I went to a local Books-A-Million over the weekend and happened to find Lucifer Rising: sin, devil worship, and rock & roll on one of the shelves. Thanks to a reccomendation I got from someone here on MA, I decided to buy the book... and I enjoyed it.

One of the more interesting bits were right off the bat in the second or third chapter which dealt with the origins of the Satanic movement. It mentioned an underground organization that existed in 16th century London that named itself the "Hellfire Clubs". One of the most prominent figures in the organization was a Francis Dashwood who I was intrigued to discover was a close friend of Benjamin Franklin. This, alone, makes me wonder how much truth is in the accusations that fundamentalist Christains make about the Freemasons being a "Satanic" [secret] society. I've seen pictures of a statue of George Washington in a Baphomet pose and I've heard conspiricy theories about Lady Liberty (Statue of Liberty) being a depiction of Lucifer. I'm not saying the Founding Fathers conspired to eradicate humanity or anything. I'm just entertaining the idea that maybe they expected America to be hijacked by Christianity in the future and they wanted to make it clear that they were against it.

Another thing I wanted to mention about Lucifer Rising was the ridiculous shit some of these people said in the interviews. Varg's part was batshit insane and retarded, but that isn't out of character for him. Euronymous talked about how he supposedly had an "action group" to bring about the Apocalypse and about how he admires fundamentalist Christians because of the darkness and depression they bring to the world. I really don't know if these guys are giving serious responses to their interview questions or if they just have a really dry, satrical sense of humor. Whatever their intentions, the author of this book seemed to maintain a serious tone when discussing this stuff.

A lot of the modern cults mentioned annoyed me. It just seems like more new age crap to me. Its like the guys in "The Temple of Set" are sitting in their moms' basements with the lights off and trying to define what "Satan" is... while the guys in the Order of Saint Francis were Satan. I dunno.

Have any of you read this book? Any thoughts?

I've flipped through it, a few interviews on there are outright fabricated and a lot of it is meant to shock people who don't really know anything about the music.

Same. I bought a copy used one time and read it. I thought it was basically tabloid-ish. Facts thrown around to seem more credible, but mainly intended to shock people. I wrote a review of it once but I can't find it now. If such a book had existed when I was 13 years old, I would have enjoyed it a lot.