A high-ranking, respected military officer with top-secret security clearance, a  specialist in psychological warfare with a PhD in political science, a worshipper of Satan and founder of The Temple of Set, Michael Aquino was accused but never convicted of Satanic Ritual Abuse  of children (SRA).

Aquino was also a leading member of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan but broke with LaVey  in 1975 when LaVey sold priestly offices previously awarded for attainment. Draped in black, a Hollywood version of a horned devil,  LaVey was a carnival barker, provocateur  and showman who denied any spiritual reality. Aquino, however, was more sincere.  He describes performing a ritual invoking Satan, but the Egyptian god Set showed up instead. Set told him Satan was old news, that the future was Set, and Aquino was thereby anointed high priest of a new order called the Temple of Set. Set was the Egyptian god of chaos, war and storms who murdered and dismembered his brother Osiris.

The Temple of Set was nominally “theistic Satanism” as opposed to LaVey’s “atheistic Satanism”  but Aquino’s actual perspective was vague. When Sean Stone, son of filmmaker Oliver Stone, asked Aquino if he believed that spiritual beings were real external entities or simply manifestations of our own mind, Aquino’s answer was  unclear. Predictably, Sean repeated the question. Aquino then  referred to “universal principles”, “natural law”  and manifestations of consciousness. The only unambiguous position was held by high-ranking member Nikolas Schreck. He believed these entities were entirely real and some downright dangerous and malevolent. He later abandoned Aquino’s brand of Satanism in favour of Buddhism and Gnosticism.

 In conversation with Peter Levenda, Aquino always denied the existence of anything paranormal, including ghosts, UFOs or spirits. This materialism seems at odds with his actual practice. Perhaps the stated position conceals a deeper occulted reality. Materialism is the most insidious of all religions but  designed only for the rubes, not the initiated.

What then did his actual practice include?

In one instance, it included a trip to Wewelsburg Castle, where Heinrich Himmler and other SS officers performed occult ceremonies. Aquino was attracted to the location because he considered it magically charged. He performed his own ceremony in the ritual chamber, then moved on to Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, to pay further homage.  On national television, he proudly displayed a dagger belonging to the most senior SS officer at Wewelsburg. He does not tell us what the dagger was used for. That part is left to the imagination. 

In Vietnam, Aquino, as a psychological warfare operative, put his skills to work as part of Operation Phoenix. They used helicopters blasting blood-curdling demonic screams to frighten both civilians and combatants alike. In one instance they captured a local tax collector, murdered him, drained all his blood and left him hanging outside a village. The villagers were terrified of vampires, and this was calculated to encourage reliance on the US Army for protection. This was an application of what Aquino called “lesser black magic”, the alteration of perceptions; “greater black magic” involved the truly miraculous, the alteration of reality itself.

In 1980, he was commissioned by General Paul Vallely, board member of Turning Point USA, to write a paper on mind control. This resulted in an academic treatise  From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory. Henceforth, mind war would be primary, not secondary to actual combat, to be practised on both enemies and citizens alike. He acknowledges the illegality of lying to the American people but gets around this with a concept he terms, “future truth”. First you decide what narrative you want to spin, control all the means by which people process information until everyone believes it; and because everyone believes it, it becomes real. That’s next-level magic! This is the negative application of the postmodernist assertion: there’s no such thing as objective reality, no such thing as truth. Reality is something we mould and shape to our liking.

During a BBC interview, he was asked if it was OK, in his view, to put a curse on someone. He replied in the affirmative. He was then asked if he had ever  cursed anyone. Sensing a trap, there was a long pause. He never felt the need, he said,  because he was always able to influence events preventatively. An extravagant claim, I thought.

Satanism is a form of magic which comes under the general heading  “left-hand path”. It does not recognize a higher power or moral authority beyond the individual, whereas “the right-hand path” does. The right-hand path is also a magical tradition but subject to safeguards. Jesus was a magician, and prayer is a form of magic but always with a qualification, “thy will be done”.   A higher power could mean, among other things, a wiser, more evolved version of ourselves as yet unrealized, something beyond the ego to which we might turn for guidance.

Satanists reject moral authority, taboos, rules and societal norms, claiming the individual alone is god.  This could be a call to personal autonomy or a wilful refusal to tame the ego. Which rules do they want to get rid of? How about murder, for example? They could argue a moral person needs no rules but this could easily qualify as Christianity 101, so why Satanism then? Christian doctrine says if you have the law written in your heart, the law is no longer needed.  Satanism might imply such a high level of attainment that asserting  one’s own will would always be the right thing.  Satanism could manifest as wilfulness, enlisting entities to force a desired outcome. This could come with a price.

For the Satanist, Satan or Set is the ultimate rebel. If we are speaking of rebellion against religious authority, Jesus Christ could  be an equally worthy figurehead. He opposed the religious authorities of his day and the moneychangers at the Temple. Just as easily, rebellion could mean cutting yourself off from  Source consciousness and going it alone. In Gnosticism, this was Sophia’s error, a permissionless departure, creating on her own, separate from Source.

Christianity can mean different things to different people. Satanism can mean different things to different people. Saying you are a rebel tells us very little. What kind of rebel, rebelling against what? Most inmates of maximum-security prisons are rebels, so was Jesus Christ.

There are probably as many versions of Satanism as there are versions of Christianity and it’s impossible to overgeneralize.  Some argue that the god of the Old Testament  was not the ultimate God but a flawed, lesser created being, often cruel, jealous and wrathful. So, what we once thought was good might be considered bad.  Carrying this inversion further, the one rebelling against that flawed deity, Satan, once thought bad becomes symbolic of liberation. The acid test is  not so much belief as behaviour.  Watch what they do, not what they say. By their fruits you shall know them, not their labels.

One form of Satanism might seek to provoke or ridicule fundamentalist Christians, a self-defeating and unnecessary practice which, I believe, contributed to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s which swept across the United States and other countries. The Satanic Panic was a modern version of the Salem witch trials and the Spanish Inquisition. These events all involved serious accusations of Satanic Ritual Abuse of children attending daycare centres. Some convictions were attained on flimsy evidence, the convictions later overturned.

 It takes two to tango, however. You cannot ignite a firestorm, appear on national television in black robes, an SS ceremonial dagger in hand, then act surprised and claim victimhood when accusations come your way. Newton’s third law of motion is “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

Now comes my tentative hypothesis, an out-on-a-limb speculation. The Satanic Panic could have been a psyop, the proverbial battle of opposites, the classic divide and conquer strategy, diverting and misdirecting attention from the puppet master behind the stage and the hard truths too difficult to believe. Widespread fantasies of demons everywhere tormenting the overactive imagination should not be taken as evidence that demons do not exist. I believe that MindWar is a real thing and that Aquino’s dream of controlling all the means by which we perceive reality has been achieved. Therefore, when the media participates in stoking the hysteria of the Satanic Panic, as it did through shows like Geraldo and  The Oprah Winfrey Show, this might not be  an accident.  Hollywood was in on the act is well with a series of horror films, such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

If the overall effect of MindWar is to obscure and muddy the waters, discouraging serious investigation into allegations of SRA, then  we could easily conclude it has  succeeded. The whole episode damages our perception of what might be the real thing.

(c) Adrian Charles Smith 2026