Diane Hegarty was 17 years old she was working as an usherette at her local movie theater called “The Seaview” that was just a block away from the crashing beach and rocky cliffs at the base of what is called today the “Devil’s Slide” stretch of pacific coastal route in northern California.
While out on a date with the theater manager at “Mori's Point,” just a mile or so from the Seaview. Diane recalls a tip being passed to the maître d’ to “let her slide” into the bar despite being underage. Whether he was bringing Diane to meet Anton is unclear - although the theater manager had hired Diane with plans to make the moves on her when she became of-age. That didn’t happen because she met Anton LaVey, and that changed everything…forever.
Anton was playing a Hammond organ and there was an unlit candle sitting on top of it. Diane took the opportunity to meet the man she would later not-marry by striking a match to the candle on her way to the ladies room. She would tell friends that was the night she lit Anton’s fire, friends knowing what Diane meant I’m sure would gleam from hearing this story. Imagine hearing of this meeting with Togare, the family’s pet lion licking your leg, or "tenderizing" you as the couple called it when the lion would lick, particularly Anton's feet at bedtime - which he loved!
Diane’s parents, “grandma Jean & grandpa Charlie” as I knew them were married but understood that Anton and Diane couldn't tie the knot because of Anton's not yet being divorced from Carol. Jean and Charles "Joo" short for Von Joo, were true-blue American traditionalists who did not partake in any form of religion. Grandma Jean was a Swede and Charlie was a Hun and neither of them were the kind to be “taken for a ride” which is a good indicator that Anton was for all intents and purposes a “nice young man” when Diane first brought him home to meet her parents. Anton got on very well with Diane’s family, his new extended family, and when Carol eventually moved out of the house in 1960 is when Anton really started letting his weird out. Almost as though Diane was this great liberator of Anton’s creative mind she would encourage him in his devilry and the outcome, was, well Satanism and the birth of a new American culture.
The first photo was taken by my great-grandparents Jean & Charlie Von Joo who insisted the couple let them get a wedding cake and have an informal celebration at home to inaugurate Diane & Anton’s officially moving in with each other after Carol’s abrupt yet to-be-expected departure. This classic American cake-cutting shot was taken in 1960 Diane would have been about 18 years old if that.
The next photo is of the Master in a classic Anton look – his enormous ring an expression of the ego. For he who holds the whole of the earth on his fingertip shall be the master and creator of the universe.
Lastly a photo of High Priestess & Priest in a lovers pose taken in 1966 – the year the hair came off and the light bulb turned on that became referred to popularly by Satanists as “The Black Flame” or the creative spark of invention of something from a seeming nothing that was the birth of the Satanic Order which is what we are living and experiencing around us – the blossom of a true American culture. A culture was one of the most distinctly absent marks of identity for America, a country which can now boast being the land where a global belief system sprang forth from the sliver of an opening believed to be the gateway of freedom and democracy that is the “American Dream” – in 1969 many events led to the manifestation of the new American Nightmare that we are living in today. A world that is more well equipped and well endowed to enjoy in the pleasures of carnality promoted by the philosophy of the “Satanic” so here’s to Lust the not so divine force that attracts, compels and creates!
The photos I’m showing here today are a tribute to Love, Lust & demons of the flesh!
Hail The Digital Devil
Hail LaVey
Stanton Z. LaVey
Baphomet X