Before a single word of Satanic history is spoken, the episode opens with a promo for Evil Dead: Burn and rolls through ads for SNHU, Squarespace, BetterHelp, and Mint Mobile. Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, and Ed Larson introduce themselves with characteristic chaos — Ed's George Clinton shirt stakes a claim to the only cool person in the room, Marcus's Neil Adams Batman tee ranks second, and Henry obliterates both with his 700-page two-volume set of Michael Aquino's Church of Satan history. The hosts warn listeners that the episode will get deeply nerdy, and Henry teases the finale: a Gandalf-based allegory explaining why Anton LaVey, like all old wizards, refused to die the death his growth required.

Picking up from the previous episode, Marcus Parks traces the arc from NBC's TV movie 'Poor Devil' — in which Sammy Davis Jr. played a low-level demon — to Davis's formal induction as the Church of Satan's honorary warlock. Michael Aquino had called the show 'a magnificent commercial for the church,' and Marcus agrees it was genuinely Satanic in its message: focused, justified revenge that hurts only the deserving. Anton LaVey's antenna went up, but he kept his distance out of a pee-shyness about Hollywood. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "Sammy Davis Jr. didn't just flirt with Satanism — he went all in. Within a month of receiving the Church of Satan's letter, he accepted his…" 04:02 Play} Davis, however, accepted the warlock offer within a month, and on the night of his concert — Friday the 13th, at the Circle Star Theater, a name that encodes a pentagram — he received his Baphomet medallion backstage before nearly 4,000 fans. He went out wearing it on his chest and closed with Sammy's near-Satanic anthem, 'I Gotta Be Me.' Nothing in the world could have made Sammy happier.

Henry drops a bombshell from Michael Aquino's Church of Satan history: the published Satanic Bible heavily sanitized the actual ritual, which included a female altar masturbating a consecrated host to completion inside her, the host then dissolved in urine and drunk communally, and LaVey concluding with a solo finish. The hosts riff on the absurdity before Marcus brings it back to the larger point — these rituals were controlled ceremonial theater, and after the mass everyone had coffee and cake. This context makes the Sammy Davis Jr. friendship funnier: Davis was a whiskey-and-cocaine man who had specifically invited two young witches to his first gathering with Anton and Diane, hoping for an orgy with the head freaks. Instead, he got sober intellectual conversation about Satanist theology and a German silent film. Davis's silver cocaine bowl got pushed behind the bar. His nights with the Satanists were, in the end, his most wholesome.

As Anton LaVey finally began to feel like he belonged at Davis's Hollywood parties, his insecurities sabotaged him. When Davis invited both LaVey and his Poor Devil co-star Christopher Lee to a dinner party, LaVey bristled — Lee was another spooky figure, and LaVey wanted to be Sammy's only one. What LaVey didn't know is that Lee was a committed Christian occultist who believed Satanism was folly. When LaVey baited Lee by insisting Bela Lugosi was a superior Dracula to Lee's ten portrayals, Davis had to physically step between them before a fight broke out — a comic image given that the 5'4" Davis was mediating between two men well over 6 feet. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "Sammy Davis Jr. diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, 1989: When Sammy Davis Jr.'s 1989 tribute show aired after his terminal cancer diagn…" 36:26 Play} More damage came from Frank Sinatra, who told Davis to cool it with the Satanists in the late '70s, apparently unaware these were Sammy's most pharmaceutical-free evenings. The friendship faded, and when Davis was diagnosed with terminal cancer and his 1989 tribute was televised, LaVey watched from home. He hadn't spoken to Sammy in a decade, and the chance to break into Hollywood through the greatest entertainer alive had evaporated permanently.

Henry Zebrowski delivers three sponsor reads in his signature unhinged style: Boll & Branch sheets (he felt like 'the luckiest pasta filling in the world' sliding in), Acorns investing app (framed via squirrel metaphor), and IXL educational platform (involving his dog Carmi's chocolate emergencies and his daughter Wendy's objections to American history as taught). Standard ad break, nothing more.

The episode now turns to the inner mechanics of the Church of Satan's most significant schism. The core problem: LaVey was an atheist who used Satan as theatrical branding, while Aquino genuinely believed Satan was a real, contactable deity. Henry notes that Aquino was — accidentally — just reinventing Christianity with worse aesthetics. The breaking point came when money ran short in 1975 and LaVey decided to simply sell initiatory ranks, a move Aquino compared to the Catholic Church selling indulgences. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "Aquino left Church of Satan in 1975 to found Temple of Set: Michael Aquino left the Church of Satan in 1975 after LaVey began selling churc…" 45:15 Play} Aquino played Martin Luther, published his objections, and left, taking a fair number of other disillusioned Satanists with him. His new organization, the Temple of Set, cast the biblical Satan as the ancient Egyptian deity Set, god of storms and desert, the murderer of Osiris. Henry points out that Aquino also penned his foundational text — received, he claimed, through automatic writing like Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law — and named it The Book of Coming Forth by Night, apparently unaware of the avalanche of ejaculate jokes that would follow.

After founding the Temple of Set, Michael Aquino settled into the role of an academic, earning a PhD in political science and taking an adjunct professor post at Golden Gate University, while continuing to publish a scathing history of the Church of Satan that debunked LaVey's many self-invented myths. But his more disturbing parallel obsession was with Nazi occultism. In 1983, on a UN work trip to Europe, Aquino detoured to Wewelsburg Castle — Heinrich Himmler's intended ceremonial HQ for his Aryan knighthood — and performed a ritual in the underground chamber Himmler had designed for his own rites. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "Aquino performed Nazi ritual at Wewelsburg Castle in 1983: Michael Aquino used UN contacts to sneak into Wewelsburg Castle in 1983 and perf…" 57:12 Play} Out of this came the Second Order of the Trapezoid, which Aquino decreed was a chivalric order of occult knights. He denied sympathy for Nazi ideology while simultaneously arguing that Himmler had genuinely summoned an extraordinary psychic force that had merely been 'misdirected.' Henry unpacks the incoherence: you cannot separate a magical tradition from the Holocaust that powered it, full stop. It was not a whoopsie.

The Satanic Panic was a machinery of false accusation built from leading questions posed to small children who wanted to please adults and be rewarded. Investigators treated every wild claim as evidence, and a nationwide Satanic underground that never existed was constructed entirely from the statements of 3-year-olds. Michael Aquino became one of its most prominent victims when 58 children were allegedly abused at the Presidio Army Base daycare in San Francisco, and a 3-year-old daughter of an Army chaplain named Aquino as her abuser. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "In 1987, a 3-year-old accused Michael Aquino of Satanic ritual abuse at a Presidio daycare. He wasn't even in San Francisco when it happene…" 1:03:30 Play} Police raided his San Francisco home, found nothing, and it was eventually proven in court that Aquino was in Washington DC when the alleged abuse occurred. He sued every author who named him as a suspect and won every case. It didn't matter. The accusation followed him for the rest of his life, and Marcus notes with some bleakness that even now, the hosts still receive emails calling Aquino a child molester. He died in 2019 by self-inflicted gunshot, facing terminal cancer.

LaVey's association with neo-Nazis seems at odds with his genuine friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., but Henry reveals a key letter explaining LaVey's motive: he believed neo-Nazis were not serious ideologues and that he could exploit their anti-Christian sentiment to fold them into a broader Satanist coalition alongside Jews. His plan was common-enemy logic: forget the Jews, the real enemy is the Catholic Church. Marcus calls this a violation of the Nazi bar principle — as soon as you let Nazis in, every other Nazi treats your space as safe harbor. ^{[1] — Henry Zebrowski "Fascism uses nostalgia as a weapon. Always." 1:11:56 Play} Henry goes further: LaVey's willingness to associate with anyone was really a symptom of his desperate need to be loved, the same vacuous hole that drove L. Ron Hubbard and every other cult leader. He weaponized this need into the concept of Emotional Crystallization Initiation — surrounding himself with images of his youth, refusing to engage with youth culture — which Henry argues is precisely the mechanism that froze LaVey in place while the world moved on without him. Fascism uses nostalgia as a weapon. Always.

James Madol was raised in upstate New York by an antisemitic mother and found refuge in sci-fi as a teenager, absorbing the heaven-storming scientists and master races of 1930s pulp fiction. He formed the Animist Party in a pulp magazine in 1945 — an admirably ballsy year to launch a fascist movement — before taking over the National Renaissance Party from its elderly founder in 1949. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "In 1963, neo-Nazi James Madol's National Renaissance Party counter-protested CORE civil rights demonstrators outside White Castle restauran…" 1:19:00 Play} Madol's most memorable moment came in 1963's White Castle Plot, in which his NRP showed up to counter-protest civil rights demonstrators from CORE outside Bronx White Castle restaurants. Three of his stormtroopers got beaten up by CORE members, went to the police to report it, and a detective glanced at their truck and saw a .22 revolver, tear gas guns, a crossbow with a steel-tipped arrow, a butcher knife, a switchblade, a straight razor, and an axe all in plain view. Eight members were arrested. When Madol died of cancer in 1979, his mother handed the NRP's entire archives to a loyalist at the funeral; the loyalist hit a concrete abutment on the highway home and was killed instantly, the records blowing away as New York City litter. The NRP ended within days of Madol's death.

The 1970s were, in retrospect, the last fun years of the Church of Satan. As the '80s began, the FBI received a fantastical informant tip claiming LaVey was the go-between in a plot to murder Senator Ted Kennedy involving 8 kilos of hash paid to the Chicago Mafia. The FBI, DEA, and Secret Service set up a blockade at O'Hare Airport and raided the Black House on Halloween 1980. They found a 50-year-old man sitting at home who told them he admired the Kennedys and was morally opposed to drugs — which was, bizarrely, the truth. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "The FBI, Secret Service, and DEA set up a blockade at O'Hare Airport, monitored incoming flights for days, and raided the Black House on Ha…" 1:26:20 Play} More damaging than the raid was the book Michelle Remembers, published that same year, which claimed to document genuine Satanic ritual abuse and was taken extremely seriously. The McMartin Preschool case followed in 1983 — 300 allegations, zero convictions, seven years of trial, possibly the longest in California history. The media largely sided with prosecutors and regularly named the Church of Satan as a main culprit. Anton LaVey, rather than responding, simply retreated further into himself.

The Satanic Panic was the moment Anton LaVey most needed Diane Hegarty, and the moment she finally left him. In 1984, after years of emotional and physical abuse including a headlock that knocked her unconscious, Diane filed a restraining order and walked out. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "Diane Hegarty left LaVey in 1984 after abuse: Diane Hegarty left LaVey in 1984 after years of abuse — without her, LaVey had no one to mana…" 1:32:10 Play} Without Diane, who had been managing virtually every aspect of the Church's operations, LaVey admitted he had no one to handle media. His daughter Zeena — 22 at the time — stepped in as spokesperson on a temporary basis that lasted years. She appeared on Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, and everywhere else, debating Christians and methodically deconstructing the Satanic abuse myth. Her appearances caused Church membership to skyrocket throughout the '80s — the ultimate irony of Christian suppression breeding popularity. By 1990, however, Zeena had also had enough of her father, resigned from the Church, renounced him publicly, and joined Michael Aquino's Temple of Set, where she immediately became a high priestess. The FBI issued a report in 1992 refuting all Satanic abuse conspiracy theories, but Zeena was gone.

By 1984, even as the Church faced its worst public crisis, 54-year-old Anton LaVey was beginning a relationship with 17-year-old Blanche Barton, who had written him a fan letter from college. She would eventually write his official biography — a document Henry notes is stuffed with easily disproved lies. ^{[1] — Marcus Parks "Before any murders, Richard Ramirez politely stopped LaVey on a San Francisco street and asked to talk Satanism. LaVey blew him off. After …" 1:40:40 Play} LaVey's last notable brush with cultural relevance came through serial killer Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who had driven to San Francisco specifically to meet LaVey and politely stopped him in the street to ask for a few minutes of conversation. LaVey brushed him off and told him to write a letter instead. After Ramirez was arrested and branded America's most evil serial killer, LaVey told the press he was 'the nicest, most polite young man you'd ever want to meet' — one last button-press from a man running on fumes. Legal battles over the Church's properties with Diane dragged through the '80s. By 1993 LaVey had lost the Black House; a friend bought it back and let him live out his remaining years there at someone else's allowance. He stopped giving interviews and was hospitalized repeatedly in the final months of his life.

Anton LaVey died October 29, 1997, of respiratory failure — but he had pre-arranged his death certificate to say October 31st, Halloween. Even his death was a performance, and as Marcus puts it, LaVey believed there was never any reason for the truth to get in the way of a good story. ^{[1] — Henry Zebrowski "The first half of your life is spent changing the world. The second half of your life should be spent having the world change you, because …" 1:23:02 Play} Henry then delivers the Gandalf allegory he had promised since the opening: Gandalf the Grey had to die to become Gandalf the White. The first half of a life is for changing the world; the second half should be for letting the world change you in return. LaVey refused that transformation. He crystallized himself in mythology, surrounded himself with his own youth, refused to evolve, and became the thing he never wanted to be — a bitter, nostalgic old man clinging to a past that no longer needed him. He could have defused the Satanic Panic, could have opened the Church to public scrutiny, could have taken responsibility for what he'd built. He did none of it. That, Henry argues, is why old wizards die hard.

Marcus directs listeners to Patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft and the show's Netflix presence before Ed Larson lists three remaining JK Ultra live show dates: June 27th in Grand Rapids, July 17th in Tulsa, and July 18th in Oklahoma City. Henry and Ed plug their new movie show 'Available' on SiriusXM Podcast Plus with video on Patreon every Thursday. Ed teases an October Side Stories Halloween show returning to Humboldt. A cross-promotion plug for Morbid Podcast runs, followed by a LifeLock ad. The episode closes with competitive hailing — after brief deliberation, the entire group lands on Sammy Davis Jr. as the episode's most worthy recipient of a hail. Hail Sammy.