After seven years, the Black Coven of Sathanas — to the best of local knowledge the only organized Satanist group in Mobile — will officially dissolve this Halloween, a date its members marked as their high holiday, “Sathanasmas.”
The coven’s founder, identified here by the pseudonym Joe K at his request, says twenty-eight members passed through the group since its founding on October 31, 2005. Schisms driven mostly by personal differences steadily drained the rolls until all that remained were Joe, his wife Katrina and one occasional participant. He jokes that football season didn’t help Saturday attendance either.
An unlikely spiritual lineage
Joe traces his path from a strict Christian childhood through agnosticism to The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey’s 1969 blend of ritual and philosophy, which he picked up expecting lark reading and found instead a worldview that stuck. When he formed his own group, he modeled it not on LaVey’s church but on an older and far more obscure ancestor: the Our Lady of Endor Coven of the Ophite Cultus Sathanas, widely considered the first American Satanist group, founded in the 1940s by Herbert Sloane, a retired barber in Toledo, Ohio.
“The kind of coven leader I wanted to be,” Joe says of Sloane. “Not a LaVey, not Crowley, but just a nice, friendly, neighborhood Devil Worshipper.”
In practice, members describe their reverence as directed toward the serpent of the Eden story — the giver of knowledge and free will — rather than a literal devil. Their closest thing to a central tenet borrows from Aleister Crowley: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” understood to mean that harming others separates a person from their own true purpose.
Why it ended
Joe is candid about the group’s troubles. Early years ran too formal, with an initiate hierarchy and required coursework; later, run-ins with self-styled Satanists he considers cranks and even a white-supremacist sister coven soured him on recruitment. Rather than keep up a shell organization, he and his family will observe their rites privately from now on — this Halloween with a holiday dinner and, in keeping with tradition, offerings left at their home altar.
Names in this story were changed at the subjects’ request.