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Others were not so guiltless. A peak of sulfur-and-brimstone intensity was reached by the Satanists of 17th century France, who were rooted out by a secret court under Louis XIV. A famous case of that day involved a series of demonic rituals commissioned by a mistress of Louis who felt that she was falling out of favor. To regain the monarch's love, she had a corrupt priest say sacrilegious Masses *over her nude body in a subterranean Paris chamber, sacrificing a live child at the height of each Mass.
Despite such malevolent connections, Satan remained a temptingly attractive figure. Milton made him such a hero that next to him Christ looked almost pallid. Faust's fiendish friend, Mephistopheles, is one of literature's great protagonists. It is no new thing for the Rolling Stones to conjure up Sympathy for the Devil. He had it long ago, even from so famous a church father as Origen, who speculated that Satan and his fallen angels would be saved at the end of time.
Even the Enlightenment did not do the Devil in. Just as ancient Romans flocked to mystery cults in the days of religious and political decay, so do more modern men seek out the occult in times of stress or excessive pragmatism. The Victorian period saw one such flowering, the 1920s another. Now an occult revival has come to the space age.
Despite the bewildering variety of fads and fascinations involved in it, there are roughly four main categories, and Lucifer still has his place:
SATANISM. "Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth. If a man smite you on one cheek, SMASH him on the other!" This inverted gospel —from Anton Szandor La Vey's The Satanic Bible—sets the tone for today's leading brand of Satanism, the San Francisco-based Church of Satan. Founded in 1966 by La Vey, a former circus animal trainer, the Church of Satan offers a mirror image of most of the beliefs and ethics of traditional Christianity.
La Vey's church and its branches might well be called the "unitarian" wing of the occult. The members invest themselves with some of the most flamboyant trappings of occultism, but magic for them is mostly psychodrama —or plain old carnival hokum. They invoke Satan not as a supernatural being, but as a symbol of man's self-gratifying ego, which is what they really worship. They look down on those who actually believe in the supernatural, evil or otherwise.
La Vey's church is organized, incorporated and protected under the laws of California. La Vey, 42, stopped giving out membership figures when his followers, who are grouped in local "grottoes," reached a total of 10,000. The most striking thing about the members of the Church of Satan (one of whom is shown on TIME'S cover) is that instead of being exotic, they are almost banal in their normality. Their most insidious contribution to evil is their resolute commitment to man's animal nature, stripped of any spiritual dimension or thought of self-sacrifice. There is no reach, in