"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 College of San Fransisco. That led to his first conformist job, photographer for the San Fransisco Police Department. As it worked out, that job had as much to do as any other with his development of Satanism as a way of life.