolishly that's for sure and pridefully and you know it was quite a trip down memory lane in some ways to take a look at this book today because I haven't thought about those things in relationship to the early sixties or the early seventies and the late sixties for quite a long time.

So you were right in the middle of this. And so maybe you could start by telling people who your father was and then also when you were born so we can place you exactly in time. And then I think we'll probably go through your life autobiographically and let you tell your story. So why don't you tell everybody who your father was to begin with? Okay. Yeah, so first of all, you know, I was born in 1963 and my father was Anton LeVey, so he was the founder of the Church of Satan, which coincided with being

the founder of modern-day Satanism as a co-hegent kind of organizational, openly public organization for Satanists. Not that Satanism didn't exist before, but it was always in secret or was practiced very differently from the way my father practiced it. Let me back up and clarify something. When you were discussing about the hedonism of the 60s and the dark side and the Rolling Stones kind of Altamont type things that were happening then the interesting thing to understand about my father and his organization was that they were a generation older than the members were mostly people who were young

in the post-war generation of the 50s. So in a strange way, you could consider that the Church of Satan always considered itself the counterculture to the counterculture because we were, my father was really very anti-hippie. And so this is where it gets complicated because it doesn't fit into the stereotypical idea idea one has of Satanism in the occult milieu. So it's a little bit complicated because my father was anti-occultist, actually, and he was really much more of a performer and a showman and very Machiavellian, of course, in the formation of the church in the way that he did it. So the hedonism that was promoted within the Church of Satan was something different than

what was going on in the 60s. So, the hedonism within the Church of Satan was more like, I mean, it was more like for, I don't know if you recall, but in the 60s there was this phrase, don't trust anybody over 30, right? Because the 60s was a youth culture generation and anyone over 30 was considered part of the establishment, don't trust them. Yet, in the Church of Satan, that pretty much summed up a large percentage of the membership, and they were very much a part of the establishment, but in the sense that they were professionals. And that's, they would go to Church of Satan events to sort of live it up, whether it was to meet people that they'd have liaisons with or affairs or whatever, you know, whatever. It was really not, it's hard to describe, but it was really not what people imagine and what people think.

I mean, yes, there was a lot of psychopaths and a lot of deviant people in the Church of Satan. I'm not going to say there wasn't. But the way that that transpired was very different than the let it all hang out kind of attitude of the hippies. So my point is both are problematic. Both are not, so my father's attitude was more like, he was more like P.T. Barnum, who

was an inspiration to us. Like a sucker is born every minute. And it's perfectly logical and valid to take advantage of people that want to be taken advantage of. As long as everybody's enjoying themselves and nobody complains, then, you know, then, but the fact is, interestingly, he was anti-drug. He was very anti-drug. He was a very law and order kind of person.

I mean, we had friends in the police department. I have to say something that I've never said publicly before either is in my teenage years, I dated a policeman who was a friend of my father's, who was just part of the patrol that was always coming in and out of our house because we needed protection from vandalism and from attacks on the house and threats. So he fell into a different category than most occultists, and as I say, he didn't even consider himself an occultist. He considered himself more of like a social experiment in a way of providing that if you created a doctrine and a religion that was based on people's base impulses and base desires, that maybe you could take away the stigma of people exercising

those base desires. But the problem with that is it was entirely mixed with a lot of neuroses from his own side. I mean, it was very, you could say, postmodern in his way of approaching Satanism and the symbolism of Satan. It really doesn't hold up to scrutiny and academic study and things like that. And certainly it doesn't hold up in terms of what constitutes a real religion.

It's not a real religion. It's just more like a private club, basically. However, I would say that I was raised with the understanding that it was a religion and I took that very seriously. Much later in life during the 80s when there was the satanic panic, I felt that it was my religion that was being under attack, but more importantly, it was because I had empathy and compassion for my father and I was very afraid that he was going to be framed for something that he was not responsible for. And yet, he was utterly incapable of defending himself, utterly unwilling to defend himself, that what I did for that organization was really for my father.

And then subsequently, what grew out of that was a sense of responsibility. I felt like, okay, somebody needs to just show up and show that these people are real people, that they're not ethereal things that you can just hurl accusations at. Because I knew from experience that the media likes to grab onto boogeymen and make something that is going to inflame and get people very riled up. And you can sell a lot of advertising that way and you can also create a lot of new jobs that way and it's good for the economy and all kinds of things like that. So I knew that that was happening. But more importantly, I thought that they were imagining that, well,

this isn't going to hurt anybody because there isn't really anything such as Satanism anyway, so we can kind of use this. But in fact, there were people who considered themselves that. And I thought, well, we need to, I need to at least be a placeholder, just say, this is a real person whose life you're affecting. And because I felt like I had to protect my father. So what I did was out of necessity and out of love for my father and fear, because I had a son, fear that my son would be taken away from me by child protective services. So fear, a mother's fear, love for a father, and then yet at the same time, as all that was going on, because I'm jumping forward to the 80s now with the satanic

panic period, as all that was going on, my parents, they weren't ever legally married in the first place, but they lived as man and wife, so you could say that they lived as common law marriage. And so they were breaking up, and so there was this immense tension between my two parents and me feeling as though I was being pulled between the both of them. Two narcissistic parents, both saying, you know, either blaming me for being like the other parent or trying to draw and quarter me, saying, you know, you have to support me.

No, you have to support me. No, you have to support me. So there was a lot happening in my life at that time in combination with what was happening in the country with this national hysteria. Okay, so I want to delve into some of the characterizations that you touched on in relationship to your father, because he's emblematic of a whole wealth of, what would you say, like a symbolic cluster. You know, you said that, well, you described him as narcissistic, you described him as Machiavellian, but you described him as a showman. You said

that one of his heroes was P.T. Barnum. You described the phrase, there's a sucker born every minute. Then you said something very interesting about that, and this is something that everybody who's listening and watching should understand. I mean, one of the things that characterizes a Machiavellian orientation towards life is a proclamation which has an iota of truth in it, which is, if you're stupid enough to let me take advantage of you, if you invite me in to take advantage of you, you deserve everything you have coming to you. Right, well, and you know, it's a very strange thing, so let me reflect on that in a strange manner. So in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is very bitter and resentful because what he's

offering to God is not being accepted, his sacrifices are being rejected. And he essentially makes a case to God that his misery and unhappiness is a consequence of his failure. And God says back to him, no, that's not true. You're missing an intervening variable here, buddy. You did sacrifice inappropriately. You're not bringing your best to the table. And because of that, you are failing. But that's not why you're miserable. You're miserable because something tempted you when you were failing. It's sin that crouched at your door.

And you invited it in and you let it have its way with you. And that's why you're bitter and miserable. And that's a very different causal sequence, hey. Now, the reason I'm bringing that up is because the constant refrain of the showman carnival barker is, and you see this parodied, for example, or explored in Tom Waits work, and you see it touched on in the work of people

like Robert Crumb, is that, you know, if you're the kind of damn fool who invites the predator into your house and then he eats you. It's like, well, you know, you kind of set yourself up for it and you had it coming. Now the problem with that is that the Machiavellian who you could think about as a force of divine vengeance in that regard, ensuring that those who are foolish get their just desserts also uses that as a justification for their own predatory and parasitical activities, right?

Well, of course I can take advantage of you because, well, first of all, you're probably a thief anyways, and you just hide it with a facade of moral virtue. That's what the Marxists always claim. Yes, there's a lot of justification. Yes, yes, and then the next thing is, well, if I accept this story that you're a fool, and so I'm entitled to deliver you what you deserve,

then that justifies virtually anything on my behalf. And so now it's a very complex characterization of your father, but now you also, interestingly enough, in the 80s, so you would have been in your 20s at that point, despite the fact that your father had this very complex character and was toying with the edges of propriety, let's say at minimum, you also felt compelled to rise to his defense and you did that very publicly.

And so I'm very curious, like what, how would you, you obviously loved your father and that in itself. No, that's a, I want to clarify that because a lot of people hold me up as some kind of poster child for adolescent rebellion against parents. And in fact, I was a really dutiful daughter. I really went to bat for both of my parents and all of my upbringing, even though they never came to school to defend me when I was being bullied and picked on. I just had to learn how to fight myself. But yes, I always felt, until I was an adult in parted ways with my father, I mean, I always felt that we were buddies,

that we were really close. And yeah, I mean, obviously I looked up to him as the, you know, Jehovah God kind of archetype except in Satan form. And which is interesting because I think that's a lot of how his followers do look up to him as like a kind of satanic Jehovah. So, and they treat him in the same way. And so, it is not really that I was such a rebellious kid. I was a very obedient, dutiful daughter. And I, you know, there was only, even though I was left to my own, left on my own quite a lot growing up, my, I mean, my mother and well, both of them made it clear that there are only certain rules which is don't do anything that is going to drag us into a negative light, which in

hindsight, I think is really funny because as if they didn't do enough themselves to do that. But I couldn't do, for example, I didn't have the luxury of having a drug problem. That just couldn't happen because that would reflect badly on my parents. So that was something that, you know, although they were pretty logically open-minded about if you want to experiment, you know, let us know and that kind of pseudo-liberal attitude. However, by their behavior and by their, by things that my father would say about really being very anti-drug, it didn't take a genius to know that he would not have been happy

if I had gone down that route. So I was constantly, you know constantly keeping myself in check and being sure that I lived up to what his standards were, which was really idiosyncratic, obviously. So what I'm trying to say about rebellion, what I'm trying to explain about rebellion is I was not a rebellious child. In fact, I always felt like it was us, our little clan, against the world. And I was very rebellious against other authority figures, like in school or out in the world, and I was really a scrappy kind of warrior in that way. but I always felt like there was the core family that was solid and tight. And I continued to feel that way until the split with my father, and I would even

characterize when I severed ties with my father, not as an act of rebellion, but just as simply severance, as putting an end. That was the end, forever. So that wasn't the, you know, because rebellion implies a kind of relationship. It implies that, that, you know, a child will test the limits this way and then the parent will push back that way and there will be a give and take and a give and take. I never had any of that, never did any of that. I reached my limit and then there was a tipping point and then I was done and it was clean severance and I never went back. And I never, it was not even rebellion, it was just I'm done. You've pushed me too far and I can't even.

Okay, so let me ask you two questions about that because there's another paradox about your father. I mean, in the satanic rituals, for example, it certainly appears that he's perfectly willing to harness, let's say, sexual activity for the purposes of the church, and there is an overlap with a kind of sexual hedonism there, but you also characterize him as someone who essentially had a law and order orientation and And and it was very strict with regards For example to your own behavior at least on the drug side And so those are very difficult things to bring together right so you have this Machiavellian person he's narcissistic. He's a real real. He's a real showman

he's drawing all sorts of attention to your family, and he's a celebrator of what's unacceptable, and yet there's an element of him too that's aligned more with the law and order types. And then you also brought into that your sense. Yep. Go ahead. No, finish your thought. Well, you also brought into there something else that's interesting, which was, you know, you were a dutiful person and your initial presumption, which I think is the

default presumption of a daughter, is that your primary loyalty was to your family and that you felt that your family was an embattled unit. Now, you know, that is a trick that Machiavellians use with people who are close to them, right? They tend to sever their ties to other people and keep them intensely focused on what's proximal. I'm very aware of that. Yeah, to prize loyalty above all else. And so it's very- And they use the word we. They use the word we. So that you're dragged into the we. Yeah, well, and I can't see in some ways how you could have escaped that as a child, right?

I mean, especially if you're relatively dutiful in your personality, because you're going to assume, especially if your father's also charismatic, your primary allegiance is going to be to him. And so, you think, you believe that that was what motivated your participation as a high priestess, say, let's say in the 1980s, is that you were still on the side of your family, you still believe that your father... Okay, so how did the evidence mount for you that the orientation that you had in relationship to your father was of the sort that would

eventually have to be severed. Like how the hell did you come about that revolution? That was a gradual process. Like most things in life, things don't just, really things don't just happen out of the blue. Things don't just happen suddenly. There's lead up. And I've always been a really patient person and I give people

a lot of chances and a lot of benefit of the doubt and I've always, sometimes stupidly so but I've always tried to see actually the good in people, even reprehense, you know, people who are really reprehensive. I've known a lot of people who by any normal standards of society would think that these people are beyond the pale, they're totally psychopathic and horrible. That's a matter of psychological analysis. That's not for me to say what their diagnoses are. I'm just saying that by normal standards, they would be seen that way. And yet, because I've known such people in perfectly normal, I wouldn't say perfectly, nothing about my life has been perfectly normal.

But I mean, I've known them in the same way that I'm talking to you now, just talking normally. And so, I could always see, yeah, I mean, I saw the problems in such people, including my father. But in the case of him in particular, so that was a gradual process. But what began to happen is as I was defending him publicly, and I would like have a little powwow with him and say, okay, these are the interviews I've lined up for next week and then what do you want me to say? Because I would always say to him, what's the party line? What do you want me to say?

I was a mouthpiece for him. But at the same time, because he would just say like, he was so out of touch with reality, he would just say crazy things like, you know, talk about celebrities. And that's all he cared about was that people saw him in an entertaining and exciting and kind of cocktail party conversation kind of way. He really had no interest or concern about the phenomena that were happening in the country at that time with innocent people being accused of horrible things. That didn't interest him at all. So what happened with me is, you know, I would begin kind of having to, either I would have to, you know, push him a little more, like say, well, I'm not really sure that they're going to want to talk about Jane Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe and things like that.

I would say, you know, but people are being accused of being members that aren't even members of the Church of Satan, things like this. And so anyway, what I had to do, because there was a lot of cognitive dissonance happening, what I had to do was be his mouthpiece and yet filter it through my personality, through my conscience. And I had to live with it. So you know, I would phrase things in such a way that according to my personality, what I could live with up to the degree that I was still promoting his vision and it was

never about me. It was always, and I always held him up as the, you know, this is, I'm here on behalf of. And so gradually what happened is some people would start coming forth to me and telling me about things about his life that I didn't know about. People in the public would just say, oh, do you know that it would be horribly embarrassing? But they'd say, well, do you know where this part of the satanic Bible came from? Or do you know where that really came from?

And of course, because I lived in a vacuum and a bubble in my family, so I just accepted it. And this is the best way for Machiavellians who are narcissistic is to get people to be very credible defenders of them, is if you can convince an innocent person that all of your facade is true and you send them forth, they will be very credulous and they will be very credible and they will seem very convincing. And of course, that's the problem of what I have to live with today, is I still get so many Satanists that come to my website or come to my social media pages and clueless

and say, how can I join? So where do I sign up? And it's like you didn't get the memo 30 years ago or over 30 years ago. So the disillusionment happened gradually. It wasn't like overnight. And then of course, like all things that happen gradually, then there's the tipping point, then everybody freaks out and they say, well, she just blew up over this one little thing. But it wasn't just one little thing. It was an accumulation of too many things. And then the final straw was when he threatened my own life.

When, after I had been doing this for five years on behalf of him, all of these public appearances, I had been taking the threats and I had been endangering my own life, showing up in studios where there would be huge hoards of Christian evangelists that really want to take a baseball bat to my head and kill me. And I have lots of anecdotal stories about that too, how that's a reality. And then, so what had happened was the tipping point was that my husband at that time and I, we were preparing a 25-year anniversary of the Church of Satan, and it was going to

be a public performance. And the venue, but also the police and the sheriff's department in Los Angeles had been getting a lot of threats and a lot of warnings that if it was going to go on, you know, something really terrible would happen. And interestingly enough, actually, because I knew Richard Ramirez at the time too, because my husband at the time and I were considering writing a book about him, that's a whole other subject. Just tell people who he was.

Richard Ramirez was a serial killer, a serial murderer in Los Angeles in the 80s who self-identified as a Satanist, and he was a follower of my father's. And he's somebody that, you know, the present day Church of Satan wants to pretend there was no connection to. But here's the thing, as I was beginning to represent the Church of Satan on a broader level, in a broader spectrum, and there were some things that began developing in me. And those were realizations, and realizations that if you are a real religion, you can't pick and choose who is drawn to that religion. I mean, there are Christian murderers too,

but each Christian denomination can't just close shop and say, well, you can't join. Because if you are a true religion, you can't have that kind of selectivity. Religion is something bigger. Religion isn't a private club, right? So then that brought to mind philosophical questions. Like philosophical questions like, well, what is the meaning of it? What purpose does religion serve actually then to the community? And if we are supposed to be this kind of anti-religion or a counter-religion, what purpose does that serve and to who? So, it's just a religion of Anton Lové's personal friends? Well, then that's not a religion, right? But he had different tiers. He had like his inner circle, and then he had his circle of

friends who in fact were outside of the Church of Satan, people that he liked to feel like he could have a kind of, yeah, Machiavellian and also Rasputin, you know, the Russian monk Rasputin. He was also very influenced by him. So these were kind of role models for him that he felt that he, through knowing people in influential circles, whether it was in the entertainment field or other fields that he could have some sort of influence over them in some way in their decision making and things like that. But then he had the laity, the laity of the Church of Satan, which of course, because he was so in his youth, he was very influenced by the carnival, carnies,

carny life, you know. So the laity is what we always referred to as the rubes. Those were the paying customers. The laity were, to quote my father, he would say, they're the stuffing in the mattress. You know, they're what pay the bills. Right, right. So that carnival, that carnival association is extremely interesting. So there's a, I'm a real, what would you call, aficionado of the early Disney classic animated movies and I've spent a lot of time, for example, lecturing about it, walking through the story of Pinocchio. And there's a mystery, there's a lot

of mysteries in that animated movie, which is about the attempts of someone striving forward to free themselves from the invisible strings that control them, right? Because Pinocchio's a marionette and he's trying to become a real person. Well, the first temptation that he encounters, this took me a long time to figure out, the first temptation he encounters is to become an actor. Like he gets picked up by the coachman, this Italian character who's a traveling carny and he's put on the stage as a puppet, right? And the Italian

carnival director claims that he's going to make him a star, but imprisons him essentially. And it took me a long time to understand. I thought, well, this is so strange because this is a Hollywood movie and yet actor is put in an extraordinarily negative light and I thought actor, actor and then it seems obvious in retrospect but it wasn't to begin with that well it's a parody of accomplishment right to be an actor is to is to have all of the what would you call the trappings of the real thing. Well that's your persona. Not to do any of the work exactly it's the's a persona. And there's not, well, and you said, you know,

you're tilting continually towards description of your father, essentially as a carnival barker. And you said, for example, that when you were trying to work through some of the deeper philosophical implications of the accusations that were coming your family's way, his insistence constantly was to play up his association with high level celebrities, right? And to become... So, I mean, so, so the, the actor issue is, it's a continuation of the great game idea. So you say, well, there's a soccer born every

minute is perfectly reasonable and even right to prey on the gullible because they deserve it. But then there's a deeper justification underneath that, which is something like, well, everything is a great show anyways, right? There's nothing real. That's kind of the postmodern element. There's nothing real. Everyone who's successful isn't successful

because they've actually contributed something real. They're successful because their act worked. And so I might as well have an act. And your father was obviously, I mean, with the carnival surround, that really becomes tangible because a carnival is all about taking a break from the duties and responsibilities of life and celebrating the orgiastic and the odd

and the lustful and the base. And there's an attraction of that carnival barker who's often represented in literary, in literary symbology as a, what would you say, an invitation to the satanic realm, right? That's why you see in Stephen King, for example, and Ray Bradbury, it's very, very, or in movies that use that trope,

let's say of the serial killer, is often terrible things are going on behind the scenes in a carnival, right? It's a place of dark magic. And so your father obviously was part of that world. And is it safe to say that he believed that it was all a great show and that he was staging a theatre?

Okay, yeah? Here's the thing, is I believe that in the beginning he really believed that he would, I think that he really believed that so-called normal society, straight society, normal, regular middle class society, that they were corrupt in their way. So I'm sure he had some early life experiences. I'm sure he had early life experiences that disillusioned him and caused him to take a dim view of society and the double standards and the corruption and things like this. But here's the thing,

a lot of people get that too. But not everybody thinks, well, then I'm going to take revenge and I'm going to flip the script and I'm going to flip the script and I'm going to do one up on that. But I think in the beginning, I think in the beginning, with the help of my mother, I must say, because my mother, don't forget, was 50% of the development of the Church of Satan as well, and she had her own personality and she had her own makeup from her past and her family and things like that. And she very often was like a balance to him, but sometimes she was also someone who was pushing him from behind the scenes too, go further, go further, and setting. She was his PR agent, she was the administrator of the whole, she built up the Church of

Satan in the administrative sense. So if my father had not had my mother who was young and naive and really looked up to him when she first met him and admired his talent, his creative abilities, and he was a raconteur, you know, he could talk for hours and hours. And so she didn't mind taking the behind the scenes position of, you know, doing all the work of creating and building up. Okay, so she did the work, because that's curious, because a man like your father, given his temperament, highly entrepreneurial, highly open, highly creative,

but also with that Machiavellian and narcissistic tilt, it isn't obvious at all that he'd be willing to do something like the administrative work that would be necessary to build anything approximating an organization. So your mom did, okay, but you also characterized your mom very briefly, also as narcissistic. Now you said she was also young. How much of an age gap was there?

11, 11 years. Okay. No, no, I'm sorry, 12 years, 12 years. Okay. And how old was she when he met her? 17. Okay, okay, okay. So that explains something right there, right? So he's just about 30 at that point and she's 17. Okay, okay, okay. So that explains something right there. Right, so he's just about 30 at that point and she's 17.

Well, he turned 30 right when they met. He turned 30 right when they met and then a couple months later she turned 18. Right, right. And she was drawn to him because he was magnetic and she, but now you also characterise. Was that the time? Well, she doesn't sound like you exactly, right? Because you said you were dutiful and you were, you know, you were actually striving to be, to aim up and you were trapped in a situation where up looked like what your father was doing from within your family.

But you characterised your mother as narcissistic. So tell me more about her role and her personality. Yes, but she was narcissistic in a different way. She was not, and before I understood more about narcissism and really did some deep studying about all of the different kinds of narcissists and different traits that different ones have. I used to think, in just my own definition, as I used to think of her as a narcissist by proxy, because her narcissistic feed was in being a martyr to the great narcissistic

genius, my father. She was the martyr, so she had no time for me. She, I mean, she was an absentee mother in my life. She passed off her mother duties onto other people, so my grandparents or people in the neighborhood, other church members, my sister. She had absolutely no time for me. And because I was the only child of the both of them, and I was the last child. My sister was born when my father was very young. He was only 21 years old when my sister was born. So she, in her formative years, she knew a very different person than the one I was raised

with. And she actually had probably a more fun early childhood because it was more a normal kid's childhood, you know. I mean, yeah, they had, she always describes it as they had kind of an Adam's family existence, kind of Adam's family home. They were quirky and they had unusual pets like tarantulas and snakes and things like that. But that's not as malignant as inviting psychopaths. Opening your door to the public and letting any walk of life come through when you've

got two young daughters, it's like the irresponsibility factor increased in the ensuing years. And as my sister was a teenager, I was still a small child. So my sister being considerably older than me, and as a teenager, she could pretty much handle herself. She didn't have to be a... Although the strange thing is my mother used to say that I was allowed to participate in the rituals because I was precocious, whatever that means. But I think that was more of a justification in my mother's mind that if she said that I was more resilient and more precocious and more mature in my dealings with people.

Because I actually was, as a child, I was kind of, I don't know, yes, crappy is the only way I can describe it. Because I would talk back at some of the members when they would say I was just being shy or something. I was an introverted child. And I still am an introverted person, I think. My basic baseline is leans towards contemplative activities and pastimes, and I tend to be more thoughtful and think things out. So I'm more introverted in the stereotypical ways. So as a child, you know,

sometimes members would say, oh, she's just shy. She's, she's, you know, she doesn't have the confidence to talk. And I would actually confront them and say, I'm not shy. I have nothing to say to you. Which was true. Right. That's a very different thing. Which was true because I'd see all these people, I'd see all these adults acting like blithering idiots, you know, just drunk and falling all over the place. I'm not saying they were participating in orgies and things like that, but they were

just gross. A lot of them were just the ones that would come to the parties and that would party after the rituals and stuff. It was just gross. So no, I didn't have anything to say to people like that. But to be fair, then there were also other members of the Church of Satan too, who were not like that, who, you know, whether they were creative types or they lived a different lifestyle from that kind of sneaking around behind your spouse's back

kind of, you know, swinger club mentality. There were other people that didn't fall into that category, but they did not tend to stay long, I have to say. They moved on, actually. So I want to dig into this characterization of your mother as martyr, because that was a very, very interesting thing. Well, because I'm, and you characterized that as a different form of narcissism. So there's a bunch of reasons I want to delve into that.

So see, one of the primary forms that female narcissism takes is something like the martyrdom of false compassion, right? And it's... Okay, can I interject something? You absolutely can, yes. It's interesting you say that because in Buddhism, we also, you know, I mean, of course Buddhism teaches compassion. It teaches that compassion should be, you know, the foundation from which all of our

activities spring from. However, there's also very strict teachings about the false understanding of compassion. And in Tibetan Buddhism, it's referred to in the translation as, it's referred to as idiot compassion. Now, idiot compassion is when it's motivated for the wrong reasons. If it's either motivated for personal gain or it's motivated to, you know, create some favorable response for yourself, maybe you want to look better in other people's eyes, you're doing it for some reason that's going to actually buttress your ego. That's idiot compassion, and you have to really be careful not to do that. Okay, so in the story of Adam and Eve, right, it's Eve who precipitates the fall, although

Adam is equally at fault. His role in that particular catastrophe is secondary. But Eve's fundamental, I think Eve's fundamental sin is the idiot compassion that you just described. So, so let me untangle that a bit and you tell me what you think about it, because we're getting at something very fundamental here. Like your father was a showman for the cult of Lucifer, let's say, but you're pointing out very clearly that your mother enabled and abetted that and for her own martyrdom reasons. Absolutely. Okay, so what Eve's basic sin, well, and she also ignored you, which is an interesting

detail, and then also in some ways sacrificed you to the propagation of the cult. Now, Eve's fundamental sin, so you could imagine what the story of Adam and Eve does is it sets up the fundamental patterns of masculinity and femininity and it does that in a very compacted manner. Oh good, I would say according to the Abrahamic paradigm. Yes, yes, yes, definitely. But not according to all paradigm. No, but there's an interesting overlap with what you just described and I'd like to delve

into that. And the reason why is, I just want to interject, the reason why there's an interesting overlap is because in essence, even a church of Satan is Abrahamic. So yes, that would be, because it has to, by sheer definition, how can you have a church of Satan if it isn't in reaction to something that is, you know, it is in essence a sect, an Abrahamic, just yet another offshoot or sect of the Abrahamic religions. Correct. Now I understand, I understand what you're saying.

But still within that framework, within that framework. Yes. And as such, as such, that's what my father was playing with, was flipping the archetype of, okay, if the church says Satan is evil, then we're going to flip it and we're going to say he's good, and then it's just a reversal. It's a role reversal. But within that same paradigm, so I'm only elucidating on why what you're about to describe is under the paradigm of Abrahamic religions, this archetype of, or this example of typical masculine, typical feminine. But I would disagree that

that's the only way of defining masculine and feminine because, to my understanding, in a more broad sense, there is more of a spectrum. So you can have malignant feminine behavior, and you can have heroic feminine behavior. You can have malignant masculine behavior and heroic masculine behavior. And so that's more like a grid or a spectrum. It's not just this or that. Now with that understanding, because I just wanted to clarify that, now present what you were going to say in terms of the relationship between my parents and the Adam and Eve. Yeah, well, there's no, like, there's nothing in what you said that that strikes me as like

What would you say that would motivate any contention on my part? I think the idea of malignant and positive masculine and feminine that's Yes, so let's concentrate on the malignant element of the feminine to begin with because you brought up this issue of idiot compassion And and it's not just idiot compassion It's it's something worse you, and this is also partly how it's portrayed in the story of Adam and Eve, because what Eve essentially does is proclaim her ability to take formulation of the moral order to herself, and then to clutch the serpent itself to her breast. So what she's doing is proclaiming to herself and the world that her compassion is so complete and God-like that she can even hearken to the voice of the serpent and bring

that into the family circle. Right? And that's, now you point to the idiot. So that's the ego. That's the ego believing, I'm above all this, I can handle it. Right. Yeah, and a lot of women have this attitude. But that's a false confidence. Yeah, 100%. And it has cataclysmic consequences. But it's very interesting to delineate that issue of martyrdom out because you characterized

your mother to begin with that way. And so, I want to delve into that because I want to know from your perspective what benefit that martyrdom to the cause Conferred upon your mother and why do you and what now you also said she was very young when she got tangled up in this And so but she was also attracted to your father, right? I mean there was some reason that she invited him into and was and was open to his seductions. Let's say, okay So what what do you think your mother gained from this? Well, it's exciting for a young teenage.

Okay, exciting. See, he was a musician. He was a musician. He played the organ at various civic events in San Francisco, but also at certain nightclubs, lounges, and bars. So in those days, being an organist was sort of the equivalent of being a DJ today. I mean, because you would play requests. People would, you know, drop a buck in your fishbowl that's sitting on the organ and they'd request something. And so it was sort of like being a human jukebox or like a DJ or something.

So that was kind of an exciting thing for a teenager who was living actually not in San, she was living not in San Francisco, but in a suburb of San Francisco. So to a teenage girl, it seems like, oh, I want to gravitate to the bright lights and city of San Francisco, the big city, because I'm just in Pacifica and that's kind of a dirt bowl, you know, and I want to get out and I want to, I want to experience some excitement and he seemed to her like, you know, Capable of delivering. Yes.

Yeah. Okay. And so, and what was her upbringing like? Was she, was she, what kind of background did she come from? She was working class. She was from a working class family, blue collar working class family. Her natural father actually died, she never knew her natural father. He died in Alaska jail, an Alaskan jail of liver failure because he was an Irish alcoholic

and he just drank himself to death by the age of 36. So she never knew him and her mother, I guess, to protect her from that realization. This is kind of what I'm about to say is kind of the germ of how family lies get promulgated and propagated and take on momentum. And then once you realize that that, once a child or a parent realizes they can get away with that, then they just make up many more lies. This is why I often sort of jokingly say that I was born into a virtual of lies. A web of lies. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because I didn't know. I didn't know so much. I didn't know so much. So, the first

lie was that my grandmother, my Swedish grandmother, didn't, maybe to protect her daughter because her daughter was born, in those days they used to say it was a reconciliation baby. Apparently the father would go away and come back and go away and come back and so it was at a period of temporary reconciliation that my grandmother got part about my mother because she was the product of this somebody that my grandmother eventually had to divorce. But he died, actually.

He died before she even divorced him. I think that's how it happened. So then my grandmother, Swedes are very, Swedish women are really strong women, and they're very responsible women, and they have a Lutheran work ethic. And this was something that was passed down to my mother, this Lutheran work ethic. But to make a long story short, my grandmother had these two young daughters and she moved from Chicago to San Francisco. Because she thought there would be better opportunities for work in San Francisco, she

got herself a job at the phone company and she was a single mother in the 40s raising two little girls on her own. And it was at the phone company that she met her next husband, who wound up being her husband for life. So, at the phone company, he was a delivery person. I think he delivered bottled water, actually. He was a teamster. He was totally blue collar, hard working teamster, worked 12-hour days, and really solid, salt of the earth kind of guy, liked baseball. But he was second generation Hungarian, so

he was really, really very keen on being all American, you know, baseball, hot dogs, everything. And so, my grandmother remarried, and then my mother knew that this was her stepfather. She knew that this wasn't her natural father, but she always really loved him. And so, it was a good relationship in that way, but in the back of her mind, she always knew that she had no idea who or she didn't know anything about her natural father. So that left some kind of like a hole in her psyche, which was easily filled then by my father. Right, right.

Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so let's go into that martyrdom element. Okay, so now you've set up the background for the motivation for your mother and perhaps described her, the origins of her susceptibility to the more showy sort of carnival character, musician, right, and center of attention that was your father. Okay, but now let's go into what she gained from this because again, you characterized it as a kind of narcissism of martyrdom.

And so tell me how you saw that in your mother and how you figured out that that was going on. Okay, the way I saw it was because of the dynamics between her and her mother, I always had the impression, and it was stated explicitly to me by my mother, that she always felt that her mother really didn't like her very much. One of my mother's classic things was to tell her, like, if anything ever bothered me or hurt my feelings, her mantra was toughen up, Zena, things are tough all over. At least I don't beat you like my mother did. Because she would always tell me that her mother would beat her so hard with, in those

days, a brush, a hand brush was bigger. They had big ivory brushes that, you know, could be used as a weapon, actually. And she used to tell me that her mother would, you know, spank her and beat her with a hairbrush until it broke. And so, she always held that over my head, like I'm being so... She believed that by not beating me, she was actually indulging me. But in fact, she was neglecting me. She was just leaving me to my own resources and not giving me any structure or no. And the strange thing, which I didn't understand when I was growing up, was in a sense, she

was raising me as a single mother, but I was not aware of that because I did not know that my parents were not married. They lied to me about that. I always thought that they were husband and wife. And we lived in separate parts of the house. My mother and I and my sister, we lived on the top floor. My father had his own apartment in the basement. So we lived in a sense, like two floors apart. It would be like if you divided your house into separate apartments or something. So to get back to, what was your initial question? Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin,

Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin, Martin What did she gain from this? So I believe that the advantage to her was she always wanted her mother and her stepfather, she always wanted to have their love and their approval. I think she wanted that in her mother's eyes that she would be regarded as someone important.

And by aligning herself with this kind of flamboyant, entertainer man, and the weird thing was, was even as the Church of Satan was developing, she concealed so much from her mother about what was going on. And they didn't, for example, her parents weren't allowed to visit our home unless it was really organized and planned. There was no just dropping by. None of the family members just dropped by. That just wasn't allowed. wasn't allowed. And so, even as the Church of Satan was developing and there were, you know, like I said, my father had different factions of the Church of Satan where he had his celebrity friends and his, you know, so-called important people that he fraternized with

that were, he considered his friends, but not necessarily members of the Church of Satan, although they might have been honorary members or just kind of de facto members. But they were not the people who chose to pay for a card-carrying membership, you know. So those people, I think she really hoped that she, from her own mother, that she would get some sort of respect. Respect. I mean, respect is a common motivation in narcissism that people feel like they aren't appreciated enough, they want respect, they want to… Is it respect, do you think, or attention? They want validation.

Is it respect or attention? There's a difference. Definitely attention, but I don't think she wants, in her case, with the dynamics between her and her mother, I don't think it was attention. I just think she wanted finally for her mother to think that she was worth worthy. Yeah, okay, got it. Well, that makes sense. Well, if her mother was born about her initial validity because she was the product of a

sexual union that was ambiguous in its fundamental nature, then you could imagine that that dynamic would play out in the background for your mother, like constantly, well, possibly throughout her life. And so, this- Definitely. And even when she tried like to get close to her mother, I mean, she did eventually get close to her mother in her senior years. But I can say that I even felt the fallout and the sort of chain reaction of my grandmother's

weird attitude about my mother and probably of my mother's choices in life because I don't think even though they tolerated my father, I don't think they were thrilled about her choice in marrying him, although they tolerated him. And yeah, when he could come to the holiday dinner with stories about his friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., oh, my grandfather loved that because he liked those kinds of entertainers and things, but it was sort of superficial. It was rather superficial. So, but I felt myself, I felt from my grandmother, a kind of judgmental attitude about me. Like, because I was the product, I was the product of my mother, you know.

Right, right, right. So whatever ambiguous feelings she had about her own daughter, it then continued on to me as well. Right, right. Okay, so let's go into the 80s now, and when you really decided to take up the mantle. Now, you've laid the groundwork for that. You said that you were a dutiful person. You said that it was in your father's interest and your mother's too, to have someone who was innocent and actually aiming up and a believer in the moral propriety of the enterprise

defend them. And you happen to be, as far as I can tell, you happen to be the choice for that role. And so you played the role of high priestess for how many years? Five. Five years. Five years. And so you played the role of high priestess for how many years? Five. Five years. Okay. So tell me what that meant for you. Like there's the priestess element and then there's the family spokesperson element. And then there's the next element would be what the consequences were for you of playing that role, let's say. And then also your disillusionment and movement onward to a different way of conceptualizing the world.

So let's start with, well, let's start with what you actually did. Like what did it mean to have that role for five years? That's what I had to figure out. Because it just happened suddenly. I had to figure out what does it mean. Because in my mind, my mother was the high priestess, but she had left. So, there was a vacancy. And occasionally, actually, my sister too, served in that role when she was lecturing, or my father dispatched her to Amsterdam to be sort of the spokesperson and the one to oversee and kind of keep an eye on what was going

on in the European Church of Satan. So in that capacity, then my sister also was high priestess in those days in that way, in those capacities. Yeah, but in my mind, my mother was the only high priestess and I had to think, well, because I was a single mother at that time and I was not in a position to, and I was also working in hospitals and law offices. No, I think at that time I was working at UCSF. I was working at UC Davis in environmental health and safety. So I had a full-time schedule on my plate.

Being a single mother, what was most needed was to do interviews because he told me he didn't have anybody. I mean, the Church of Satan was sort of more abundant at that point. There had been a couple of schisms in the 70s and that left my father really in a deep state of very dark depression, really malignant black, dark depression and agoraphobia. And he had locked him, he just sequestered himself into his home and would only go to very select, safe places in public, but he was not doing any interviews anymore. And he did not want to confront these allegations.

His attitude was, he'll just wait till it blows over. But you know, not just me, but everybody thought, well, this isn't anything, this is pretty extreme. This isn't going to blow over in a week or so. This is snowballing and continuing to get bigger and bigger. So, I had to kind of parachute into the role of high priestess. I had to figure it out on my own as I went along. And then that's when, as I said, I started having realizations of like, well, what does it mean to be a religion and what is religion?

And I started doing a lot of my own self-research and looking into certain things. But aside from that, experience was beginning to open my eyes to certain things. And what had happened was because my mother left my father, you know, I got to back up because you said, well, it was to my mother and father's advantage to have me doing this, but no, not exactly. It was to my father's advantage to have me doing this. My mother, having left, she was trying to pull me out of doing that and she was convincing me. Every time I would talk to her, she was haranguing me about, don't care about anybody else, you

shouldn't be doing this, and like, I need your support, and if you're doing this for him, then how can I expect you to be supporting me during this divorce thing? And so, it was very stressful for me being pulled at all sides. And she was actually telling me, don't care about anyone's, because I was beginning to develop what in Buddhism is called bodhicitta, which is a feeling of a realization that compassion, compassion can't be just for a select few special people. Compassion actually broadens and it actually, you begin to develop and attain a certain level of – it was just like the beginning stages when I began cognizing that, hey, something is really seriously wrong

here because there's innocent people out there that are not even Satanists, that have never even heard of such a thing. They haven't even heard of such a thing called Satanism, and yet, you know, their neighbors are calling them into the FBI and the police and stuff, and it's just ruining people's lives. Was that part of that daycare witch hunt, the satanic death ritual? Absolutely. Oh yeah, that was, right.

The McMartin Preschool case was up to that point the hugest waste of time and money in US history devoted to false allegations. Did you ever read Satan's Silence by any chance? Do you know that book? Satan's Silence? No. Oh well, it was written by a lawyer and a social worker and it's the best account that I've ever read by a large margin of the satanic daycare panic in the 1980s. It's an amazing book, Satan's Silence. Yeah, okay, so you were, okay, so I get the picture more thoroughly

because that was an unbelievably widespread panic, right? And it lasted for quite a while. And so, and you were trying to, okay, so let me ask you a question about that. Now, you know, the dark side of this potentially is that if you're called upon to be a spokesperson in a time like that, there's also a lot of attention drawn to you. And you know, you pointed out that your mother

was certainly willing to play the role of martyr to seek attention and to seek respect. And you know, you said that you were a pretty dutiful person and that you had a job and that this role of spokesperson was dropped on you and that you paid an emotional price because you were torn between your parents. But on retrospect, in retrospect, you've obviously done a lot of thinking about that. Do you believe that there was any contamination of your motivation by a desire for public attention or anything like that because you had the spotlight put on you? That could be easy to perceive, but the simple answer is everything was happening so fast.

I didn't have time to even think about, as everything took off, I didn't have time to even think about, and in fact, even the few times that I did think, oh, well, maybe this could be turned into an advantage, I very quickly learned that no, in fact, it's not an advantage because I had had seven years of theater training, for example, acting, and I wanted to go into the arts. I just wanted to have a career in the arts some way, and I wasn't sure in which field. I hadn't decided yet. But as a single mother, the only vocation, the only, the only branch of the arts that I could afford to pay for myself with my solitary, nobody

was helping me. I had no financial support from my family or certainly not from the father of my son. No, it was all to me, was the only thing I could do was take drama courses and coaching and for example, City College had free tuition in those days. So I had to kind of piece together an education and yeah, I mean, some of my friends at that time that were in my acting classes, they said, well, maybe you can use it to your advantage. But the problem, the problem was it became super clear to me immediately that no, this is done, it's finished.

I can't because of the religiously motivated hysteria that was happening then. If I went to, for example, I had some friends that would set up auditions for me who knew the casting agents. And so they knew, you know, of course in America you're not allowed to state your reason why you're discriminating against someone. But because through either acting coach or friends who knew casting agents or something. So I'd go on an interview, but the casting person would say, we're not going to give any money to the Satanist, are you crazy?

And we can't be associated. We can't be associated with this. It was like being an untouchable. And then that got worse. It was not only professionally that I realized, okay, now I am too branded. I am so much of an identity and I am known too much. I am too branded. I can never just play a role. That's never going to happen. I can't be like a versatile actress that can play a cowgirl one year or not that I want to, but I'm just saying hypothetically that, you know, I couldn't play a role of like a baseball mom or something like that. It's

just not going to happen because word would spread. First of all, my name, my name because at that time not many people had that last name, Lave, and then that would ring alarm bells, and then just physically I was physically known and branded that way. Now the paradox is, paradox is, there were people, the Church of Satan actually began to, meant the membership began to grow because of my being out there. So it created a new upsurge in membership. And my father realizing this, this is kind of a funny detail, my father realizing that I was actually generating more income for him and more membership. I remember he told me once that because I was doing such a good job representing him

and that there were new members coming in, that he was going to, that he would actually pay me, I think, 25% of all new memberships that come through that actually mention that they've seen me and wrote to join. So, which is funny is he did that for the first three, three memberships. So I got like at that time, I got $75 because at that time memberships were $100 and so I got $25 for three and then it never happened again. Never happened again. Oh yeah, so that was one of those pieces of information.

Yeah, yeah. It was a gesture that was to dangle the carrot and make me think, oh well, maybe, but that dropped out. And not that I was doing it for the money, but for the first time in my life, I thought, oh, my father's actually doing something for me, to help me, and he's actually acknowledging my contribution to what I'm doing for his organization, but it didn't last. It didn't last. And then that was that, and you asked me something else about … Well, I …

Oh yeah, so here, I want to clarify. Yeah. Because of the new upsurge of membership. Here again, my father would cherry pick the people that he felt like, well, these people are in a category of movers and shakers, you know, they're kind of like in the new punk scene. And, you know, he was an old fart at that point. So he thought, well, this'll, you know, maybe they'll boost my ratings with the, you know, with the cool kids. And so there was a new upsurge in the membership of what he would call the rubes.

But then there was also a new upsurge in what he cherry picked as his inner circle. And that was of these new kind of hipster, kind of edgy, punky or whatever. I wouldn't even know how to describe them by today's standards. But the interesting thing is they always claim, well, she just didn't know how to use it to her advantage. And what they mean by that, do you know what they mean by that? No, please, please elucidate. What they mean by that is I just wasn't Machiavellian enough.

I just wasn't mercenary enough. Right, right, so that's a failing. Yeah, I should have been more black-hearted. I should have been just more misanthropic. I should have just been more, just plow over everybody and just create my own. Right, right. Well, you had the opportunity there to do that, apparently, you know, because you were driving membership.

You could have definitely capitalized on that. Not only did I have the opportunity to do that, I realized the power in that, but as I said, everything was happening so fast. I was so swept up in... It was just extremely, it was an extremely chaotic time in my life and for the country that was experiencing that particular satanic panic phenomenon. However, then fast forward many, many years later, like about 15 or 20, I can't remember when this happened, but well after I became a Buddhist. And I was meditating, and in Buddhism they call the meditation session itself is the meditation session.

But anything outside of the designated meditation session is referred to post-meditation. Post-meditation can be any time in your ordinary daily routine, but in this case what I'm going to refer to is the immediate post-meditation, because very often in the immediate post-meditation phase is where things come to you, where realization comes to you, where little sparks of – I'm not going to say enlightenment, because enlightenment is a big thing, but like you could say, are little steps in the path to realization and understanding. And knowing, so the realization that I had was true power is knowing what you're capable

of, knowing how dangerous you could be and refraining. Right, right, right. Of course, of course. Refraining, refraining. Because I knew that I could mobilize people and there were times where there were interviews. In fact, the very last interview I did that in my mind I designated, I knew in my mind, this is going to be it. This is going to be the last one because I ended on a good note, but it was not without a battle. Because the last interview I did, which was for a Sunday morning religion show in Los Angeles hosted by Tony Valdez.

He was a very religious, conscientious journalist, unlike many journalists as you know. He actually did have a conscience and he was a really truly kind-hearted person, a very open-minded person. One of his colleagues had done an interview with me like maybe a month or a couple of weeks prior to that. Her name was Christina Gonzalez. One thing that I made very clear was because I'm a huge animal lover. I love animals and in my formative years, because I was not properly socialized, my only companions were animals, cats and dogs and the odd animals

that we had in our home, a capybara, a lion, a mouse and a tarantula, all the crazy strange things we had. Well, living happily together? Somewhat happily, yeah. But I did not have human friends of my own. I was not properly socialized. So I'm still very close to the animal kingdom. So what I told Cristina Gonzalez was I said, I really didn't even want to do any more interviews. I had felt that I knew at that point that I was leaving the Church of Satan.

That was like sometime in March or April. And I had already told my father that I was leaving. And yet, my dutiful nature and I felt responsible and she said she was telling me about a new law that was going to be passed by Los Angeles Animal Control about prosecuting religions that practice animal sacrifice such as Santeria and Satanism and they were bunching it together. But I told her, yeah, but Satanism doesn't practice animal sacrifice. We don't. And that's a fact. We don't. I mean, at least Levain Satanism, and they were bunching it together. But I told her, yeah, but Satanism doesn't practice animal sacrifice. We don't. And that's a fact.

We don't. I mean, at least Levain Satanism. If other Satanists do, that's not what I was representing. I was representing my father's organization. And so she convinced me that I really needed to do this, then, you know, to be a voice against this law that was going to be passed about prosecuting people for animal sacrifice. And I said, yeah, but it's kind of a contentious thing for me because personally, I do not

agree with, you know, it was, the problem was I do not believe animals should be sacrificed and it's in fact other religions that do, even conventional religions that do sacrifice animals or do kill animals in a ritualistic way. So specifically, I'm talking about Abrahamic religions that they eat their meat in a certain way, they do prayers, they do certain ritual. This has to be a specific ritual to slaughter the animal. So anyway, she convinced me to do it, but I did it under the condition. I said the thing that has been disturbing me the most being an animal lover is, you

know, they're talking about animal sacrifice all the time and they always plaster my face side by side with dead animals and this really is beginning to take its toll on my psyche. It actually really is beginning to wear me down in terms of my mental equilibrium because the animals at that point were being raised in a misanthropic household. At that point, animals were more important to me, even than most humans, honestly. So, you know, she promised me that. However, immediately as I watched the news broadcast, they did it. They spliced it and they edited it with a dead cat.

And I got a media... I was really on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Classic whatever the stress term is for a nervous breakdown. Hmm? Well, it sounds like, well, you had enough going on in your life to tilt you towards something like post-traumatic stress disorder, like that's just too much, all of that. I've been diagnosed that in the most complex ways because it wasn't only that that caused me that. It was things in my early life and things subsequently even after.

So yeah, that's been something that I've constantly been working on. So this is in relation to what I was explaining to you about that I know what my power is. I know that I can mobilize people. I know that I can inspire people to action, and I also know that people have often … And you had that opportunity. And I had that opportunity, I made a threat to them. And I said, if you don't make a public retraction by the next news show that the Church of Satan does not condone and does not support animal sacrifice, then I will have 200 angry Satanists on your studio doorstep picketing and I'm going to

contact all the other local news stations to cover it." And I threatened them with that. And they did it. They did the retraction. But this is what I'm getting to, to my last interview, Tony Valdez, who was a really kind hearted person. He reached out to me and he actually said, you know, I feel for you. I see that you're under a lot of pressure and that you've been wrongly accused of things that you have nothing to do with. And he actually said, because he was from the same network, I think it was, honestly,

I can't remember which network it was, but it was local Los Angeles network. And he said, how can I make it up to you? He said, I have some little bits of authority. He says, I can't do a lot, but he said I do have a Sunday morning show. And I thought, well, that's great. That's great. And I accepted it.

And it was actually really nice and it was the first time anyone ever let me speak without being interrupted. And he was thoughtful and kind. And interestingly, even in that very last interview, there was kind of a premonition of things to come because he made the comment, he said something like, I see a lot of in what you're saying that sounds almost like Buddhism.

And I don't know where that came from, but in fact, that was where my path ultimately went. So it's kind of interesting. So the point is, you know, realizing what your power, the true power is knowing that, knowing what you could do and knowing that you can refrain. You can make a choice and you can refrain. And I have chosen this interview we're doing today is an exception to the rule. I don't do any interviews anymore about this topic. Why do you make an exception?

Why do you make an exception? Because I felt that you, well first of all you're an educated person and you're a clinical psychologist, so you're approaching it from a different perspective than just a normal podcaster who wants to get attention or just some other journalist who wants to do it for prurient interest because I get a lot of people who are pro-Satanic that want to interview me, and they want to make it seem like, what was just fun and games, right? Wasn't it just fun? Because all of them wanted to jump on the media bandwagon. And after I left, I left

a void. And then all of these kind of hipster types in the Church of Satan that were my father's new inner circle, well, then they were all eager to just jump on that bandwagon. They wanted the media attention, but what they didn't get, they didn't get it. I didn't do it for the attention. I did it for my father because he was my blood father. Those people were just doing it because they thought, I'm going to cash in on this too, and I'm going to get my face on these mainstream media things. Pete So, let me ask you a closing question, it's a complicated one. So, you've alluded to two things

as the pathway out of the mess that you were in, well, until you left the church in the 80s. in well until you left the church in the 80s. The first thing you talked about was the fact that you increasingly became aware that things weren't as they had been described and that there were things going on in your private life of your family and then in the church itself that were violating the integrity of your conscience and you said that was an incremental process across time. And so I would say that that was the effect of conscience on you accumulating across time. But there's another element too, which we haven't spoken about.

We won't be able to delve into it deeply. There was also something that was attracting you forward. And that was what manifested itself eventually as the realization of this Buddhist path that was an alternative for you to the structure that you had inhabited within this within the family and within the church. And so can you describe the dynamic between your realization that there were nefarious things afoot and also this new path that you saw as

as good as an alternative making itself manifest, because those things were kind of happening in parallel. And so we didn't elaborate much on the Buddhist call, let's say, as a positive way out. Yeah, and that honestly, that would take a lot more description. I know, I know, I know. Well, we may talk about that more on the daily choir side, because we could delve into that more. But I know that I'm asking you to compress a lot, but I would, like it isn't only that you saw that things were wrong with what you were tangled up with, you also started to become aware of a different pathway forward. So what, maybe you could just describe for us what it was that was calling to you, do you think? So I was developing a kind of broader compassion for people that I didn't even know, strangers,

you know, people that I would hear about that were being subjected to accusations that was ruining innocent people's lives, not just our own membership population that was being affected by this. And that was one side. But then I was still, you know, like I said, these things don't just happen like a flip of a switch. They don't happen overnight. So, the irony is because I was raised as a Satanist and because I was raised with the idea of, you

know, revenge, revenge. And if somebody does something to you, I mean, my father wrote it in the Satanic Bible, if someone smite you on one cheek, smash them in the other. Don't turn the other cheek, smash them in the other. You't turn the other cheek. You smash them in the other. You retaliate. You get revenge. And if you teach this to your children, and you're not kind and compassionate to your own children, and you do something that jeopardizes their life again and again, but then one time that is really very precise and very clear, what do you expect? You know, what do you expect? You think that you've taught retaliation, you've taught revenge, you don't expect that that's going to then come your way, too, if that's what your message has been, all through

the development of your child. So, I honestly felt when I left the Church of Satan, anger, hurt. I mean, I went through all the myriad emotions and it took me a very long time to sort out all of my emotions, but my immediate instinct was, I'm going to be a damn worse Satanist than you can even imagine, to my father, you know? And I thought, not only am I going to subvertize with you, and I'm going to look into the origins of all the lies that you've said, and I'm going to look into the origins of all the lies that you've said, and I'm going to look into the origins of even terminology and jargon that you use. And for example, in the Satanic Bible, he's got a list of gods and demons and things that

he considers Satanic, but that's ridiculous because so many of those have nothing to do with Satanism, and it's just his misinterpretation, I would say, of really what he was doing. He was taking a Christian idea of deities such as Kali, the Hindu Kali, or the Egyptian deity of Set. He was taking a Christianized interpretation of these deities and just again inverting it and saying, I'll Satanize it, I'll make it all about Satan then. So then I went on my own journey to look into the origins of these things and what is the

reality of a lot of the things that I was not only raised to believe, but even my own baptism, certain entities that were invoked during my baptism. And my initial thought was, you know, okay, you've done this now to yourself and you deserve everything you're going to get too. Just in the same way that his attitude was, you know, if a sucker lets you do something, then they deserve anything they get. So that was what I was taught. So I carried out his message onto himself. And how I did that, that's a whole other can of worms that I don't have time to get into today.

But ultimately, after I completed a certain ritual that spanned over three consecutive days and then the fourth day, I sealed it. And after I sealed that ritual and when I didn't look at it again, then I actually physically sealed it in a container. And I didn't look at it again, except for only one precise day a year that I had chosen to kind of reinforce it each year on one particular precise date. And that was a ceremony that you used to sever yourself from the Church? Am I understanding that properly?

Or was this in relationship? In fact, no. In fact, my ritual that I severed from the Church was in April of 1990 on Volpergussnacht, which was the anniversary of the founding of the Church of Satan. That was the date that I chose to ritualistically sever myself from the Church of Satan. This what I'm referring to was a malediction. It was actually a curse. On your father and the Church?

Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. And on the name Leve. And so that came many months later. Yes, and on the name Levee. And so that came many months later. I had to first get myself to safety, to a safe place, which was Vienna. So I left the country.

And my intention was to leave permanently, which I have. But interestingly, I moved to a country sight unseen. It was a very stressful time for me because not many people, I mean, I was literally a refugee. But I didn't have the legal status of a refugee, but I was literally seeking refuge away from my insane family, away from my insane country, away from all the insanity that I had been experiencing. And once I got to a safe place, and once I was able to gain some sense of mental equilibrium, then I don't know why I was inspired on this one particular day, except for that it was coming near to Halloween, but I don't think that particularly had anything

to do with it. But yes, so I did this ritual that was, it took three days to complete and the fourth day to seal. So then after that ritual, as I said, then I sealed it away, didn't think about it. I only allowed myself one day a year in which I would reopen it and kind of reinforce it. Because I thought, okay, he always said, if someone smite you on one, she'd smash them on the other. If your father, if your father admits to you over the phone that he actually sent someone after you, well, I didn't send a hitman to him.

I didn't send physical hitman after him. But I did take matters into my own hands magically. How did you reconcile that with, well, I mean, you've gone on a journey down the Buddhist path, which is, by the way, for everyone listening and watching, that is something that I'm going to delve into more on the daily wire side of this interview, so some more autobiographical details and more of the positive development of this journey. I'll close with this, like, how did you reconcile that highly tempted tilt towards vengeance, let's say, that you sealed with that ritual? How did you, or do you now reconcile that with the emphasis on compassion that you've

been developing as a practitioner of Buddhism? Yeah, quite simply because I was not a Buddhist yet. And I was fresh. I was fresh, fresh out of the Church of Satan, but just because you have just freshly stepped out of a mindset, it doesn't mean that that mindset has just miraculously evaporated. So this was in my understanding, this was in keeping with the satanic doctrine. Right, so you were still operating within that framework. Correct.

I had not yet dropped all of the belief in that whole system, because that was too deeply ingrained. So that took a lot more time over the years, over the ensuing years. But in the following couple of years, I actually began to, because I thought, well, okay, maybe I should look into some compromise alternatives, different spiritual paths, whether European paganism or even tantra, Indian Vedic tantra, different spiritual paths that I was exploring and researching and trying out in practice through prayers and rituals and things like that. So I was beginning a path of exploration. And as an outgrowth of the path of exploration, then I began realizing the satanic way of

life is not sustainable. It just is not. It is self-destructive. Self-devoting, yes. In fact, it's self-destructive. R. Self-devoting, yes, yes, yes. J. It's self-destructive. I mean, even if you think, well, I'll just use it for, because the whole point of Satanism is exaltation of the ego, that is, at the core of the doctrine is exaltation of the ego.

So allow your ego to make the decisions. Do what your ego wants and just go with it and you'll feel better, you'll have no guilt, but the problem is the ego is also a false construct and it's also, it will trick you and you'll do things that will then, you know, it will like boomerang back onto you. Yeah, yeah. So, so… Well, we can talk more about that issue of sustainability too, because that's a key realization. Yeah, I mean, just sort of logically, I began realizing, no, this is not a sustainable way

of life, and actually it's so malignant that it erodes your health even. It erodes your physical health. Yeah, got it. Okay, well, for everybody watching and listening, we're going to continue this conversation. I think I'll delve more into the redemptive pathway. I'm very interested in how Zina put herself back together. She made a very astute observation here at the end, you made a very astute observation, which is be, you know, when the Israelites leave the Pharaoh, they're in the desert for three generations.

And the reason for that is, as you pointed out, just because you escaped from something doesn't mean you're now where you should be. Now you're lost, and that might be better than being under the thumb of a tyrant, but you're still lost. Being lost is actually a blessing. Being lost is where you need to be, because you need to get so, you need to be so down, you need to lose everything before you can realize what you really are and what is really there at the core. So being lost can actually be a blessing. Yep, right, got it, got it. We'll delve into that. So being lost can actually be a blessing. Yep, right. Got it.

Got it. We'll delve into that. So for all of you watching and listening, well, thank you first for your time and attention. Thank you very much for being so forthright and for agreeing to do this. We barely scratched the surface, you know, and that's too bad because there's a lot more that could have been explored productively, but we'll do some more of this on the daily wire side and pleasure to meet you and it's quite remarkable really that you're still standing as far as I'm concerned. So you know, congratulations on that.

Oh, I'm more than standing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I want to talk about that too. I'm not only standing, but I'm very … Driving? Joyful. Joyfully, joyfully standing. Well, great, great. That's remarkable. But I'm very … Driving? Joyful. Joyfully, joyfully standing.

Well, great, great. That's remarkable. So, we better, on the daily one, maybe we'll … I'd like to find out how you managed that. So, everybody, if you're interested in continuing, that's where we'll do it. And again, Zena, thank you very much for agreeing to do this today. Well, thank you too. Many blessings to you.