He was described in some newspapers as a former circus and carnival lion tamer and trickster now representing himself as the Devil's representative on earth, and I wanted to determine first whether he was a true Satanist, a prankster, or a quack. I had already met people in the limelight of the occult business; in fact, Jeane Dixon was my landlady and I had a chance to write about her before Ruth Montgomery did. But I had considered all the occultists phonies, hypocrites, or quacks, and I would never spend five minutes writing about their various forms of hocus-pocus.

All the occultists I had met or heard of were white-lighters: alleged seers, prophesiers, and witches wrapping their supposedly mystic powers around God-based, spiritual communication. LaVey, seeming to laugh at them if not spit on them in contempt, emerged from between the lines of newspaper stories as a black magician basing his work on the dark side of nature and the carnal side of humanity. There seemed to be nothing spiritual about his "church".

As I listened to LaVey talk that first time, I realized at once there was nothing to connect him with the occult business. He could not even be described as metaphysical. The brutally frank talk he delivered was pragmatic, relativistic, and above all rational. It was unorthodox, to be sure: a blast at established religious worship, repression of humanity's carnal nature, phony pretense at piety in the course of an existence based on dog-eat-dog material pursuits. It was also full of sardonic satire on human folly. But most important of all, the talk was logical. It was not quack magic that LaVey offered his audience. It was common sense philosophy based on the realities of life.

After I became convinced of LaVey's sincerity, I had to convince him that I intended to do some serious research instead of adding to the accumulation of hack articles dealing with the Church of Satan as a new type of freak show.