Author and Satanist Winter Laake explains how his experiences with the occult have shaped his views on life and the afterlife.

Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Winter Laake author of, The Satanic Paradigm. During the interview Laake discusses the hypocrisy of Christianity and Satanism:

Alex Tsakiris: I want to venture into is something that you alluded to when you were talking about the failed proposition that is Christianity, at least from your view, and the hypocrisy of it — the emphasis on self-denial that gets in the way of personal freedoms and self-development. But I wondered, can’t some of those same problems be reflected back on Satanic practices?

So, even if you practiced Satanism, and you try and live for the moment, or live for yourself, you’re going to die. You’re probably going to get sick and die. No one escapes that. Crowley didn’t escape that; Anton LaVey didn’t escape that. In the end, we all face the same fate.  So aren’t there some of the same contradictions that we see in Christianity?

Winter Laake: It does in a sense, and that is where I feel that a lot of scientists are now trying to even break that foothold. They’re seeking singularity which is coming by about 2040 or 20/50 where it will be plausible to not die. I think we will see it in our lifetime.

But yes, the hypocrisy exists probably even more so in any Satanic or occult practices. To a lot of people it’s a phase they’re going through. They are very destructive and dangerous people, some of them. They are not nice people. Christians can be pretty ruthless, too, but Satanic practitioners on different levels can be very, very dangerous. Probably more so than Christians.  A lot of Satanists don’t like to say that. They want to glaze it over and say, “oh, we’re all nice and get along,” but that’s not necessarily the truth. There’s a lot of hatred. There’s a lot of anger that’s self-created.

I personally don’t have that. I have a Mephistophelian kind of concept of where I’m at with things. But yes, hypocrisy is alive and well. It’s in our nature.

I think people are a summation of their decisions and I think if they make the asserted effort that they can achieve anything they wish.

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Alex Tsakiris: Today’s guest is a successful author, a consultant on Hollywood horror films. He’s also a psychic and sometimes psychic detective. But Winter Laake is best known through his association with the occult, black magic, witchcraft, and Satanism.

Winter, thanks for joining me today on Skeptiko.

Winter Laake: Thank you.

Alex Tsakiris: As I was just mentioning a minute ago, it’s great to have you on. It’s exciting because I think some of the ways that you approach some of the same topics we’ve been talking about is quite unique and quite interesting for our audience. So let’s start though, with some of the basics that certainly won’t be basics for a lot of people. What is Satanism? What is a little bit about your book, The Satanic Paradigm, and how does this all fit in the larger context of what we often call “the occult?”

Winter Laake: Satanism is a huge topic that engulfs many different arenas. You have the antiquity dating back to the Hellfire Club, which were basically practicing Satanists and before, even going into medieval ages and probably since the dawn of man. Mankind, in my opinion, is inherently evil and they are going against their nature by trying to pretend or put a face on that they’re good.

Alex Tsakiris: Whenever you talk about evil, now you’re getting into this duality of good and bad that is so much a part of the religious paradigm that you kind of were alluding to. And yet at the same time, one of the things that intrigues me with what I’ve encountered about Satanism is this pull for materialism, as well.

So I read Anton LaVey, who maybe you want to tell folks a little bit about, who Anton LaVey is. But the message is, be of this world. Don’t deny your experience. You are your own redeemer. And at the same time, Satan isn’t real. He’s just human power externalized. It’s a very materialistic, hey, there isn’t any real evil out there. It’s just our own human forces. But then I hear you say evil is engulfing the world. What’s going on here?

Winter Laake: Indeed. Atheists are self-worshippers. They begin and end with themselves and the materialism that they want to grasp. Anton LaVey is espoused that he did not believe in an entity or a powerful force that pervaded the universe. That is where I digress. I am a member of the Church of Satan but I do believe that there is a power or force, an energy, that is evil and it is pervading throughout the entire universe.

There are many different camps of philosophy within Satanism that are under the broad umbrella of that term, “Satanism,” or “devil worship” or “Satanic worship.” And in a lot of these aspects I have taken from my own personal philosophy and delved into each individual aspect and taken parts of that and kind of assembled my own mechanism. But in different ideologies within Satanism, absolutely there are many different forms and ways of looking at it.

Alex Tsakiris: I don’t want to let go of this one thread that I’m on here. Materialism in the scientific sense. We are just matter and that there can be nothing else. There can be no spirit. There can be no continuation of consciousness, which is something I want to talk about in a minute. I don’t understand how that can fit in what my limited understanding is of occult practices. How could you be of the belief that it’s just this? It’s just our lifetime. It’s just our experience; there are no entities. There are no supernatural forces. How can that be consistent with a Satanic view of the world?

Winter Laake: Well, I personal believe that there is a spirit and I do think there are other entities, and I stress that. And others who are in Satanic practice, some of them do not. We still get along but others are, as I said, regressing into an Atheistic view of self-worship. There are even some Agnostics and some more terroristic types that I believe are just death worshippers. But I hope that sort of sorts it out in a very uncomplicated manner. But I do think that there are spiritual or there is a spiritual aspect to what I personally believe is Satan or the power that pervades the universe.

Alex Tsakiris: So let me jump from there into a topic that we’ve covered a lot on this show, and that is survival of consciousness. So where we’ve been coming at this whole consciousness thing is butting up against scientific materialism that says, “Hey, stop. It’s just self-worship. It’s just about what we are right now. Get over it, thing. Wow, there’s these hundreds of thousands of cases of people who die and say they experienced this other worldly thing that is beyond their conscious experience here.” Then science looks at it and says, “The best we can say is there does seem to be some continuation of consciousness.” What is the Satanic or occult perspective on the afterlife?

Winter Laake: I’ve written actually on consciousness. I called it derivatively the Satanic Consciousness. In my opinion, it is about power and it is about struggle. I think that once a practitioner of a certain grade who is developed or given his life over to these entities or forces or things that he’s merged with, he becomes one with this darkness. It’s kind of like an H. R. Giger painting where you can look at the entire fluidity of emotion but everything is one. I think, and my personal opinion of a Satanic consciousness is we will merge with that darkness; that we will be one with that darkness and then that darkness will in turn transmigrate.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, but as soon as you get into the whole darkness thing, then you’re into the duality and there has to be a light, too. So how do we square the dark side with the light?

Winter Laake: Well, all of it in a sense, whether it’s a light or a darkness, I feel is all one. I’d never see any kind of divergence whatsoever. Everything that we witness is all one power. I just call it Satanic or a form of evil in the sense that that is what we’re a part of. In looking at what Lucifer, the concept of Lucifer’s light or Luciferian Light, those are all forms or different aspects of what that darkness can be, because space and time are so convoluted and it goes into the nature of the universe, in my opinion.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, there’s a couple way to handle the whole Satanic paradigm, obvious ways that I’m sure you encounter all the time. One is just to be completely rejecting of it from let’s say a religious or Christian perspective. Especially in saying, “Wow, that is my spiritual enemy and I am battling him.” But the other perspective is again, the scientific Atheist to say, “If those silly people want to go dance around in cemeteries and summon up demons, have at it. There isn’t any such reality to it at all.” How do you prove that it’s real to folks? I’m sure that crops up a lot.

Winter Laake: In proof of–in a sense of power or an ability or a super-nature, that would debunk a lot of the nay-sayers or scientists or things like that is actually not that hard to be had. There’s a form here that I’m going into that I rarely go into but when you are in this, when you are a practitioner, when you study and can make things happen in the world that would not normally happen, when you can bring psychic influence against another and you can see it work, there is an innate ability that maybe someone is born with or some kind of consciousness at work.

And that it can be caught through remote viewing or remote influencing and there is a lot of things like that, but to try to convince a scientist–and I have friends who are scientists that often go after me in these aspects–but they want to see displays of raw power. The only way that a believer or a non-believer will become a believer is through that sight and that sound or that something coming about that wouldn’t normally come about.

For example, dealing with police or the FBI. They’ll have a murder victim. You talk about hardened cynics and nonbelievers who are of the street that see terrible, horrible things, when I, some stranger to everything they are, when I who have nothing to do with their force, nothing to do with their reality, can lead them to a building where this person’s body is, that is the only way they believe.

Alex Tsakiris: Yeah. That’s something we’ve explored quite a bit on this show, Winter. We did quite a smack-down debate with debunker skeptic on police psychic detective work and had a very, very skilled psychic detective on to talk about some of her cases. We actually interviewed two police detectives who said, “Wow, we have no way of explaining it, but what this woman was able to bring forth was amazing.” So the validity of it I think is very well established.

The Atheistic materialistic push-back on it and debunking is a whole other topic we can cover in another way. But I think what you have waded into is the psychic detective we interviewed is certainly not of the dark side. She is very much of the light. So then we’re forced to pull the whole thing apart. The way I describe it is that we jump over the chasm and we say, “Okay, as strange as it sounds, there are these other forces and there’s people tapping into these other forces. And there’s this other dimension that we’re trying to explain.”

Now we have someone like you who comes along and says, “Yeah, I tap into the darker side of it.” And then we have somebody like Nancy who says, “Hey, I’m tapping into the lighter side of it.” Can you spec out for us what’s going in here? How we can have two different people channeling into this force, this energy from completely different perspectives?

Winter Laake: Yes. You know, it’s kind of goes along with whatever different mantra makes it work for you, makes your mind click, to get insert perception. And I think that if Nancy is looking at something from a perspective of her light guides or whatever she wants to feel them to be, that’s probably a working mechanism that is in her reference. But probably more than likely, she is tapping into the same entity that I call darkness or Satan.

Maybe they’re in denial of it, but I do feel that that is the case. I don’t think that there is a white or a black. I think there’s white witches and stuff. They want to dance around it or be altruistic and whereas I’m not. I see things for what they are in my opinion. But it’s more than likely a tapping of the same source to achieve the same kind of outcome.

Alex Tsakiris: Interesting. You know, that leads me into another thing I just want to touch on because it was another interesting interview exchange that we had. That’s with a very highly respected doctor, Dr. Rick Strassman, who got interested in studying DMT, the psychoactive drug. The research is really phenomenal because what he found is that people who took DMT entered into another realm and encountered these beings that for all intents and purposes, sound a lot like the descriptions that you hear in a lot of occult literature.

The interesting thing scientifically, of course, is that these beings match perfectly with beings that are reported throughout time, throughout other cultures that are unconnected with any of this research. So there’s some reason to think that there’s some reality to this other dimension kind of concept. Do you have any thoughts on psychoactive drugs bridging this other dimension and what is in that other dimension?

Winter Laake: It’s so varied and there are so many other different dimensions that it’s probably limitless as our space is limitless and the different scales that are there. Arcturius, which is a sun that can be seen at night as a star from our planet, eclipses our sun by 1,000 fold. You can literally put 1,000 of our suns inside this star and I couldn’t imagine the scale of the planets that are encircling that. I’m deviating.

But these other entities, yes, classic scenarios that have been going on since the medieval times, since the first experimentations with poison and different types of other things like formaldehyde in order to induce some kind of psycho-viewing of something supernatural. It’s very standardized. They all see kind of demonic forces or alien creatures. Why is that? In my opinion, I can tell you because I feel that those are probably dark entities on the outskirts of equilibrium, that they are mirrors of us which we are. We’re very evil. Why would we embrace that? Why do we see that? Why is it classically always like Supernatural 101, you know?

DMT, I’ve read some of the studies done as these people go into these rooms within their minds and they always see the same type of demonic forces. Now why would that be? They hold demonic forces as natural. There is something there for me personally that makes it a nature of evil that mankind is sort of going its wrong direction.

That mankind embraces violence in video games and film and the world and their lasciviousness and the news and the destruction and the general whole entirety of our planet, that is what people are embracing. They embrace that nature. It’s been very under-studied as to why humans want to delve into the destructiveness of ourselves, but I think it has to do with a lot of denial. We are mirrors of what we are, but we’re denying what we are.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s a very, very interesting perspective that’s going to be very challenging to a lot of people. I think we have to keep jumping back to these two points, which I think counterbalance each other, and that is the reality of it. So we talk about DMT, we talk about psychic detective work, and we say there’s a reality there that seems to be undeniable.

Then we jump back and say, “What is the interpretation of that? What is the undeniable?” And then we jump back and say, “What is the interpretation of that? What does that mean? Are we all evil? Do we have an evil nature? Do we just like bad and wicked things?” I’m really interested in that interplay but as soon as we get into that discussion, we’ve got to keep coming back, in my opinion, to the light.

So we go back to the near-death experience and a very prominent component of that that comes up again and again and again is the light. The all-loving being, the all-accepting being. And even if we want to take away any kind of religious connotations to it because those are varied in the experiences, right? The NDE experiencers don’t all say it’s Jesus, don’t all say it’s Shiva or Buddha. It’s varied. But what they’re consistent in is the light and the love. So don’t we have to incorporate that into it, too, because there seems to be a reality there?

Winter Laake: It’s interesting that yes, in like near-death experiences that there is a tunnel or darkness or that they’re reaching for the light. It’s easy to discount it and say, “Oh, they’re in this pseudo-place or their body is under such extreme manipulation that they’re sort of exposed to this or they were dead for a certain amount of time so was the mind on its own kind of course because it is reptilian and it is like really, unless it’s destroyed first it’s like the last thing to really let go, even though they say that the brain is dead.”

I’ll go into this just briefly and I know we’re kind of diverging from what you just said about light, but yes. Is there a light? Probably is. Is there love? Is that a feeling that is enabling–in nature within man? Yes. I mean, we can love ourselves and we can love a lot of things but I feel that personally we need to love selectively. I think that to give universal love is to open oneself up to manipulation because in our reality humans in general take kindness for weakness.

So in getting into love in general, it does exist. I think people want it and yearn for it. I think it’s an automatic reaction in a very tumultuous situation if one is exposed to that because people revert to that automatically. I’ve seen some horrid car wrecks. I’m sure you have, too. And people in near-death experiences, that is automatically a human mechanism that is gone to because you’re demeaned, you’re diminished, your ego is destroyed, you’re lying on a stretcher and you’re dying.

So it may, in turn for my explanation, be a reaction to such a horrid event that that is where we go or embrace. What comes after that is what’s all hypothetical. But it’s a wonderful thing. I mean, I think if someone is dying and it’s horrible when that occurs or if there’s some kind of terrible event and if that’s what they’re going to, then that brings them inner peace and to be able to let go. But in my sights and what I kind of push my mind to perceive is that it’s not all the light that is out there. I think that it’s more a mechanism of the mind.

Alex Tsakiris: Fascinating. I like how you’re upfront and accountable. But when you say, “Hey, we can’t deny the light. The light seems to be a part of it, too. Let’s find a way to figure out how that works.” And then you say how you’ve resolved that from your worldview, which is fine. That’s your worldview.

But I just want to say that really comes through to me and it drew me to want to talk to you because I felt like here’s someone who is going to just lay their cards on the table however they fall, and even if deception is part of the game at least I’m going to tell you, “Hey, I’m going to try and figure out the deception and if I’m deceiving you, that’s part of what we’re all doing here, too. We’re all in show business. We’re all trying to deceive each other and manipulate each other. It’s the nature of who we are.”

Winter Laake: Isn’t that interesting? Yes, I mean weapons of mass deception are used all the time. I try not to do that because I don’t really have time to deceive. It’s a lot of work to deceive. But it’s being used constantly by our government, by anything. It’s the nature of humanity that they’re liars and whores and that goes into where I said that there is a darkness or innateness about that. Why do people choose to reach or sow so much deception? Is it easier to lie than to expose the truth? I don’t know. For me I’ve always found it to be more difficult to wrangle in lies.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, let’s switch gears for a minute here. One of the topics that you talk most convincingly about is the hypocrisy of religion. And of course, it’s an easy target. I think also you make a very interesting observation about Islam that I’m sure is there. I’d never thought about it in quite that way but you talk about the sexual denial that you’re supposed to undergo and then your reward for that in the afterlife are all these sexual pleasures. And I thought, “What a twisted way of looking at human nature.” I think it’s just a pretty strong point from your perspective.

Winter Laake: Yes. I mean, the whole idea that an Islamist, if he dies for his religion of abstinence and death or bleeds which leads to death, will be rewarded with this sexual lust with these 40 different women who have never been with another man and are espoused to be virgins. I think it’s insane, but it’s written and they believe it. It’s totally hypocrital; it’s just dark, it’s evil. And that is the nature of the beast with a lot of these different religions.

It goes hand-in-hand with what my philosophy is about evil and the true nature of evil. If anything, that has a low, guttural level to it because there is levels of evil. There is these Mephistophelian heights and then you have these low, guttural types. So it’s all varied and there’s a lot of different realms to it. Islam is a threat to, I think, any normal human being on planet Earth, whether they’re Satanic or not. They’re the largest religion in the world; they’re pushing women into slavery; they’re treating people like cattle; it’s just ridiculous.

Alex Tsakiris: I think some people might be a little bit turned off with this evil encompassing the world and evil everywhere and we’re all embracing evil and moving towards evil. But I think when you really pull it apart, there’s a certain truth to it that keeps cropping up. If we take this religious aspect and look at Christianity beyond the examples we just talked about, there was a very interesting book about a year ago by a guy named Jeff Charlotte who did an expose on the most influential, powerful Christian political organization in Washington, D.C., a group called The Family.

They’re the prayer breakfast club group, whatever. They got caught up and it was made pretty big news when they were part of the C Street sex scandal where they were helping these congressmen hook up in this townhouse that they had. Then when you look behind as this author did, you found some very, very overtly dark aspects to this Christian group that says, “Hey, you know it’s really all about power. It’s all about control and Hitler and Mao Tse Tung, and Jesus were all the same and that they could control people and had this power.” When you do step into your perspective, Winter, you do start seeing this darkness crop up in some very unsuspecting places, don’t you?

Winter Laake: Yes. The government or the body known as the government which is made up of the individuals within it, are really going back to the big World Agenda. Every individual within the body known as the government has their own agenda, whether that’s getting laid, having a girl there that they can pick up on Saturday or do whatever and this nonsense which I think is a waste of time. T

They’re more focused on the self-worship and that’s what is going to cause the ultimate downfall of them as individuals and governments because they’re trying to set themselves to a higher standard. I know a lot of people in the government. I’ve shook hands with a lot of these people. They don’t know who I am but I know who they are and I know what’s going on.

They’re about the greed, which is the king. They follow the money. They’re just totally convoluted and seduced by the materialism level of Satanism, whether they want to believe it or not. And they’re enshrouding it in the hypocrisy of Christianity and enshrouding it in the idea that they’re better. Really they’re blind to their own Faustian bargains.

Alex Tsakiris: And you really have to wonder if it stops there. If we venture into the Intelligence community, it’s pretty well documented that the CIA has done more than just dabbling in the occult. There’s a project that you can Google if you want. It’s Project MKOFTEN. Here’s a quote from the director of the project who said that their goal was “to explore the world of black magic,” and “harness the forces of darkness and challenge the concept that the inner reaches of our mind are beyond reach.”

And I actually heard some interviews with some folks who were involved and remember this project back in the 70s. They were actively going out and hiring demonologists, other occult black magic people to try and summon up these spiritual forces and harness them. Part of the reason was “Hey, the Russians might be doing this. We have to do this, too.” But you also have to wonder if it isn’t just part of this “We have to win at all costs, whatever it takes,” which is built-in to our government and I guess just about any government throughout time.

Winter Laake: Exactly. And really, it has to do with individuals. When you say, “Win at all costs,” it means that if they lose that they’re going to lose their stance, their power, their money flow. So they’re really entrenched in wanting to see success whether it’s per altruism or whatever government they’re in at that time. Most of the different individuals that are in these operations are absolutely saturated with demon stuff and all of this. These are the types of people that hire people to bring in coup d’états against other structures, that will stab people  on train platforms, that will do anything it takes in order to secure themselves and secure their positions.

I’m not like that. I don’t go there. I’m not interested in trying to take somebody down, although if I am crossed I will—I think anybody would. I don’t have to do that too much anymore now. But these types of individuals are immense and they are totally Satanic and they are, in the echelons of government, in many different arenas, whether it’s China, with Russia, with many of the different tyrannies and different areas like that that have tyranny or dictatorships. It’s all about securing and the me, me, me and making sure that what I have is kept and that the sheeple are under my control, if that makes sense.

Alex Tsakiris: It does. It leads me into another area. I want to get your thoughts on the secrecy angle of this, and maybe even the Atheist cover story. You know, Bohemian Grove intrigues me. So here you have this ultra-super-elitist meet-up, the number of Presidents who have been there is just unbelievable. Almost every President has been there.

Top CEOs, top-notch power brokers from around the world are attending Bohemian Grove and openly, once you’re inside, engaging in occult practices. There’s a mock child sacrifice, worship to this giant owl. How these guys can go back and campaign as Christians is beyond me. But then, what’s interesting is 1) it’s totally secret so no one was ever able to crack it open and then 2) when they do crack it open there’s always the “Oh my gosh, you believe that stuff? Come on, it’s nothing.”

Back to our other discussion about is this stuff real, and it seems like there’s a real need to then jump on the other fence and say, “Oh, you don’t believe any of that stuff, do you?” Is the Atheistic perspective somewhat of a cover story for what’s going on with these occult practices?

Winter Laake: No, what’s really going on is business. I’m not turning to Tao ego here and I’ll go and I’ll rarely mention something, but I’ve been to Bohemian Grove. I’ve been able to go through the gates and hang out with people and like chill and stuff. To be honest, Bohemian Grove is just like a summer vacation area for a bunch of the power elite to get together and sort of mingle and talk about different deals and businesses that can be established.

They do, however, conduct—where I didn’t attend is where you drew the line and that’s where the mystery begins and that’s what’s bizarre in my opinion about it, too. It alludes that there may be something more going on, where you get these complete and total strangers but they will garner these robes and they will carry on with these bizarre rituals that are neither really Satanic or that are neither really Christian.

They’re more like these ancient Pagan rites, one being this Rite to the Sun, which is where they do this mock child sacrifice. I’ve mentioned this to people and it’s documented on the Web although you can’t really believe what you read on the Web. But unless you see it—I never really saw it. I’ve just seen photographs from different people who have gone in there and photographed it. Yeah, they conduct these Paganistic types of things and what’s bizarre to me, what I’m saying is, is that they’re total strangers to each other.

I don’t know. Is there an NWO where they’re plotting and scheming? That could possibly be it, as well.

Alex Tsakiris: The other thing I wonder is do you see a connection with the more general kind of evilness that you were mentioning earlier, because that’s what it seems like to me, even if you don’t go into this super-duper conspiratorial stuff. You just say this is challenging people to cross these barriers, these taboos that have been set, and to say, “I need to just be myself. I need to respond to my inner drives, whatever they are.” That’s what I see it as, as more of a way to get people past their inhibitions, which are religious or this light inhibitions and move toward the darkness. Do you see any reality to that, or do you think I’m reading too much into it?

Winter Laake: Well, overcoming inhibitions, I mean, that’s a huge part of it. Some have taken it to great extremes. Look at serial killers. And I’m really not fond of serial killers or child killers. I just think they’re extremely selfish and very stupid but they do it. Yeah, it’s what level you’re going to overcome some of these conditionings that have been placed upon you since childhood. It’s to what level you’re willing to allow yourself to step out of the box and be what is known as Crowley used to call “philodemic.” But the idea of hypocrisy is so ingrained within us.

Alex Tsakiris: The other area that seems totally outside of this but you made me think of it when you touched on Crowley, that’s the relationship between stage magic and folks like Houdini and black magic and the occult. You had some interesting thoughts on that in an interview that I listened to. Was there a connection between Houdini and the occult?

Winter Laake: Yes, there was. Houdini was a friend with H. P. Lovecraft. H. P.  Lovecraft was the renowned sci-fi writer, not scientific although nowadays he’s revered as a god of science or something. But really, he invented a code, a religion, and yes, they were together in New York City doing a lot of different rituals and experiments with narcotics and wanting to tap into the Other Side. It was a huge endeavor for Houdini, which was a major skeptic of any kind of spiritualism, to find actual evidence of spiritual or supernatural activity, which I do feel that he did find with H. P.  Lovecraft during that Red Hook experiment.

Alex Tsakiris: What was the Red Hook experiment and what makes you think Houdini did go from being a spiritualist and séance skeptic to someone who actually believed that there was some validity to these other powers?

Winter Laake: He had witnessed a few things that he couldn’t explain. He said he could find any flaw within other magicians and so on and so on, but when it came to Lovecraft he couldn’t explain some things away so readily about some of the events that were going on within his dreams and one of the precognitions that he was experiencing after Lovecraft ghostwrote for him Under the Pyramids. During the Red Hook experiment, basically it was just meet-ups between Houdini, Sonia Greene, who was H. P. Lovecraft’s wife, and also Houdini’s wife, whose name escapes me.

But it was the drive by Houdini’s wife really to seek supernatural kind of experiences as well, so there was an entire cabal of individuals there that were really pushing the envelope and practicing the idea that séance worthiness was real and such and such.

Even going back to what we had talked about, Houdini is a huge skeptic. He would tear different spiritualists apart. He was at war with a lot of his other fellow magicians. He was at war with them and he would fraud them out. I mean he would find them out. I do feel that he was trying to find a real supernatural experience.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, the last thing I want to venture into is something that you alluded to when you were talking about the failed proposition that is Christianity, at least from your view and the hypocrisy of it and the denial that gets in the way of personal freedoms and self-development. But I wondered, can’t some of those same problems be reflected back on the Satanic or the occult or the black magic thing?

I guess what I think of when I say that is I think the Buddhist perspective and the idea that it’s all going to be played out anyway and that it’s all suffering and that no one gets through it anyway. So even if you practiced Satanism and you try and live for the moment or live for yourself, you’re going to die. You’re probably going to get sick and die. No one escapes that. Crowley didn’t escape that; Anton LaVey didn’t escape that. In the end we all face the same fate.

So isn’t there that same contradiction, I guess, in the hypocrisy of Christianity? Doesn’t that also apply over here to Satanism? I mean, life is suffering. That’s the Buddhist’s first noble truth.

Winter Laake: It does in a sense, and that is where I feel that a lot of scientists are now trying to even break that foothold. They’re seeking singularity which is coming by about 20/40, 20/50 that it won’t be plausible to die. That actually we will be able to download our consciousness into a cybernetic organism and be able to live in some kind of fashion forever. But that is a frontier yet to come. I think we will see it in our lifetime.

But yes, the hypocrisy exists probably even more so in any Satanic or occult practices. To a lot of people it’s a phase that they’re going through. They are very destructive and dangerous people, some of them. They are not nice people. Christians necessarily, I mean they can be pretty ruthless, too, but Satanists are not—I mean Satanic practitioners on different levels can be very, very dangerous. Probably moreso than Christians. And a lot of Satanists don’t like to say that. They want to glaze it over and say, “Oh, we’re all nice and get along,” but that’s not necessarily the truth. There’s a lot of hatred. There’s a lot of anger that’s self-created.

I personally don’t have that. I have a Mephistophelian kind of concept of where I’m at with things. But yes, hypocrisy is alive and well. It’s in our nature. It’s in all different facets. It’s even in Buddhism because they feel that they’re very self-righteous. It is not necessary to suffer. I’m not suffering. Life really isn’t all that hard. And I think for the average citizen of the world nowadays it’s really not all that hard. I think people are a summation of their decisions and I think if they make the asserted effort that they can achieve anything they wish to do so.

Alex Tsakiris: So, Winter, what’s going on with you and books coming out? What are some projects that people might find interesting that you’re involved in?

Winter Laake: I’m working on a motion picture about my own screenplay called, “War in Oz,” which is a take on the Wizard of Oz concepts. It’s going to be a graphic novel and then it’s going to be punted on to being a motion picture. It’s just still in its neophyte stages as far as that but that’s a current project I’m working on.

I have a book that’s going to be coming out that talks about Lucifer extensively, called Luciferian En Cantus and it really goes into some future stuff for Satanism, about how we’re evolving as a Satanic species.

Alex Tsakiris: And your most popular book is still The Satanic Paradigm, is that right?

Winter Laake: It is. It’s sold thousands. And then the Book of Black Magic is—well, actually the Book of Black Magic, which is like this esoteric book, is speeding it. [Laughs] So whatever, you know? Ironically.

Alex Tsakiris: Well, thanks so much for joining me today. It was a great and interesting dialogue and I appreciate you being with us.

Winter Laake: Thank you, Alex.