Compare and contrast...
11 April 1722 and 1930
Two anniversaries of births today: the 304th of religious ‘maniac’ Christopher Smart, best known for a poem about his cat Jeoffry, who is “the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him”, and the 96th of… er Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan.
Christopher Smart was a writer who couldn’t make a living – or at least the living he wanted was beyond what his writing could support, so he was constantly in debt, and had to take on gruelling hack work, which may have contributed to a breakdown.
Frances Burney said he was a “man by nature endowed with talents, wit & vivacity in an eminent degree”, and (according to James Boswell) Samuel Johnson said he
shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place.
He may not have been able to spell Geoffrey (or perhaps he could – who are we to say?), but he was good at names, with his noms de plume including Mrs. Mary Midnight and Ebenezer Pentweazle – both of which, incidentally, would make pretty good names for cats.
He may have been put in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics by his father-in-law because of his debts, because the man didn’t like him, or because he’d prayed loudly enough in St James’s Park to cause a breach of the peace, but he was there for the best part of six years. It was here that he wrote what is essentially a 1,200 line psalm, Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb), which is best known for its 74-line section about his feline companion, which begins “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry”.
‘Best known’ because obviously a deeply religious 1,200-line poem isn’t destined for bestseller status, but this section says
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped ...
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery ...For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying ...
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
Jeoffry can also “spraggle upon waggle at the word of command” and “tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer”, and “he can tread to all the measures upon the music. / For he can swim for life. / For he can creep.” So, yes: a rather endearing creature.
Whereas...
Anton Szandor LaVey was a deeply ordinary man, born Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago, who founded the Church of Satan in (well, obviously) 1960s San Francisco, and spent rather less time in institutions than he probably deserved.
‘Anton’ as I suppose we must call him, became a musician in the late 1940s, and
He claims she was down on her luck and was stripping at the Mayan to make ends meet, that they became lovers for a fortnight, and that she signed a copy of her famous nude calendar for him. The man who ran the club says
she was never one of my dancers.
LaVey also ‘worked’ as a paranormal researcher and founded something called the Order of the Trapezoid. He took to driving a Jaguar with the number plate SATAN9, and in 1966 founded the Church of Satan, by, er… shaving his head and declaring that he’d founded the Church of Satan.
Three years later, he ‘wrote’ The Satanic Bible, which (because nobody ever went broke underestimating the public’s intelligence) has been in print ever since. In the last years of his life, he named a child Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey, which should attract a custodial sentence on its own.
The law did come knocking for him in 1980, when he was implicated in a plot to assassinate Ted Kennedy – but he defiantly faced down the FBI, saying... er,
His role as the head of the church was all a charade
and his followers were
fanatics, cultists, and weirdos.
The agents concluded that “his interest in the Church of Satan is strictly from a monetary point of view” – which might be the best bit of that article were it not for the wonderfully deadpan
In truth, LaVey did not have magical powers.
All in all, I rather prefer the empirical observer of the quadruped who
keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger …
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.