Remembering Satan

by Lawrence Wright

  Peterson became sufficiently interested in the subject to conduct a survey of Tacoma and Seattle therapists in early 1988, and he found that a quarter of the respondents had treated victims of satanic-ritual abuse, or SRA, as it was coming to be known in the rapidly developing literature of the phenomenon. That same year, an influential paper appeared, under the title “A New Clinical Syndrome: Patients Reporting Ritual Abuse in Childhood by Satanic Cults.” The authors were two psychiatrists, Walter C. Young and Bennett G. Braun, and a psychologist, Roberta G. Sachs, who specialized in dissociative disorders. These are psychiatric maladies characterized by an unintegrated sense of identity, the best-known of which is multiple-personality disorder, or MPD. People who suffer from dissociative disorders also have disturbances of memory, which can range from dreamlike recall to partial memory lapses—or fugue states—to complete psychogenic amnesia and out-of-body sensations. The authors interviewed thirty-seven people undergoing treatment for dissociative disorders who also spoke of having been victims of SRA. They found an astonishing similarity in the stories of the patients they analyzed. The most common abuses reported were of being forcibly drugged during rituals; of being sexually abused, often with sexual devices; of witnessing the abuse or torture of other people or the mutilation of animals; of being buried alive in coffins; of being forced to participate in the sacrifice of human adults or babies; of being ceremonially “married” to Satan; of being impregnated during a ritual and later having to sacrifice the fetus or infant to Satan; and of being made to eat human body parts. It was a virtual checklist of the atrocities originally described in Michelle Remembers. “The lack of independent verification of the reports of cult abuse presented in this paper prevents a definitive statement that the ritual cult abuse is true,” the authors conceded, but they went on to say: “Despite the fact that some patients have discussed ritual abuse with other patients, and the fact that patients have had contact with referring therapists who may have provided information to them, it was our opinion that the ritual abuse was real.” Many other therapists, counselors, and psychiatrists were also coming to that conclusion. Furthermore, Braun saw a link between multiple-personality disorder and SRA; he believed that of the two hundred thousand Americans that he estimated were suffering from MPD, up to one-fourth could be victims of SRA.

  Dr. George K. Ganaway, who is the program director of the Ridgeview Center for Dissociative Disorders in Smyrna, Georgia, observed the same link but drew a different conclusion from it. Ganaway suggested that dissociative disorders might account for the SRA phenomenon, rather than vice versa, because the alleged victims were highly hypnotizable, suggestible, and fantasy-prone. In a 1991 speech before the American Psychological Association called “Alternative Hypotheses Regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse Memories,” Ganaway warned: “When individuals are highly hypnotizable, they may spontaneously enter autohypnotic trance states, particularly during stressful interview situations.… Experimental hypnosis evidence indicates that memories retrieved in a hypnotic trance state are likely to contain a combination of both fact and fantasy in a mixture that cannot be accurately determined without external corroboration.” Furthermore, hypnosis increases the subject’s confidence in the veracity of both correct and incorrect recalled material. Highly hypnotizable individuals suspend critical judgment while in trance states and compulsively seek to comply with the suggestions of the interviewer, Ganaway said. There was thus an obvious danger that an unwary therapist might unconsciously guide patients to conclusions that already existed in the therapist’s mind. That concern had caused lawmakers in a number of states, including Washington, to reject testimony that had been enhanced through hypnosis. In an earlier paper, “Historical Versus Narrative Truth: Clarifying the Role of Exogenous Trauma in the Etiology of MPD and Its Variants,” Ganaway had proposed that much of what was being remembered as satanic-ritual abuse was in fact an invented “screen memory” masking more prosaically brutal forms of actual abuse, such as beatings, rapes, deprivations, or incarcerations. This paper became a touchstone for mental health workers who believed that something awful had happened to their anguished patients but that, whatever it was, it was something other than satanic-ritual abuse.*

  A 1991 survey of members of the American Psychological Association found that 30 percent of the respondents had treated at least one client who claimed to have suffered from satanic-ritual abuse, and 93 percent of those who completed a second survey believed their clients’ claims to be true. Another poll addressed the opinions of social workers in California. Nearly half of those interviewed accepted the idea that SRA involved a national conspiracy of multigenerational abusers and baby-killers and that many of these people were prominent in their communities and appeared to live completely exemplary lives. A majority of those polled believed that victims of such extreme abuse were likely to have repressed the memories of it and that (contrary to scientific evidence) hypnosis increased the likelihood of accurately recalling what had happened.

  The question of whether SRA is real has riven the mental-health field. On the one hand, there are those who compare survivors of satanic-ritual abuse to people who claim to remember past lives or to have been abducted by aliens: the evidence—or lack of it—is about the same in each instance. On the other hand, there are those who compare survivors of SRA to the survivors of less spectacular forms of child abuse. They point out that in many cases memories of what one might call ordinary abuse are forgotten, and are recovered only in therapy, through exactly the same process that produces memories of ritual abuse. If some recovered memories are deemed authentic, they ask, then why not others? Where does one draw the line in deciding what to believe?

  How delicate this argument has become was apparent at the August 1992 meeting of the American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C. Michael Nash, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, presented a clinical account of a patient who had reported remembering an abduction by aliens. “I successfully treated this highly hypnotizable man over a period of three months, using standard uncovering techniques and employing hypnosis on two occasions,” reported Nash. He took the position that the abduction story was relevant therapeutic material but not literally true. “About two months into this therapy, his symptoms abated, he was sleeping normally again, his ruminations and flashbacks had resolved, he returned to his usual level of interpersonal engagement, and his productivity at work improved. What we did worked. Nevertheless, let me underscore this: he walked out of my office as utterly convinced that he had been abducted as when he walked in. As a matter of fact he thanked me for helping him ‘fill in the gaps of my memory.’ I suppose I need not tell you how unhappy I was about his particular choice of words.” Nash went on: “Here we have a stark example of a tenaciously believed-in fantasy which is almost certainly not true, but which, nonetheless, has all the signs of a previously repressed traumatic memory. I work routinely with adult women who have been sexually abused, and I could discern no difference between this patient’s clinical presentation around the trauma and that of my sexually abused patients. Worse yet, the patient seemed to get better as he was able to elaborate on the report of trauma and integrate it into his own view of the world.”

  The conclusion that Nash drew from this experience was that “in terms of clinical utility, it may not really matter whether the event actually happened or not.… In the end, we (as clinicians) cannot tell the difference between believed-in fantasy about the past and viable memory of the past. Indeed there may be no structural difference between the two.” In reaction to Nash’s speech, someone in the audience asked if he had ever considered another hypothesis in his treatment of the young man, which would explain everything: that the alien abduction had actually occurred.

  Therapists were not the only source of information on SRA in 1988, a seminal year in the spread of the phenomenon. On October 25, just before Julie wrote the second note to her teacher, disclosing the abuse by her father and the poker playe
rs, the Ingram family sat down together and watched a prime-time Geraldo Rivera special on NBC entitled “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground.” It was one of the most widely watched documentaries in television history, although it was only one of many such shows. (The day before, the subject of Rivera’s daily program had been “Satanic Breeders: Babies for Sacrifice.” Daytime talk shows had become obsessed with Satanic abuse since the McMartin case.) “No region in this country is beyond the reach of the Devil worshipers,” Rivera said on location in Nebraska. “Even here in the heartland of America, stories of ritual abuse crop up. The children you’re about to meet were born into it. They say their parents forced them to witness bloody rituals and even, they say, to participate in ritual murder.” Then he showed a clip of a young girl who testified, “My dad was involved in a lot of it. He’s, like, one of the main guys; he’s a leader or something. He made us have sex with him and with other guys and with other people.”

  That year also saw the publication of several books that discussed SRA, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. Although this book is only one of many “survivor” books, it is by far the most successful, having sold more than 750,000 copies. It is sometimes called “the bible of the incest-recovery movement,” and in terms of its consequences, it would have to be considered one of the most significant publications of the century. Neither of the authors is a trained therapist; Ellen Bass is a poet, and Laura Davis is a short-story writer, and both lead workshops on recovery. They make a number of assertions that have become commonplace in such books, such as the notion that childhood abuse is frequently forgotten and can be recovered in therapy. Much of The Courage to Heal is in the form of survivors’ stories, including that of “Annette,” who grew up in an upper-middle-class home in the Midwest. Annette’s parents were active in their church and leaders in their community, but they were also secret satanists—along with other prominent members of the town. Before she was twelve, Annette was impregnated, then forced to watch as her babies were sacrificed. “I completely blocked out the abuse,” she writes. “I couldn’t believe my parents had done such heinous things to me. My family had been so proper and clean, they squeaked.”

  According to one of Julie Ingram’s friends, who talked to Loreli Thompson, Julie read a book about incest and then lent it to the friend. The friend could not remember the title. Julie admitted that “she cried the whole time she read the book,” the friend recalled. “I was thinkin’: ‘The whole entire time?’ I mean, I can understand at the really, really sad parts.… Well, Julie’s really sensitive and she really cares about those kind of things. I guess that’s Julie for you.”

  Another influential book that appeared in 1988 was Satan’s Underground, by a woman writing under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford, which purported to be a true account of the abuse and sexual slavery she endured as a child. Satan’s Underground became a paperback best-seller, and it was widely read in fundamentalist Christian congregations. For many religious believers, stories of satanic-ritual abuse merely confirmed a worldview they already strongly held. Hal Lindsey and Johanna Michaelsen, two other very popular Christian authors, endorsed Satan’s Underground and thereby added considerably to its credibility. “If there is one thing that cult satanists do well, it’s cover their tracks in such a way as to thoroughly discredit witnesses who might seek to come against them,” Michaelsen wrote in the foreword. She elaborated what has become the standard explanation for the lack of evidence in cult crimes: “Animals are indeed killed and buried, but are later dug up and disposed of elsewhere. The children are frequently given a stupefying drug before the rituals so that their senses and perceptions are easily manipulated in the dim candlelight of the ritual scene. The pornographic photographs taken of the children don’t show up because they’re carefully kept in vaults of private collectors.” Stratford first began to recall memories of her abused childhood when she was hospitalized for an unspecified “life-threatening disorder.” In order to deal with the physical pain, the author underwent “guided imagery,” which is similar to hypnosis, with a therapist. In the process, she recovered horrifying memories of being pressed into pornography by her mother, becoming a child prostitute, and joining a satanic cult. In one vivid scene, she describes being placed in a barrel as the mutilated bodies of sacrificed babies were dropped on top of her. Eventually, however, the original publisher decided to withdraw Satan’s Underground after a well-researched article in Cornerstone, a Christian magazine, attacked the book as a hoax, and portrayed the author as a deluded and unfortunate woman—as it happens, from a rigid, fundamentalist Christian family like the Ingrams, from Tacoma, just north of Olympia—who had a history of self-mutilation and of making sexual accusations that were never verified. (The book has since been reissued by another publisher, with few changes.)

  It chanced that in the summer of 1988 Ericka Ingram had noticed a copy of Satan’s Underground on the coffee table of a house where she was baby-sitting and had asked if she could borrow it. When she returned the book, she said that she had read it all the way through. Later she told police that she had read only a few chapters, then tossed the book into the backseat of her car, because the shock of recognition had been too great to bear.

  Thus two communities that normally have little to do with each other—fundamentalist Christians and a particular set of mental health professionals—found common ground in the question dominating any consideration of satanic-ritual abuse: whether to believe it actually exists. In the absence of evidence that these stories or memories of satanic-ritual abuse were real, one could either reject them as absurd, withhold judgment until evidence appeared, or accept them on faith. The middle ground was rapidly shrinking as the proselytizers for both groups spread the word that SRA was real and anyone who doubted it either was “in denial” or was part of the satanic underground. (Interestingly, the rise in reports of SRA coincided with the collapse of international communism, suggesting that one external enemy was being replaced by another, closer to home. Bennett Braun made this connection explicit in a speech in 1988, describing the satanic conspiracy as “a national-international type organization that’s got a structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure, where it goes from … small groups, to local consuls [sic], regional consuls, district consuls, national consuls, and they have meetings at different times.”)

  The Los Angeles County Commission for Women formed a task force in 1988 to call attention to the purported rise in satanic-ritual abuse, thereby claiming SRA as a women’s issue, ostensibly because women and children were the main victims of cult crimes. The commission issued a report that defined satanic-ritual abuse as “a brutal form of abuse of children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, and involving the use of rituals,” and continued:

  Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and practices.

  Ritual abuse is usually carried out by members of a cult. The purpose of the ritual elements of the abuse seems threefold: (1) rituals in some groups are part of a shared belief or worship system into which the victim is being indoctrinated; (2) rituals are used to intimidate victims into silence; (3) ritual elements (e.g., devil worship, animal or human sacrifice) seem so unbelievable to those unfamiliar with these crimes that these elements detract from the credibility of the victims and make prosecution of the crimes very difficult.

  The report goes on to say that the central feature of ritual abuse is mind control, which is achieved through the sophisticated use of brainwashing, drugs, and hypnosis: “The purpose of the mind control is to compel ritual abuse victims to keep the secret of their abuse, to conform to the beliefs and behaviors of the cult, and to become functioning members who serve the cult by carrying out the directives of its leaders without being detected within soci
ety at large.”

  Elizabeth S. Rose (the pseudonym of a free-lance writer who says she herself is an SRA survivor) wrote in a cover story for the January/February 1993 Ms., “People would rather believe that survivors—particularly women survivors—are crazy. This keeps many survivors from coming forward.” The cover line read, “BELIEVE IT! CULT RITUAL ABUSE EXISTS.” The frequent reference to the need to believe in ritual abuse arises from the long-standing cultural resistance to the reality of child abuse, but it also points to the quasi-religious nature of the SRA campaign. At Safeplace, the rape-crisis center where Julie Ingram sought refuge after leaving home, counselors say that the disbelief that usually greets such charges parallels the incredulity that often greeted bona fide allegations of incest and sexual abuse only a few years ago. Nevertheless, the counselors have frequent internal debates about whether the increasing numbers of women who come to them talking about satanic-ritual abuse and human sacrifice are telling the truth. “Here’s my dilemma,” Tyra Lindquist, the administrative coordinator of the center, said. “We are already struggling against a tidal wave of disbelief—it’s a tidal wave! Nobody wants to believe how bad it really is for women and children. Whoever walks in or calls us on the phone will tell us what she needs to survive this minute, this day. Our job is to help her survive through recovery. It’s not our role to believe or disbelieve.”