Leaving the Church of Satan | Zeena Schreck

I mean the Church of Satan was sort of more abundant at that point. Um, there had been a couple of schisms in the 70s, and that left uh my father really in a deep state of very dark depression, really malignant black, black dark depression. And um, agoraphobia. He had locked himself; he just sequestered himself into his home and would only go to very select safe places in public, but not he was not doing any interviews anymore. He did not want to confront these allegations. His attitude was he'll just wait till it blows over. But, you know, it was not just me, but everybody thought, well, this isn't anything, this is pretty extreme, this isn't going to blow over in a week or so. This is snowballing and continuing and getting bigger and bigger.

So, um, I had to kind of parachute; I had to parachute into the role of, you know, paratroop into the role of high priestess, and I had to figure it out on my own as I went along. That’s when I, as I said, I started having realizations of like, well, what does it mean to be a religion? And what is religion? I started doing a lot of my own uh self-research and um looking into certain things. But aside from that experience, it was beginning to open my eyes to certain things. And what had happened was because my mother left my father, you know I got to back up because you said, well, it was to my mother and father's advantage to have me doing this. But no, not exactly; it was to my father's advantage to have me doing this.

My mother, having left, she was trying to pull me out of doing that, and she was convincing me. She, every time I would talk to her, she was hanging me about, "Don't care about anybody else. You shouldn't be doing this." And, you know, "I need your support and if you're doing this for him, then how can I expect you to be supporting me during this divorce?" You know, thing. So it was very uh stressful for me being pulled at all sides. She was actually telling me don’t care about anyone because I was beginning to develop what in Buddhism is called "bouti," which is a feeling of um a realization that compassion, compassion can't be just for a select few special people.

Compassion actually broadens, and it actually uh you begin to develop and attain a certain level. It was just like the beginning stages when I began cognizing that, hey, something is really seriously wrong here because there are innocent people out there that are not even Satanists that have never even heard of such a thing. They haven't even heard of such a thing called Satanism, yet you know their neighbors are calling them into the FBI and the police and stuff, and it's just ruining people's lives.

Was that part of That Daycare Witch Hunt? The satanic death ritual? The MCM Martin preschool case was up to that point the hugest waste of time and money in US history devoted to it. Do you Silence by any chance? Do you know that book, "Satan's Silence?" No? Oh well, it was written by a lawyer and a social worker, and it's the best account that I've ever read by a large margin of the satanic daycare panic in the 1980s. It's an amazing book, "Satan's Silence."

Yeah, okay, so you are T. Okay, so I get the picture more thoroughly because that was an unbelievably widespread panic, right? And it lasted for quite a while. So, and you were trying to—okay, so let me ask you a question about that. Now, you know, the dark side of this potentially is that if you're called upon to be a spokesperson in a time like that, there's also a lot of attention drawn to you. And you know, you pointed out that your mother was certainly willing to play the role of martyr to seek attention and to seek respect.

And you know, you said that you were a pretty dutiful person and that you had a job and that this role of spokesperson was dropped on you and that you paid an emotional price because you were torn between your parents. But on retrospect and retrospect, you've obviously done a lot of thinking about that. Do you believe that there was any contamination of your motivation by a desire for public attention or anything like that? Because you had the spotlight put on you, that could be easy to perceive, but the simple answer is everything was happening so fast I didn't have time to even think about it.

As everything took off, I didn't have time to even think about it. And, in fact, even the few times I did think, "Oh, well, maybe this can—maybe this could be turned into an advantage," I very quickly learned that no, in fact, it's not an advantage. Because I had had seven years of theater training, for example—acting—and I wanted to go into the arts. I just wanted to have a career in the arts in some way, and I wasn't sure in which field I hadn't decided yet.

But as a single mother, the only vocation, the only branch of the arts that I could afford to pay for myself with my solitary—I had no financial support from my family, or certainly not from the father of my son. No, it was all to me. The only thing I could do was take um drama, drama courses and coaching. And, for example, City College had free tuition in those days, so I had to kind of piece together an education.

And yeah, I mean some of my friends at that time that were in my acting classes, they said, "Well, maybe you can use it to your advantage." But the problem was it became super clear to me immediately that, no, this is done. It's finished. I can't, because of the religiously motivated uh hysteria that was happening then. If I went to uh, for example, I had some friends that would set up um auditions for me who knew who knew the casting agents, and so they knew, you know, of course in America you're not allowed to state your reason why you're discriminating against someone.

But because I, through either um acting coach or friends who knew casting agents or something, so I'd go on an interview, but the casting person would say, "We're not going to give any money to the Satanist, are you crazy? We can't be associated; we can't be associated with this." It was like um, uh you know being an untouchable.

And then that got worse. It was not only professionally that I realized, okay, now I am too branded. I am so much of an identity and I am known too much. I'm too branded; I can never just play a role. That's never going to happen. I can't be like a versatile actress that can play a cowgirl one year or not that I want, but I'm just saying hypothetically that, you know, I couldn't play a role of like a baseball mom or something like that. It's just not going to happen because W would spread, first of all, my name. My name, because not at that time, not many people had that last name, Le, and then it would um ring alarm bells.

And then, just physically, I was physically known and branded that way now. The paradox is there were people—the Church of Satan actually began to grow because of my being out there. So it created a new upsurge in membership. Um, and my father realizing this—this is kind of a funny detail—my father realizing that I was actually generating more income for him and more membership.

I remember he told me once that because I was doing such a good job presenting him and that there were new members coming in, that he was going to, uh he would actually pay me, uh I think 25% of all new memberships that come through that actually mention that they've seen me and wrote to join. So, what's funny is he did that for the first three memberships, so I got like, at that time, I got $75 because at that time memberships were $100, and so I got $25 for three. And then it never happened again. Never happened again.

Oh yeah, so that was one of those pieces of information. Yeah, it was a gesture that was to dangle the carrot and make me think, "Oh well maybe, you know," but then, you know, that dropped out, and not that I was doing it for the money but I thought for the first time in my life I thought, "Oh my father's actually doing something for me to help me," and he's actually acknowledging my contribution to what I'm doing for his organization, but it didn't last. It didn't last.

Um, and then that was that. And you asked me something else about, um, well I, so here I want to clarify. Yeah, because of the new upsurge of membership here again, um, my father would cherry-pick the people that he felt like, well, these people are in a category of movers and shakers. You know, they’re kind of like in the new punk scene, and you know, he was an old for at that point, so he thought, well this will, you know, maybe they'll boost my ratings with the, you know, with the cool kids.

Or, and so um, so there was a new upsurge in what, and in the membership of what he would call the Rubes, but then there was also a new upsurge in what he cherry-picked as his little inner circle, and that was of these new kind of, uh you know hipster, kind of edgy, um punky or whatever, you know, just um. I wouldn't even know how to describe them by today's standards.

But the interesting thing is they always claim, "Well, she just didn't know how to use it to her advantage." And what they mean by that—what do you know what they mean by that? No, please, please elucidate. What they mean by that is I just wasn't malevolent enough. I just wasn't mercenary enough. I should have been more black-hearted. I should have just been more misanthropic. I should have just been more, just plow over everybody and just create my own—create my own.

Well, you had the opportunity there to do that apparently, you know, because you were driving membership. You could have—you could have definitely capitalized on that. Not only did I have the opportunity to do that, but I realized the power in that; but I was, as I said, everything was happening so fast. I was so swept up in—it was just extremely chaotic time in my life and for the country that was experiencing that particular satanic panic phenomenon.

However, then fast forward many, many years later—like about 15 or 20, I can't remember when this happened—but well after I became a Buddhist, um, and I was meditating, and in Buddhism they call the well—they really the meditation session itself is the meditation session; but anything outside of the designated meditation session is referred to post-meditation. Post-meditation can be any time in your ordinary daily routine, but in this case what I'm going to refer to is the immediate post-meditation.

Because very often in the immediate post-meditation phase is where things come to you, where realization comes to you, where little sparks of—not going to say Enlightenment because Enlightenment is a big thing—but like you could say are little steps in the path to realization and understanding and knowing. So, the realization that I had was true power is knowing what you're capable of, knowing how dangerous you could be, and refraining.