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[–] 23394085? ago 

Never heard anything about that. I did some deep digging into Michael Aquino who spent a lot of time with LaVey while the CoS was developing, and he was pretty much the guy behind LaVey until he left to start the Temple of Set.

Don't believe a lot of the stuff you hear about LaVey. He created a lot of phoney stories about himself to boldter his image,

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[–] 23394154? [S] ago 

I was reading that about LaVey as well. According to one blog I read, LaVey was more about propping up his image as being this great leader that made Satanism mainstream. Acquino did not like that. Acquino wanted to make it large to bring more people in and not have it all be about a single leader. Thus Aquino left to start the Temple of Set. Using is military intelligence background and training he was able to grow it fairly quickly. Aquino never hid the fact of who he was or what he believed. He was very out in the open about it.

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[–] 23402861? ago  (edited ago)

Aquino took advantage of LaVey's desire for attention and helped to promnote him in order to build up the CoS and introduce new members. LaVey had been failing there and was happy to have Aquino take charge wherever possible from behind the scenes. Aquino used the CoS as a starting point for acquiring dedicated/serious followers that he could then siphon off when he was ready. It appears that the whole association Aquino had with LaVey was part of a military-grade psyop. This comes clear when you look at the timeline. Aquino had just started training as a psychological warfare specialist when he first learned about LaVey in 1968 (saw him promoting himself outside a movie theatre), and a year later he went looking him up, immediately after having finished training as a Psychological Operations officer at Ft. Bragg. This is also when Aquino started practicing satanism on his own. It seems to me that Aquino was assigned to the task. It was to be a cover for other (illegal) operations. LaVey was used as far as he could be and then abandoned when he was no longer needed.