Satanism: Fear, Manipulation, & Suffering | Zeena Schreck | EP 471

I think she wanted that in her mother's eyes that she would be regarded as someone important you know like I said my father had different factions of the Church of Satan where he had his celebrity friends and his Pro you know import so-called important people that he fraternized with that were he considered his friends and by aligning herself with this kind of flamboyant Entertainer man I think she really hoped that she from her own mother that she would get some sort of [Music] respect hello everybody today I'm speaking with Zena Shrek whose original name was

LA and who is the daughter of Anton L 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 uh very intelligent man very charismatic very creative uh very Macallan Psychopathic manipulative uh a Carne Barker an admirer of PT 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 and gullible uh that's the Eternal self-justification of the carne 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 defend him and took on the mantle of High Priestess of the satanic church for 5

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 own um 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 uh well who better to guide us through that absolute bloody catastrophic mess than the daughter of the Prime saintness from the 1960s and the 1970s join us Zena thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me and everyone today uh I guess I'm I'm curious you've had a very strange life and uh

I I want to describe that I guess I'm curious to First for myself before we delve into any of the details what what do you think we could accomplish with this conversation what's what's the utility of the conversation as far as you're concerned oh well that's a good question well it's also a big question uh I suppose in the bigger picture uh since I I don't normally break apart bits of my past to discuss it only comes up anecdotally in relation to where I am today I always prefer to live in the present um that's

in accordance with my Buddhist practices um but if I were to think of an overall uh accomplishment of what we get across today I think it might be to reassure those who might be watching who live in difficult situations uh or difficult families or really dysfunctional uh conditions life that uh they should not give up hope and that there is a way out and to always remember that everything is impermanent if we practice patience and diligence in trying to find our own course that is in alignment with who we truly are um I think that

the the only thing I really have to offer because everybody has adversity in their life uh but in my case maybe the only thing I have to offer is that um people who are raised with certain conditioning or certain um you know belief systems that through that they've learned through childhood that they really never had an opportunity to qu question or they 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 who felt that because of their early life conditioning that um that they're just stuck and their 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 uh my life's experiences and and my life story can provide a example amongst many others in in this world and in history um of the fact that if you have strength of character if you have a greater Vision if you have um you know 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 a 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 proximately with regard to who it is that you have in your family of birth and your parents and their they have their individ in individual idiosyncrasies and um talents and then they are also exemplars of

the much broader culture now your father was a very famous man an extraordinarily controversial person you know I was reading the Satanic rituals this morning and back you know I'm old enough so I kind of caught the tail end of the Heen itic 60s you know I'm really a kid of the 70s and the 70s was where the 60s went to die so I always say that the 70s are The Hangover of the 60s yeah that's exactly right the yeah the drunken hangover it was a really ugly hangover yeah that's for sure that's for sure

it it really was and uh you know when I was 18 or 19 I spent a fair bit of time investigating Alister 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 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 Marquee desad for the French Enlightenment and these aren't the sorts of things that people like to delve into uh 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 60s or the early' 70s and the late 60s for quite a long time so you were right in the middle of this and so what

what you're 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 and and let you tell your story so let 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 uh my father was Anton l so he was the founder of the Church of Satan which uh coincided with being the founder of modern

day Satanism uh as a coherent kind of organizational uh openly public Organization for for satanists not that Satanism didn't exist before but it was always um you know in secret or was practiced very differently from the way my father practiced it um uh let me back up and clarify something when you were discussing saying about the Hedonism of the 60s and um 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 hippie generation and as such they they were like mostly comprised of the members were most ly uh people who were young in the post-war generation of the 50s so so in so in a strange way um you could consider that the Church of Satan always considered itself the counterculture to the counterculture because we were um my father my father was really very anti- hippie and um so this is where it gets complicated because it doesn't fit into it doesn't fit into the stereotypical idea one has of Satanism in in in the occult millu

um so it's a little bit complicated because my father was an anti occultist actually and he was really much more of a performer and a showman and um very mellian of course uh in in the formation of of the church in the way that he did it um so 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 that that pretty much summed up a lot a large percentage of the membership and they were part you know they were very much a part of the establishment but in the sense that you know they were professionals um and that's they would go to Church of Satan events to sort of live up whether it was uh to meet

people that they'd have Liaisons with or Affairs or what you know whatever it was really uh 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 um but it 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 um

see my father's attitude was more like um he was more like PT Barnum who was an inspiration to him it's like a sucker is born every minute and and it's perfectly logical and and to take advantage of people that want to be taken advantage of um as long as long as everybody's enjoying themselves and um nobody complains then um you know then but but 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 um I

have to say something that I've never said publicly before either is my teenage years I dated a policeman who was a friend of my father's um who was just part of the patrol that was always in coming in and out of our house because we needed protection from vandalism and from uh attacks on on the house and threats and uh so so he 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 a um more of like a doing some sort

of like a social experiment in a way of of providing that if if you created a a Doctrine and a religion that was based on people's base uh impulses and base desires that maybe you could take take away the stigma of of people exercising those beas desires but the problem with that is it was entirely mixed with a lot of neurosis from his own side I mean it was it was very you could say um postmodern in his way of of uh approaching Satanism and and the symbolism of Satan it really doesn't hold up to

scrutiny and academic study things like that so and certainly it doesn't hold up it certainly doesn't hold up in terms of what constitutes a real religion it's not a real religion it's just more like um more like uh you know a private club basically however this but however I would say that I I was raised with the understanding that it was a religion and I took that very seriously and then much later in life during the 80s when there was the satanic panic and then I felt that it was my religion that was being under

attack but more importantly 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 was not you know that he was not responsible for and yet he was utterly incapable of defending himself utterly unwilling to defend himself that you know what I did for that organization was really for my father it wasn't it wasn't like and and then subsequently what grew out of that was a sense of responsibility like I felt like okay somebody needs to just uh show up and show

that these people are real people um that they're not ethereal things that you can just hurl accusations at and um because I knew from experience that the media likes to grab on to Boogeyman and and make something that is going to inflame and and uh get people very riled up and uh 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 that was happening but um but

more importantly I I thought that uh they were they were imagining that well this isn't going to hurt anybody because there isn't really anything as such as Satanism anyway so 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 to say this is you know a real person whose life you're affecting and because I felt like I had to protect my father so what I did what I did was out of necessity and out

of love for my father um and 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 uh love for a father and um and then yet at the same time uh as all that was going on because I'm jumping forward to the 80s now with the satanic Panic per perod as all of that was going on U my parents were they weren't 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 uh tension between my two parents and 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 uh draw and quarter me saying you know you have to support me no you have to support me and so there was a lot happening in my life at that time in in combination with what was happening in

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described the What's 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 Maia valan 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 uh you deserve everything you have coming to you right well and you know it's a it's a very strange thing

so let me let me reflect on that in in a 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 interv Ving variable here buddy um 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 now the reason I'm bringing that up is because the constant refrain of the showman Carnival Barker is and you see this parody for example or explored in Tom weight's 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 the problem with that is that the Maia Val 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 facade of moral virtue that's what the Marxist claic 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 uh 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 that's that 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 uh went to bat for both of my parents and all of my upbring

even though they never came to to school to defend me when I was being bullied and picked on I just had to learn how to fight myself but um yes I I always uh felt uh 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 uh yeah I mean obviously I looked up to him as the you know Jehovah God kind of archetype except in Satan form and um 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 um and they treat him in the same way um and uh so so it is not really that I was such a rebellious kid I was a very obedient beautiful daughter and I you know there was only even though I was left to my own uh left on my own quite a lot growing up my um I mean my mother and both of them made it clear that that there are only certain rules which is don't do anything that is going to

drag us into a negative light which I 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 that was something that you know although they were uh pretty uh 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 and by their um by things

that my father would say about really being very anti-drug it didn't take a a genius to know that he would not have been happy if I had gone down that route so I was constantly um you know keeping myself in check and being sure that I lived up to what his what his standards were which was really idiosyncratic obviously so so 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 and I and I was very rebellious against other authority figures like in school or out in out in the world um 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 um and I and I continued to feel that way until the split with my father and even and I would even characterize when I uh severed ties with my father not as a Act of rebellion but just as simply Severance as putting an end that was

the end forever so that wasn't 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 a clean sance and I never went back and I never it was not even Reb reion it was

just I'm done you've pushed me too far and I can't even uhhuh yeah okay so 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 um 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 at least on the drug side and so those are very difficult things to bring together right so you have this MCU valan 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 and he's a celebrator of what's unacceptable and yet there's an element of him too that's Al aligned more with the law and order types and so and then you also brought into that your sense yep go ahead no finish your thought I'll try well you also brought into there something else

that's interesting which was you know you were a dutiful person and you're a 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 anass unit now you know that is a trick that maav ellian 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 prox very aware of that yeah to prize loyalty Above All Else and so 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 how 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 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 believed

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 leadup there's and 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 stupid so but I've always tried to see actually the good in people even reprehensive um I've known a lot of you people who by any normal uh standards of society would think you would think that these people are Beyond The Pale they're totally Psychopathic and and horrible and you know I mean that's that's a a matter of uh psychological analysis that's not for me to say what their diagnosis are I'm just saying that by normal standards they would be seen that way um and yet because I've known such people in perfectly normal

I I wouldn't say perfectly because nothing about my life has been perfectly normal but I mean I've I've known them as in the same way that I'm talking to you now just talking normally and um so I could always see uh yeah I mean I saw the problems in in such people including my father um but in the case of him in particular uh that so that was a gradual process but but because I would always say to him what's the party line what do you want me to say I I was a a mouthpiece

for him but at the same time because he would just say like he was so out of touch with reality would just say crazy things like you know talk about celebrities and that's all he cared about was that people saw him in and entertaining and exciting and kind of cocktail party conversation kind of way he really had no interest or concern about about you know the phenomena that was happening that that were happening in the country at that time with innocent people being uh accused of horrible things it that didn't interest him at all so

so what happened with me is um you know I I would begin uh kind of having to either either I would have to uh 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 Min and things like and I would say you know but but you know these people are being accused of being members that aren't even members of the Church of St and things things like this and so anyway what I had to do because there was a lot

of cogn cognitive dissidence happening um what I had to do is be his mouthpiece and yet uh 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 and it was never about me it was always and I always held you know held him up as the uh you know this is I'm here on behalf of um 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 um people in the public would just say oh do you know that it would be horribly embarrassing but they' 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 in a bubble in my family so I just accepted and this is the best way for melians who are narcissistic is to get

people to be very credible Defenders of them is is is if you if you can uh 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 you know how can I 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 so the the disillusionment happened gradually it wasn't like overnight and then of course like all 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 um s and I had been endangering my own life showing up in studios where there would be huge hordes of you know Christian evangelists that really want to take a baseball bat to my head and you know kill me um and I have lots of anecdotal stories about that too how that's that's a reality um and and then uh so so what had happened was uh 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 um and it was going to be a public performance and uh there had the the venue but also the police and the sheriff's department in Los Angeles had been getting a lot of um threats and a lot of warnings that if it was going to go on you know something really terrible would happen and um 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 uh

just tell people Richard Ramirez was a serial killer a Serial murderer in Los Angeles in the 80s um who self-identified as a Satanist um and he was a follower of my fathers and uh he somebody that uh you know the present day Church of Satan wants to pretend was there was no connection to but but here's the thing as I was beginning to represent the Church of Satan on a broader uh level on a broader 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 who is drawn to that religion I mean there are Christian murderers too but each Christian denomination can't just uh close shop and say well you can't join because if you are a true religion you can't you can't uh have that kind of selectivity religion is something bigger religion isn't a private club right so then that brought to mind uh philosophical questions like uh philosophical questions like well what is the meaning of what what purpose does a religion serve actually then to the community and

if we are supposed to be this kind of anti-religion or a counter religion you what purpose does that serve and and to who and so so it's just a religion of Anton L's personal friends well then that's not a religion right so or but he had different tears 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 uh yeah mauell and and also Rasputin you know the the Russian monk

Rasputin he was also very influenced by him so 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 um you know that he could have some sort of influence over them in some way in in their decision-making things like that but then he had the Ley the Ley of the Church of Satan which of course because he was so in his youth he was very influenced by the carnival Cary Carney life you know so the

Ley is what we always refer to as the Rubes those were the paying customers the Ley were um to quote my father he would say they're the stuffing in the mattress um you know they're they're what pay the bills starting a business can be tough but thanks to Shopify running your online storefront is easier than ever Shopify is the global Commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is here to help

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control and take your business to the next level sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com jbp all lowercase go to shopify.com jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in that's shopify.com jbp right right so that Carnival that Carnival Association is extremely interesting so there's a I'm a real uh what would you call afficionado of the early Disney classic animated movies and I've spent a lot of time for example lecturing about it walking through the 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 is 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 he gets picked up by The Coachman fun this this Italian character who's a traveling Carney and he's put on the stage as a puppet right and the 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 uh what would you call the trappings of the real thing not to do any of the work exactly it's the it's a

Persona and there's not well and you said you know you you're 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 accus ations that were coming your family's way his insistence constantly was to play up his association with highle celebrities right and to become so I mean so so the the actor issue is it it's a continuation of the great game idea so you say well there's a soccer born every minute it's

perfectly reasonable and even right to pray 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 with the carnival surround that that really becomes tangible because a carnival is all about taking a break from

the duties and responsibilities of life and celebrating the orgastic and the odd and the lustful and the base and and 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 um it's very very or in movies that use the Trope let's say of the serial killer is often Terri terrible things are going on behind the scenes in a carnival right it's a it's a place of

dark magic and so your father obviously was part of that world and and is it safe to say that he believed that it was all a great show and that he was he was staging a the okay yeah here's the thing is I believe that in the beginning he really believed he really believed that he would I think that he really believed that so-called normal society straight societ you know normal uh 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 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 uh but not everybody thinks well then I'm going to take revenge and I'm going to do and I'm going to I'm going to flip the script and I'm going to flip the script and I'm going to uh do it I'm going to do one up on that and so but I think in the beginning I think in the beginning

uh 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 person ality and she had her own uh con you know uh makeup from her past and her family and things like that so um 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 and setting yeah she was his PR agent she was the administrator of

the whole she built up the Church of Satan in the administrative sense um so if my father had not had my mother who was young and naive and really uh looked up to him when she first met him and admired his uh Talent his creative uh abilities and and uh he was a r onour you know he could talk for hours and hours and um so she she didn't mind taking the behind the scenes position of um you know doing all the work of creating and building up okay so she did the because that's curious

he because a man like your father given his temperament highly entrepreneurial highly open highly creative but also H with that MCU valion 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 narcissist istic 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 well he turned 30 right when they met he turned 30 right when they met and then couple months later she turned 18 right right and she was drawn to him because he was magnetic and she but now you also characterize 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 characterized 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 and before I understood more about narcissism and really did some deep studying about all the different kinds of narcissists and different traits that different ones have I used to think in in just my own definition is I used to think of her as a narcissist by proxy because her

narcissistic feed was in being a martyr to the great narcissistic my father she was the Martyr so she had no time for me she I mean she was an absentee mother in my life um she passed off her mother duties onto other people so my grandparents or people in the neighborhood other church members my sister um she had absolutely no time for me um and and because I was the only child of the both of them and I was the last child so my 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 uh and she actually had probably a more fun Early Childhood because it was more a normal kids childhood you know I mean yeah they had she always describes it as they had kind of an Adams 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 you know any Walk of Life come through and 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 um and as a teenager she could pretty much handle herself she didn't have to be uh although the strange thing is my my mother used to say that I was allowed to participate in the rituals because I was precocious whatever that means um but I I think that was

more of a justification in my mother's mind that that if she if she said that that I was more resilient and more precocious and more mature in in my uh you know in my dealings with people because I I actually was as a child I I was kind of I don't know yeah Scrappy is the only way I can describe it because like 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

to my my my basic Baseline is uh leans towards contemplative activities and and uh pastimes and and I I tend to be more thoughtful and think things out so I'm more introverted in the typ stereotypical ways so as a child you know sometimes members would say oh she's just shy she's she's uh you know she doesn't have the confidence to talk and I 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 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 and not really I mean I'm not saying they were participating in orgies and things like that but they were just gross you know they just there 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 um and uh 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 um who you know whether they were creative types or they they lived a different lifestyle from that kind of uh 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 um they did not tend to stay long I have to say they they moved on actually so I wanted dig into this characterization of your mother as martyr because that was a very very interesting thing well because I'm and 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 can I interject something you absolutely can yes um 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 should be you know the foundation from which all of our activities spring from however there's also uh very strict teachings about about the false understanding of compassion and

in Tibetan Buddhism it's referred to in the translation is it's referred to as idiot compassion now Idiot compassion is when it's motivated for the wrong reasons it's if it's either motivated for personal gain or it's motivated to you know create uh 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 butress your ego that's idiot compassion and you have to really uh be careful not to do that okay so in 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 eded that and for her own Marty reasons okay so she was an enabler she was a class

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 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 and I would say according to the abrahamic Paradigm yes yes yes yes definitely not according to all Paradigm no but there's an interesting overlap with what you just described and and I'd like to

delve into that and the reason why is be I 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's it has to by uh 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 SE anti abrahamic religions correct I understand I understand what you're saying still 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 if the church says uh 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 um elucidating on why what you're about to describe is under the Paradigm of abrahamic religions this archetype of or this uh example of typical masculine typical feminine but I would disagree that that's the only way of defining ing

masculine feminine because to my understanding uh in a more broad sense there is more of a spectrum so you can have malignant you can have malignant feminine you can have malignant feminine behavior and you can have heroic feminine Behavior you can have malignant ma 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 uh 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 as like uh 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 see 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 Godlike that she can even hearken to the voice of the serpent and clut and bring that into the Family Circle right and that's now you can interject here 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 attitude yeah but that's a false

confidence yeah 100% And it 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 teenage okay excit see he was a musician she he was a musician he played the organ at uh various Civic events in San Francisco but also at certain uh nightclubs lounges and and bars so in those days being an organist uh 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 Oregon and they'd request something

and so it was sort of like being a human jukebox or like a DJ or something so um so that was kind of an exciting thing for a teenager who was living actually not in s she was living not in San Francisco but in a suburb of San Francisco so to 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 um 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 workingclass family Blue Collar workingclass family uh her father her natural father was actually died she never knew her natural father he died in Alaska jail an Alaskan jail of liver 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 her this this is kind of what I'm about to say is kind of The Germ of how family lies get promulgated and yeah and propagate it and and uh and take on momentum and then once you realize that that once once a child or a parent realizes they can get away with that then they then they just make up many more lies and this is this is how why I I often sort of jokingly say that I was born into

a oh absolutely yeah because I didn't know I didn't know so much I didn't know so much so so the first lie was that my grandmother my Swedish grandmother uh didn't maybe to protect her daughter because her daughter was born uh 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 pregnant with my mother and then he went away again so um so so naturally that

set up a kind of psychological uh ambiguity on my grandmother's part about my mother because she was the product of this uh of this uh somebody that that my grandmother didn't have eventually had to divorce um but he died actually he died before she even divorced him I think I think that's how it happened and then um 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's passed down to my mother this Lutheran work ethic but

to make long story short my grandmother um had these two young daughters and she moved from Chicago to San Francisco and um 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 um on her own and it was at the phone company that she met her um her next husband who wound up being her husband for life so uh uh so at the phone company he was a delivery person uh I

think he delivered bottled water actually he was a Teamster he was totally Blue Collar hardworking Teamster worked 12-hour days and U really solid salt of the earth kind of guy um 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 um and uh so so my grandmother remarried and then my mother knew that this was her stepfather he she knew that this wasn't her natural father but she always really loved him and so that was 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 uh so that left some kind of like a hole in her psyche which was easily filled then by my father right got it got it got it okay okay so let's go into that martyrdom element okay so now you've set up the background for of the motivation for your mother and perhaps described her the the origins of her susceptibility to well to the more showy sort of Carnival character

musician right and center of attention that was your father okay but but now let's go into what she gained from this because again you characterized it as a kind of narcissis of narcissism of martyrdom and so tell me tell me how you saw that in your mother and and how you figured out that that was going on okay the way I saw it was uh because of the Dynamics between her and her mother I always had the oppression and it was stated explicitly to me by my mother that she always felt that her mother really

didn't like her very much and that because one of my mother's classic things was to tell like if anything ever bothered me or hurt my feelings is her Mantra was tough up Zena things are tough all over at least I don't beat you like my mother did and because she would always tell me that her mother would beat her so hard with a with in those days a brush you know a handbrush was bigger they had big Ivory brushes that 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 um so she always hel she always held that over my head like I'm being so she 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 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 I 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 two floors apart you know it's a like it would it would be like if you divided your house into separate apartments or something so um so to get back

to what was initial okay Mom what did she gain from this um so I I believe that the advantage for to her was she always wanted her mother and her stepfather she always wanted to have their love and their approval and their their I think 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 um 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 she they didn't for example the her parents weren't allowed to visit our home unless it was really organized and planned and like it was there was no just dropping by nobody just none of none of the family members just dropped by that just wasn't allowed um and so even as the Church of Satan was developing and there were uh you know like I said my father had different factions of the Church of Satan where he had his celebrity friends and his Pro you know import 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 a common motivation in narcissism that people feel like they aren't appreciated enough they want respect they want to uh is it respect do you think or

attention validation H is it respect or attention there's a difference um definitely attention but I I don't think she want 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 or okay got it well that makes well if her mother was toring 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 definitely and and even when she tried like uh to get close to her mother I mean she did eventually get close to her mother in her in her senior years but I can say that I even felt the Fallout and the sort of chain effect chain reaction of my grandmother's uh 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 in marrying

him although they tolerated him and and yeah when he could come to the holiday dinner with stories about his friendship with Sammy Davis Jr then oh my grandfather loved that because you know he liked those kinds of entertainers and things but but 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 so so whatever ambiguous feeling 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 mantle now you've laid the groundwork for that you said that you were a dutiful person you said that your 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 okay so so 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 the next element would be what the consequences were for you of playing that role let's say and then also your disillusionment and move 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 5 years that's what I had

to figure out I because it just happened suddenly I had to figure out what does it because in my mind my mother was the high priestess but she had left so there was a vacancy there wasn't and and occasionally actually my sister too served in that in that role when she was lecturing or um my father dispatched her to Amsterdam to be the um 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 uh Church of Satan so so in that

capacity then my sister also was High Priestess in in like in those days in that way in those capacities um uh yeah but in my mind my mother was the only High Priestess and I had to think well because I I was a single mother at that time and I was not in a position to and I was also wor you know I was working in hospitals and Law Offices no I think at that time I was working at UCSF oh I was working at UC Davis in environmental health and safety so I had full-time

I had a full-time schedule on my on my plate being a single mother uh what was most needed was to do interviews cuz he told me he didn't have anybody I mean the Church of Satan was sort of more abundant at that point um there there had been a of schisms in the 70s and and that left uh my father really in a deep state of very dark depression really malignant black black dark depression and um 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 not he was not doing any any interviews anymore and he did not want to to confront these allegations he 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 this is snowballing and continuing and to get bigger and bigger so um so I had to I had to uh kind of parachute I had to parachute into the role of par you know

paratroop into the role of high priestess and I had to figure it out on my own as I went along and then that's when I as I said I started having realizations of like well what does it mean to be a religion and what is religion I started doing a lot of my own uh self- research and and um looking into certain things but 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 she every time I would talk to her she was hanging me about don't care about anybody else you shouldn't be doing this and you know 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 you know thing and so it was very uh stressful for me being pulled at all sides and she was actually telling me don't care about anyone because I was beginning to develop what in Buddhism is called bti which is a feeling of um a realization that compassion compassion can't be just for a select few special people people compassion actually broadens and it actually uh you begin to to develop and attain a certain level it was 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 Part of That Daycare Witch Hunt the the satanic death ritual the MCM Martin preschool case was up to that point the hugest waste of time and money in in US history devoted to did you ever read Satan Silence by any chance do you know that

book Satan silence no oh well it was written by a lawyer and 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 are T 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 as everything took off I didn't have time to even think about and and and in fact even the few times that I did think oh well maybe this can 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 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 the only uh 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 uh financial support from my family or certainly not from the father of

my son uh no it was all to me was the only thing I could do was take um drama 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 and uh but the problem the problem was it became super clear to me immediately medely that no it this is done it's finished I I can't

because because of the religiously motivated uh hysteria that was happening then if I went to uh for example I had some friends that would set up um auditions for me who knew who knew the casting agents and so so they knew you know of course in America you're not allowed to to state your reason why you're discriminating against someone but but because I because through either um acting coach or or friends who knew casting agents or something so I'd go on an interview but but the 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 um uh you know being an Untouchable and then that got worse it was not only it was not only um the professionally that that I realized okay now I am too branded I am so 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 cow

cowgirl one year or not that I want to but I'm just saying hypothetically that you know I I couldn't play a role of like a baseball mom or something like it's just not going to happen because because word would spread first of all my name my name because not at that time not many people had that last name Le and then it that would um ring alarm ring alarm Bells um and then then just physically I was physically known and branded that way now the now the Paradox is paradox is there were people the Church

of Satan actually began to to the membership began to grow because of my being out there so it created a new upsurge in membership um 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 um 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 uh that he would actually pay me uh I think 25% of all new memberships that

come through that actually mention that they've seen me and wrote to to join so so what's 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 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 you know but then you know that dropped out and

not that I was doing it for the money but I thought for the first time in my life I thought oh my father's actually doing something for me to help me and and he's actually acknowledging my contribution to what I'm doing for his organization but it didn't last it didn't last um and then that was that and you asked me something else about um well so so here I want to clarify yeah because of the new upsurge of membership here again um my father would Cherry Picked the people that he felt like well these people

are in a category of movers and shakers you know they're they're kind of like in the new Punk scene and you know he was an old for at that point so he thought well this will you know maybe they'll boost my ratings with the you know with the cool kids or and so um so there was there was a new upsurge in what and 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 little Inner Circle and that that was of these

new kind of uh you know hipster kind of edgy um Punky or whatever you know just just um I wouldn't even know how to describe them by today's standards but but the interesting thing is they they always claim well well she just didn't know how to use it to her advantage and what they mean by that what do you know what they mean by that no please please elucidate what they mean by that is I just wasn't mailan enough I just wasn't mercenary enough right right so that's a been more I yeah I should have

been more Blackheart I should have been just more misanthropic I should have just been more just plow over everybody and and just create my own create my own well you had the opportunity there to do that apparently you know because you were driving membership you could have you could have definitely capitalized on that not only did I have the opportunity to do that I realized the power in that but I was as I said everything was happening so fast I was so swept up in in it was just extremely it was an extremely chaotic time

in my life and for for the country that was experiencing that 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 um and I was meditating and in Buddhism they call the well really the meditation session itself is the meditation session but anything outside of the designated meditation session is referred to postm meditation postm meditation can be any time in your ordinary daily routine but in this case what I'm going to refer to is the

immediate postm meditation because very often in the immediate postm meditation phase is where things come to you where realization comes to you where little Sparks of I'm not going to say Enlightenment cuz Enlightenment is a big thing but the but like you could say are little steps in the path to realization and understanding and knowing so 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 um in fact the very last interview I did that in my mind I designated I 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 uh a a Sunday morning religion show in Los Angeles hosted by Tony Valdez who was a very he was a very religious conscientious uh journalist unlike many journalists as you know um he actually

did have a conscience and he was a really truly kind-hearted person uh a very open-minded person and um one of his colleagues had done an interview with me like uh maybe a month or a couple of weeks prior to that and um her name was Christina Gonzalez and one thing that I made very clear was because I'm a huge animal lover I love animals and and in my formative years because I I was uh not properly socialized my only companions were animals cats and dogs and and the and the odd animals that we had in

our home a cppy Bea a lion a mouse and a tarantula all the crazy strange living happily together somewhat happily yeah um but I did not have human friends that of my own you know I was not properly socialized so um I'm I'm I'm still very uh close to the Animal Kingdom so what I told Christina Gonzalez was I said I really didn't even want to do any more interviews I 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

um I had already told my father that I was leaving and um and yet um I my beautiful 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 um prosecu religions that practice animal sacrifice such as santoria and Satanism and they were bunching it together but I told her yeah but Satanism doesn't practice animal sacrifice we don't and we that's a fact we don't I mean at least Levan Satanism if other satanists do that's not what I was

representing I was representing my father's organization and so she she convinced me that um I really needed to do this then you know to be a voice against this law that was going going to be passed about Prosecuting people for animal sacrifice and I said yeah but it's 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 even conventional religions that do sacrifice animals uh or do kill

animals in a ritualistic way so um specifically I'm talking about abrahamic religions that that they their meat in a certain way they do prayers they do uh certain ritual this has to be a specific ritual to to slaughter the animal so um so anyway she did she convinced me to do it but 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 sock sacrifice all the time and they always plaster my face side by side with dead

animals and this this really is uh beginning to take its toll on my psyche it actually really is beginning to wear me down uh in terms of my 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 um so you know she promised me that however immediately as I watched the news broadcast cast they did it they spliced it and they eded it with a dead cat and I got a me and I I I

was right really on the verge of a nervous breakdown um classic classic whatever uh whatever the term is for nervous H well it sounds like well you had enough going on in your life to tilt you toward 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 it wasn't only that that caused me that it was things in my early life and things subsequently even after um so yeah that's been something that I've constantly been working on so um this

is in relation to what I was explaining to you about that I know what my power is I know that I can Miz people I know that I can inspire people to action and I also and I had that opportunity I I made a threat to them and I said if you don't make a public retraction by the next news show that that 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 um they did it you know they did the retraction but this is what I'm getting to to my last interview Tony Valdez who was a really kindhearted person um he reached out to me and he um 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 that you have nothing to do with um and he he actually said how because he was from the same network

I think it was uh honestly I can't remember which network it was but it was local Los Angeles Network and he saidh how can I how can I make it up to you he Saidi have some I have some little bits of authority he says I can't do a lot but he said I do I have a Sunday Morning Show and I thought well that's great that's great and 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 uh and he

was thoughtful and kind and interestingly even in that very last interview there was kind of a uh uh premonition of things to come because he made the comment I see 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 um so the the point is you know realizing what you 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 the uh 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 because I felt that you well first of all you're an educated person and you're you're a Psy clinical psychologist so you're approaching it from a different perspective than just a um than just a normal podcaster who wants to get attention or or just some

other uh journalist who wants to do it for puant interest because like I get a lot of I get a lot of people who are pro- satanic that want to interview me and they they want to make it seem like what was just fun in games right wasn't it just fun because all they all all of them wanted to jump on the media bandwagon and after I left I left a void and then all 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 he wasn't you know that those people were just doing it because they they thought I'm going to cash in on this too and I'm going to get my face on on Med on these mainstream media things 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 the the first thing you talked about was the fact that you increasingly become a 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 of foot 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 as a positive way out that honestly that would take a lot more descri know well we may talk about that more wire side e we because we could delve into that more but 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 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 um being subjected to accusations that uh that was ruining innocent people's lives not just our own membership population that was being affected by this 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 so

the irony is uh because I was raised as a Satanist and because I was raised with the idea of um you know Revenge Revenge and if somebody does something to you I mean my my father wrote it in the Satanic Bible uh if someone Smite you on One Cheek smash them in the other don't turn the other cheek you smash them in the other um you retal alate you get revenge and um 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 at one time that is really very precise and very clear what do you expect you know what do you expect do 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 um anger hurt I mean I went through all the Myriad emotions uh and it took me a very long time to uh sort out all

of my emotions but my immediate in stinct was I'm going to be a a damn worse Satanist than you can even imagine to my father you know and um and I thought not only am I going to sever our ties 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 even uh terminology and jargon that you use and for example in the Satanic Bible he's got a list of gods and and demons and things that he considers satanic but but

that's ridiculous because so many of those have nothing to do with Satanism and it's just his his uh misinterpretation I would say of um really what he was doing is he was taking a Christian idea of deities such as uh Ki the Hindu K or the Egyptian deity of set he was taking a christianized interpretation of these deities and just again inverting it and saying I'll satanized 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

uh a lot of the things that I was not only raised to believe but even my own baptism certain uh entities that were invoked during my baptism and um and uh 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 he his attitude was you know if a sucker if if a sucker lets you do something then they deserve anything they get so that was what I was taught so I carried out that his message onto himself and

how I did that that's a whole other uh that's a whole other can of worms that I don't have time to get into today but um but but ultimately after I completed a certain ritual that spanned over three consecutive days and then the fourth day I sealed it um and after I sealed that ritual and then I didn't look at it again um then then I I actually physically sealed it in a contained uh uh in a container and I didn't look at it again uh except for only one precise day a year that I

had chosen to kind of reinforce it each year on one particular precise day and that that was a ceremony that you used to sever yourself from the church is am am I understanding that properly or or was this in relationship in fact No in fact my my ritual that I severed from the church was in April of 90 on vurus no which was the 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 and on on your father and the church yes yes and on the name Le and so um and so U that came many months later I had to first get myself to safety to a safe place which was Vienna uh that's why I left the country um uh and my and my intention was to leave permanently which I have um 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 I

didn't have I didn't have the um 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 then um and once I was able to to gain some sense of mental equilibrium then I um I I I don't know why I was inspired on this one particular day except for that it was coming near to Halloween but I I don't think that particular particularly had anything to do with

it but yes so I I did this uh ritual that was uh 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 one day a year in which I would reopen it and kind of reinforce it um because I thought okay he always said if someone Smite you on one sheet 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 you've gone on a journey down the Buddhist path which is by the way for everyone listening and and watching that is something that I'm going to delve into more um on The Daily wire side of this interview so some more autobiographical details and 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 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 evaporated uh so so this was this was in in my understanding this was in keeping

with the satanic Doctrine right so you were Stiller within that framework correct I had not yet I had not yet dropped all of the belief in that whole system because that's too that was too deeply ingrained so that took a lot more time over the years over the ensuing years but in the following 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 different spiritual paths whether you know European uh paganism or or even Tantra Indian uh viic Tantra um uh

different spiritual paths that I was uh exploring and researching and and trying out in practice through prayers and rituals and things like that so I was I was beginning a path of exploration right and as as an outgrowth of the path of exploration then I began realizing saying the satanic way of life is not sustainable it just is not you know it's not it is self-destruct self-devouring yes yes it's self-destructive I mean even if even if you think well 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 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 it's also uh it will trick you and you'll do things that will then you know uh it will rioch will like Boomerang back onto you so well we can talk more about that issue of sustainability too that's realiz sort of logically logically I began realizing no this

is not a aable way of life and actually it's so malignant that it it eats into it it erodes your health even it erodes your soul your physical health yeah got it okay well um for everybody watching and listening we're going to continue this conversation I think I'll delve more into the Redemptive pathway uh I I'm very interested in how Zena put herself back together she made a very astute observation here at the end you made a very stute 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 that's exactly what we'll talk about can

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 uh there's like we barely scratched the surface you know but I and 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 and uh 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 I'm more than standing yeah yeah yeah yeah well I want to talk about standing but I'm very I'm I'm very thriving joyful joyfully joyfully standing well great great that's remarkable so we better on the daily wi side maybe we'll 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 [Music]