resigned had any concept of or experience with organizational mechanics. Bringing the
membership into the Temple’s functioning would be essential to its future viability and survival,
but that would have to happen later. I would need to do the initial work myself.
The Church of Satan had been a California for-profit corporation with Anton and Diane
LaVey as its sole members. Membership in the Church as a religious affiliation had not carried
with it corporate membership, even at the Priesthood level. Thus, when Anton decided to
corrupt the degree system in 1975, Church members had no legal interest or recourse. The
Church’s for-profit status [as a “business”] had also kept it from qualifying for federal or state
tax-exempt status as a religious institution.
These I would remedy. The Temple of Set would not belong to myself, but collectively to the
Priesthood of Set (III°+) as members of its corporation. And that corporation would be a
California nonprofit corporation organized as a church. Federal and California State tax-exempt
status as a religion would be sought, establishing the Temple’s [and all Setians’] full right to First
Amendment Constitutional recognition and protection.
Thematically I thought the Temple should continue/evolve from the Church, so that it would
include an initiatory degree system, a national [later international] office, and local groups. The
formal Priesthood was clearly to be continued, and the concept of a High Priesthood and a
Council of Nine seemed essential as well. Beyond these very general assumptions, the sheet of
paper was clean.
I had had the benefit of six years’ supervisory work with the Church, and prior to that my
personal involvement with various nonprofit organizations such as the Knights of Dunamis
(Eagle Scout honor society of the Boy Scouts of America) and Alpha Phi Omega Fraternity. I had
been National Commander of the former in 1965 and the University of California, Santa Barbara
Chapter President of the latter in 1967. In both I had worked extensively on their internal design.
A Temple of Set presented several new and unusual challenges and requirements. As
indicated in the Book of Coming Forth by Night, it was essential that it support initiation as a
uniquely individual experience. Thus it was to be an “organization for individuals”, something
of a tension if not outright contradiction. [The ominous metaphor of “herding cats” came to
mind!]
The Church of Satan’s initiatory degree system had worked well enough, particularly as it had
been regularly reworked and refined over the years. But by Temple of Set requirements it was
unacceptably vague, limited in scope, and symbolically obsolete. It had been loosely modeled on
the grade structure of Aleister Crowley’s A.'.A.'., the predecessor most familiar to Anton LaVey. I
went back into the documents of the A.'.A.'. and its own predecessor, the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, to study the rationale behind those grade systems. While both were loosely linked
to the Hebrew Cabalistic “Tree of Life” then fashionable among European occult societies, I saw
threads extending from them through the Church of Satan that were indeed suitable to these
latest, most advanced requirements of the Temple of Set.
The Church had had two participant (Satanist I°, Witch/Warlock II°) and three Priesthood
(Priest/ess of Mendes III°, Magister IV°, Magus V°) degrees. The I° signified only formal
affiliation. The II° represented passage of a fairly simple written test based upon the contents of
the Satanic Bible. The III° and IV° were conferred by Anton LaVey, based in part on a more
extensive written/essay examination and in part on his personal evaluation of the individual.
The V° remained, as of 1975, a designation for Anton’s own initiatory standing as distinct from
- 43 -
his High Priesthood office. The Magister IV° was subdivided into -Caverni IV°-I', -Templi IV°-II',
and -Magnus IV°-III', with the intent that they function administratively similar to bishops,
archbishops, and cardinals once the Church eventually grew to require same. [A detailed
description of the Church’s degree system, and its somewhat confusing dual names, can be found
in Appendix #39 of my Church of Satan.]
I rethought all of this comprehensively.
It did not seem to me that a person could properly claim to be an “initiate” simply by
expressing a desire to become one and paying an affiliation fee. The Temple of Set’s I° must
identify formal affiliation and appreciate the individual’s desire, yet stop short of representing
him as someone actually initiated. Per the guidance of the Book of Coming Forth by Night, I
determined that the I° [as well as all affiliation generally] should be called “Setian”, and should
be regarded as a transitional phase between ordinary existence and initiation. For that reason,
instead of the red I° Baphomet of the Church, the medallion of the Setian I° would be white.
The Witch/Warlock II° of the Church had signified the passage of a basic test. In the prior
organizations, past the “entrance grade”, there had been a long ladder of knowledge-grades to
climb, signifying laborious accumulation of useless/trivial occult obscurata. The most general
prefix for these stages had been “Adept”, and that sounded correct enough providing that the
recipient was indeed adept at being what he was supposed to be, in our case a practitioner of
Black Magic. So our II° would be “Adept”, and it would signify precisely that. The Church’s II°
Baphomet had been white; our medallion was therefore red, the color of Set in ancient Egyptian
imagery.
The Priesthood III° required only a name-change: from “of Mendes” to “of Set”. The former,
within the Church, derived not from any intended Egyptian association but rather from one of
the Devil’s traditional titles as the “Goat of Mendes”.
Things got more complex beyond the III°. In the same sense as in the Church, the Priesthood
of Set was the essential distinction between skilled-individual and deputized-individual, so to
speak. Hence “higher” degrees in the Temple should properly be considered “aspects” or
“enhancements” of the Priesthood.
In the G.'.D.'. and A.'.A.'. (which, as non-religious entities did not have priesthoods per se),
initiation beyond the highest adeptship (Adeptus Exemptus) involved a formal rite of passage
“across the Abyss” [separating individual consciousness from that partaking of God/YHVH]. The
G.'.D.'., indeed, regarded such transition as so profound as to be attainable only by disincarnate
“ascended Masters”. In Crowley’s A.'.A.'. crossing of the Abyss could be done by incarnated
humans (as exemplified in his The Vision and The Voice record), but still denoted an evolution
from human to divine consciousness.
My first premise was that if the Temple of Set’s degree system were to be purely initiatory,
none of its designations should be confused or “dual-hatted” with administrative or
organizational functions. Additionally the threefold subdivision of the Church’s IV° had no
initiatory significance.
Our IV° would retain the title of “Magister/Magistra Templi”, as a “Master (in the sense of a
sage) of the Temple [of Set]”. There was no reference to a Cabalistic “Abyss�
��, and there was no
essential metamorphosis of consciousness, as that has already occurred at the III°. So what does
change at this level of initiation? The Book of Coming Forth by Night had identified an “Æon of
Set” as a unique perspective on existence characteristic of Setian initiation. The Magistry, it
seemed to me, should properly identify those individuals who, beyond their Priesthoods, had
become so aware of, attuned to, and harmonized with the atmosphere of the Æon that its
representation had become their “center of gravity”, their accustomed mode of existence. Yes,
that sounded appropriate - even setting aside for the moment the inconvenience that I had yet to
grapple with what the Æon of Set was all about!
- 44 -
The V° of Magus seemed easier. Anton had been one, I was now one, and because each of us
had started an initiatory organization, yes? In his case possibly, since he had taken on that title
as a symbolic borrow from Crowley; he occasionally used a longer variation, “Satanic Master”.
But here again the Book of Coming Forth by Night went into somewhat more detail concerning
the term, including its context as “Magus of the Æon of Set”. This fulfilled Crowley’s definition of
a Magus as the announcer or formulator of an æon. It also complemented our IV°: A Magus
apprehended a new æon; a Master comprehended it.
I carried over the colors of the III° to V° that I had recommended and Anton approved for the
Church: black, blue, and purple. Black represented the Prince & Powers of Darkness. Blue I had
taken from the robes of history’s most famous ancient sages, the priest-kings of Plato’s Atlantis.
And purple from its royal connotation, and from the Book of the Law’s reference to the Magus’
“purple beyond purple” magical eyesight.
In 1975 I left unaddressed, as had the Church, any state of initiation beyond Magus. The
G.'.D.'. and A.'.A.'. both included an ultimate grade of Ipsissimus, but were equally vague
concerning its characteristics. Evidently someone so thoroughly initiated could hardly be
described at all!
Having conceptualized these degrees, at least so far as was possible a priori in 1975, I turned
to the task of how to properly entitle them to individuals. In the Church all such designations
had been determined personally by Anton LaVey, who was responsible only to his own integrity,
and as was taken for granted to Satan, for such decisions. While this had worked well enough for
nine years, we had all seen the disastrous consequences of his abrogating those two
responsibilities in 1975.
Nor, of course, did I envision the Temple of Set as an institution of which I would be the
permanent and only High Priest.
The solution seemed inherent in the characteristics of the degrees. A III° should, with the
perception and authority of the Priesthood of Set, be able to recognize an Initiate who had
become genuinely adept in the application of Black Magic. And yes, recognition was the proper
term too, in an environment wherein initiation was inescapably individual.
Similarly a Master should be able to recognize a Priest of Set within the Æon.
Recognition of a Magus past the Book of Coming Forth by Night was again a challenge.
Characteristic of a Magus is Utterance of a Word (creation of a philosophy) beyond what is
conventionally or currently known. A Master “within” in an æon cannot be expected to be able to
recognize something “without” it. But a college of æonic Masters might conceivably agree on
both the current æon’s limits and the initiatory substance of a philosophical concept beyond it. I
decided to proceed from this assumption.
While for the sake of simplicity here I have used the masculine degree-titles, it was always
understood that the Setian initiation system applied equally to women as Priestess, Magistra,
and Maga. In the Church no women ever advanced past the III°, and the elder initiatory
organizations tended to be male-exclusive past the Adepti grades. The Temple of Set’s initiatory
and official gender-indifference has remained axiomatic throughout its history.
Now came the administrative structure of the Temple. I knew what I didn’t want: a one-man
dictatorship as in the Church. Again that had worked well as long as Anton had exercised his
authority wisely and benevolently, but when he hadn’t, it disintegrated. Drawing on my Knights
of Dunamis and Alpha Phi Omega experience, I resolved to design an organization with
cooperative, interlocking, and authority-sharing branches. I had also the convenient model of
the United States Constitution, with its balance-of-power divisions of the executive, legislative,
and judicial.
Like the Church, the Temple of Set would have a High Priest and a Council of Nine. Unlike
the Church, the Temple’s Council of Nine would be collectively superior to the High Priesthood,
- 45 -
with the power of appointment and removal. This would be codified in a California nonprofit
Articles of Incorporation (Appendix #6 [original]) and By-Laws (Appendix #7 [current 2006]),
and the degree system would be included in those same By-Laws beyond alteration by either the
High Priest or the Council.
Finally to counterbalance the executive power of the High Priesthood, two additional offices,
also corporate, would be created: Executive Director (to oversee all Temple administration) and
Treasurer (to oversee Temple finances). The Treasurer would respond to the Executive Director,
who would respond to the High Priest, in routine matters; but all three officers would be
individually accountable to, and appointed/removed by, the Council of Nine.
Underlying these formal organizational arrangements was my intention that they should be
as “invisible” as possible in the normal course of Temple affairs. The focus of the Temple’s
attention should be upon magical, philosophical, and initiatory matters, not administrative ones.
The legal structure and its By-Laws should properly be in the background as a consensual
framework, coming to notice only as a specific situation might require.
I thought that I had worked all of this out pretty well, and over thirty years later I can say that
both the degree system and the organizational structure of the Temple of Set have stood the test
of time very satisfactorily. Along the years we have adjusted, improved, and refined both as
necessary or desirable, but those basic 1975 premises and principles have all remained.
The next step was to fill the initial offices, of which that of Executive Director was easily the
most crucial. This person (required to be III°+) would be at the nerve center of all Temple
administrative communications and operations. While there were many Priests and Priestesses
from the Church who could have taken on the job, I was looking for someone who would enjoy
and thrive in it - who was naturally involved with everyone and everything everywhere. One
name came instantly to mind - Bill Murray.
As documented in The Church of Satan, Warlock William F. Murray had been a Regional
Agent of the Church in Winnemucca, a small town hundreds of miles from anywhere else in the
middle of the Nevada desert. [Winnemucca’s one bank has a plaque boasting that it was once
robbed by Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch.] Whatever Warlock Murray lacked in group
contact, however, he made up for in a flurry of correspondence, telephone calls, and his Regional
Agent/Carpathia Chapel newsletter Children of the Night. So central a crossroads had he become
by 1974 that the LaVeys, as also recounted in COS, began to become alarmed; if for some reason
he became disaffected, he could conceivably cause quite a widespread chain-reaction throughout
the Church. They ordered him to restrict his contacts to his Regional Agency, but a short time
later the crisis of 1975 overwhelmed that attempted clampdown.
Just how much of a clearinghouse Warlock Murray had become by then can be illustrated by
just one of a number of his letters to me at the time (Appendix #9).
Bill Murray might have been the bane of an authoritarian system seeking to keep its
extensions isolated from one another, but he was exactly what the Temple of Set would need in
its Executive Director. I asked him if he could drive to San Francisco, and I would come up from
Santa Barbara so that we could talk things over. We met at my mother’s house on Saturday, June
28th and spent the next day going over my ideas for the new Temple. On Sunday, to clear our
heads, we went out for a drive around the city, and when we happened to pass the obscure
intersection of 22nd and Kansas Streets over on the Potrero Hill, Bill finally said yes, that he
would take on the Executive Directorship.
Constituting the first Council of Nine was another interesting challenge. What I finally
decided to do was to invite three of the most senior Priests as initial members, ask them to
unanimously select a pro tem Chairman from among themselves, then to nominate/vote in a
fourth, then for those four to nominate/vote in a fifth, and so on until the full nine initial
Councillors had been elected. Then they could formally vote on a first regular Chairman.
- 46 -
This arrangement worked very well. On the auspicious date of July 4th - the same day I
finalized the Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws - I invited Dale Seago from Los Angeles,
Michael Grumboski from Detroit, and Robert Ethel from Washington, D.C. to be the first three
Councillors. When the first Council was finally filled by December 1975, it consisted additionally
of Thomas Huddleston of Dayton, Ohio; Ronald K. Barrett of San Francisco, California; Lilith
The Temple of Set I Page 7
