Dear Urban Legends:
Regarding the urban legend that Procter & Gamble donates a portion of its profits to the Church of Satan:
There is no Church of Satan per se for anyone to give funds to. The closest thing is a small group started 25 years ago in San Francisco by Anton LaVey which was actually organized and had that official title. But they never amounted to much except a very entertaining focus for journalists in search of some filler copy. LaVey was a charming, articulate con/PR man.
In its heyday, the Church of Satan had a small eclectic following and afforded LaVey a barely livable income, but LaVey is dead now, probably swapping lies with P.T. Barnum, et al. His old, ramshackled black Victorian in the Richmond District of SF is being fought over by his daughter and last wife, I think. It'll be a race to see if one of them gets it before it's condemned.
Not exactly the "Church" envisioned by the P&G conspiracy folks, which is supposedly receiving bundles of cash from one of the larger corporations in the world, eh?
Dear Reader:
To outward appearances, Anton LaVey's so-called Church of Satan still survives despite his passing — or so its most recent High Priestess, Blanche Barton, has tried hard to convince the world. But, just as you say, it really consists of little more than a handful of oddballs bickering over the remnants of LaVey's estate and is, much as it has always been, more a cult of personality than a valid religious entity. Surely, if the Satanic Church were benefitting from corporate donations from the likes of Procter & Gamble, the famed "Black House" in which LaVey once held his kitschy revels would not have languished for so long in disrepair (the house was demolished in 2002).
The Church's main tenets, such as they are (or were), appear to revolve around egoism and hedonism — basically the obverse of traditional Christian virtues. Piety, charity and self-sacrifice are disdained in LaVey's ethos, which amounts to a kind of social Darwinism. As an atheist, he believed neither in the existence of God, nor of Satan. For LaVey and his followers, "Satanism" was and still is about transgressing accepted social norms, not worshiping a literal "Devil."
LaVey's was never the only Satanic show in town, however. Other self-styled devil-worshippers have challenged the Church's claim to authority over the years. In an article called "The Devil Advocates," Santa Cruz writer Traci Hukill quotes a self-styled former "classical Satanist" who claims he used to hack the heads off horses to absorb the animals' strength and who dismisses LaVey and his followers as mere "pop Satanists." The closer one looks at the phenomenon, the more it seems to reduce down to a few disparate groups of sociopathic weirdos gathered under a collective banner which they believe — or would like the rest of the world to believe - excuses them from social conformity.
So, yes, the Church of Satan is real enough to speak of intelligibly and justify bemused newspaper articles from time to time, but it's hardly the sort of global presence to rationalize the fear and disgust exploited by the Procter & Gamble legend and others of its ilk.
