to Satan are to be written before being burned. Although alcohol was consumed in the church's rites, drunkenness was frowned upon and the taking of illicit drugs was forbidden. LaVeyan rituals sometimes include anti-Christian blasphemies, which are intended to have a liberating effect on the participants. In some of the rituals, a naked woman serves as the altar; in these cases it is made explicit that the woman's body itself becomes the altar, rather than have her simply lying on an existing altar. In contrast to longstanding stereotypes about Satanists, there is no place for sexual orgies in LaVeyan ritual. Neither animal nor human sacrifice takes place. Children are banned from attending these rituals, with the only exception being the Satanic Baptism, which is specifically designed to involve infants. LaVey also developed his own Black Mass, which was designed as a form of deconditioning to free the participant from any inhibitions that they developed living in Christian society. He noted that in composing the Black Mass rite, he had drawn upon the work of the French fiction writers Charles Baudelaire and Joris-Karl Huysmans. LaVey openly toyed with the use of literature and popular culture in other rituals and ceremonies, thus appealing to artifice, pageantry, and showmanship. For instance, he published an outline of a ritual which he termed the "Call to Cthulhu" which drew upon the stories of the alien god Cthulhu authored by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. In this rite, set to take place at night in a secluded location near to a turbulent body of water, a celebrant takes on the role of Cthulhu and appears before the assembled Satanists, signing a pact between them in the language of Lovecraft's fictional "Old Ones". Holidays In The Satanic Bible, LaVey writes that "after one's own birthday, the two major Satanic holidays are Walpurgisnacht and Halloween." Other holidays celebrated by members include the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and Yule. Symbolism As a symbol of his Satanic church, LaVey adopted the upturned five-pointed pentagram. The upturned pentagram had previously been used by the French occultist Eliphas Lévi, and had been adopted by his disciple, Stanislas de Guaita, who merged it with a goat's head in his 1897 book, Key of Black Magic. In the literature and imagery predating LaVey, imagery used to represent the "satanic" is denoted by inverted crosses and blasphemous parodies of Christian art. The familiar