"Anton Szandor LaVey - The Satanic Bible" - читать интересную книгу автора (LaVey Anton Szandor)

In high school LaVey became something of an offbeat child prodigy. Reserving his
most serious studies for outside the school, he delved into music, metaphysics,
and secrets of the occult. At fifteen, he became second oboist in the San
Fransisco Ballet Symphony Orchestra. Bored with high school classes, LaVey
dropped out in his Junior year, left home, and joined the Clyde Beatty Circus as
a cage boy, watering and feeding the lions and tigers. Animal trainer Beatty
noticed that LaVey was comfortable working with the big cats and made him an
assistant trainer.

Possessed since childhood by a passion for the arts, for culture, LaVey was not
content merely with the excitement of training jungle beasts and working with
them in the ring as a fill-in for Beatty. By age ten he had taught himself to
play the piano by ear. This came in handy when the circus calliope player became
drunk before a performance and was unable to go on; LaVey volunteered to replace
him, confident he could handle the unfamiliar organ keyboard well enough to
provide the necessary background music. It turned out he knew more music and
played better than the regular calliopist, so Beatty cashiered the drunk and
installed LaVey at the instrument. He accompanied the "Human Cannonball", Hugo
Zachinni, and the Wallendas' high-wire acts, among others.

When LaVey was eighteen he left the circus and joined a carnival. There he
became assistant to a magician, learned hypnosis, and studied more about the
occult. It was a curious combination. On the one side he was working in an
atmosphere of life at its rawest level - of earthy music; the smell of wild
animals and sawdust; acts in which a second of missed timing meant accident or
death; performances that demanded youth and strength, and shed those who grew
old like last year's clothes; a world of physical excitement that had magical
attractions. On the other side, he was working with magic in the dark side of
the human brain. Perhaps the strange combination influenced the way he began to
view humanity as he played organ for carnival sideshows.

"On Saturday night," LaVey recalled in one of our long talks, "I would see men
lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning
when I was playing organ for tent-show evaneglists at the other end of the
carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives
and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And
the next Saturday night they'd be back at the carnival or some other place of
indulgence. I knew then that the Christian church thrives on hypocrisy, and that
man's carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scourged by any
white-light religion."

Though LaVey did not realize it then, he was on his way toward formulating a
religion that would serve as the antithesis of Christianity and its Judaic
heritage. It was an old religion, older than Christianity or Judaism. But it had
never been formalized, arranged into a body of thought and ritual. That was to
become LaVey's role in twentieth-century civilization.

After LaVey became a married man himself in 1951, at age twenty-one, he
abandoned the wondrous world of the carnival to settle into a career better
suited for homemaking. He had been enrolled as a criminology major at the City