I finished off the Might Ain't Right series on the Ave Satanas podcast tonight, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to examine the history of Satanism (ICYMI LaVey took big chunks of Might Is Right for The Satanic Bible). @queersatanic and the Ave Satanas team do a great job of breaking down this book and highlighting what LaVey did and didn't adopt.
I still plan on reading it because I like to really examine primary sources for myself, but I need a break from Ragnar Redbeard's/Arthur Desmond's bullshit before I do, but I can say...
At best, MIR is half-cooked; a half-assed collection of poorly considered opinions.
At worst, it's blatantly racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, poorly written, and overall, a waste of ink from an angry, jealous, pathetic man who really needed to get out more.
And LaVey would have created something better if he had used his own thoughts and writings instead of taking from MIR. But props to him for cutting out the most heinously bigoted shit.
We're collaborating with some folk at Ave Satanas Podcast (ASP) and Free Society Satanists to bring you a miniseries looking at Might Is Rig
Anton LaVey plagiarized* "Might Is Right" for "The Satanic Bible" — here's the proof
Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, directly lifted passages from the 19th century proto-fascist book "Might Is Right" by “Ragnar Redbeard” (Arthur Desmond) and did so extensively and without credit to produce a substantial part of LaVey’s most famous and popular work "The Satanic Bible".
This has been known for a very long while, although most Satanists tend not to be aware of just how shamelessly and thoroughly this work was done.
In fact, the Church of Satan sometimes tweets out passages from Might Is Right while supposedly praising LaVey.
To have quoted LaVey there, the Church of Satan would have had to tweet just "on the other".
And this is not a stray, incidental unattributed line that LaVey could have argued his readers ought to have immediately been familiar with as a sort of homage.
This was part of a wholesale, uncredited and unacknowledged ransacking of another person’s writing in order to create another, ostensibly-original book and sell it for profit. For example, here is how much from one particular section of Might Is Right ended up making it into LaVey’s book:
This is what LaVey and his partner Diane Hegarty, who also served as his typist an editor, used to introduce people to The Satanic Bible in its opening section the "Book of Satan". This isn't in some appendix or footnote; this is the first thing people reading the book were shown.
The "Book of Satan" portion of The Satanic Bible is essentially identical to parallel lines in Might Is Right: www.diffchecker.com/ppXjtPGV/
If you strip out differences in punctuation(!) and Capitalization and compare them, it's even more shameful: www.diffchecker.com/td0vLevN/
Depending on how you want to count, about 85 percent of this opening can be identified as directly copied, which still includes Americanization of spellings, leaving words out from the original, and a handful of words substituted within much larger phrases and ideas that were retained fully intact.
Only two of the 53 statements of the “Book of Satan” appear to be original creations of LaVey and Hegarty: Book III No. 5 and Book V No. 13. Feel free to check out the full comparison for yourself here:
Anton LaVey , the founder of the Church of Satan, directly lifted passages from the 19th century proto-fascist book Might Is Right by “Ragna
Physical strength can be a weighted issue in various cultures - particularly where the species that makes up the culture experiences sexual dimorphism or there's a military leaning, where there can be an element of "might is right". Others may consider strength brutish or associate it with stupidity. How is strength perceived in your story?
Between beasts of burden and beasts of prey there is an eternal combat. Natural enemies are they of each other, and whichever proves the stronger must rule, for the time being, or rather, until the next Test. The law of battle is unlimited. It does not end today or tomorrow. It persists for all time.
