The United States is greatly influenced by its organized religions; the fact that these religions are being pushed toward the more traditional values of the past may point to an upcoming trend in society—a relinquishment (or abandonment) of the modernist ideas and a return to traditional values. Traditions develop to ensure a society’s survival through repetition of effective rituals and patterns. Modernists often deride traditional values as being outdated or archaic; but in light of the current moral state of the nation, it would appear that modernism has largely failed people’s expectations or has failed to appeal to their spiritual nature. Man’s ancient quest for and interest in the supernatural has not gone away with the introduction of modern thought; it has simply changed its face. The desire is still there, but the knowledge that used to be provided by religion is gone as the church has modernized itself to suit science and, for the most part, minimized the supernatural. The church has had to cede many of its ancient beliefs to science, but the reason may be because the church was trying to offer a religious explanation for everything in nature, essentially sticking its nose where it didn’t belong. The motion of the earth around the sun, or vice versa, has no place in religious thinking and belief, but the church put it forth as dogma until science rendered them inaccurate. The church’s repeated forays into areas that should be reserved exclusively for science (which has proven them wrong again and again), does not necessarily negate its spiritual beliefs. Unfortunately, these repeated embarrassments over the centuries have resulted in a church that is striving to avoid the sensationalism and spiritualism that once drew supernatural seekers to organized religion.
There have always been skeptics and zealots, but it is the church’s responsibility to try to navigate the middle road while keeping their values and traditions intact. Far too often the church has given in to zealotry or overstepped the bounds of its purported goal. Now, however, it seems the pendulum may have swung in the opposite direction; modernist thought has transformed the traditional church, be it Catholic, Protestant, or Evangelical. The result is a society that has largely foregone the traditional organized religions in favor of New Age and occult representations of the supernatural. In 2008 the American Religious Identification Survey estimated that there are 340,000 practicing Wiccans in the United States, though they note that it is difficult to obtain accurate numbers, as many practicing Wiccans and pagans are fearful of revealing their beliefs. According to the survey,
Specifically, the number of Wiccans more than doubled from 2001 to 2008, from 134,000 to 342,000, and the same held true for [other] neo-pagans, who went from 140,000 in 2001 to 340,000 in 2008. Experts say the growth reflects not only an increasing number of neo-pagans, but also a rise in the social acceptability of paganism. As a result, more respondents are willing to identify themselves as followers of some pagan tradition. They also note that identification surveys do not fully measure the influence of neo-paganism. Many people use two or more religious identifiers—calling themselves Unitarian and Druid, for example—while others might adopt certain neo-pagan practices without calling themselves neo-pagan. The upshot is that neo-pagans—such as Wiccans, Druids, Asatruar (from Heathenism), and various Reconstructionists—and neo-paganism have pushed further into the mainstream. Some scholars credit the Internet and its ability to connect pagans of different tribes who would previously have remained unknown to each other. Whatever the reason, pagans have grown increasingly more organized and more visible, and today are widely recognized by religion scholars and sociologists as a group with staying power.35
The rise in the belief and interest in the paranormal has a serious effect on religion, and churches everywhere must eventually address it because the public is yearning for it. Regardless of whether the various religious organizations may feel they have lost their way, the paranormal represents a calling to believers to return to the traditional values and beliefs that birthed the religion. In the words of Father Vince Lampert,
It is almost like people want to believe in the extreme … I am happy to pray with people; but if I tell them that they need to start going back to the Church and taking advantage of the sacraments, they look at me like I am crazy for actually suggesting that they practice their faith. And I know if I told them to go out and do the extreme, “Go stand on your lawn and swing a dead chicken around your head and you’ll be fine,” they would do that.36
CHAPTER 12
Is Satanism Real?
“The Rise of Paranormal Television” discussed the Discovery Channel’s program A Haunting, and in particular looked at the episode entitled “Where Evil Lurks.” In this episode, a family moving into a previously vacated home finds evidence of a satanic ritual in one of the upstairs bedrooms; candles and a pentagram painted in red mark the site where surely a group of Satan worshipers had performed a ceremony and ultimately opened the door to hell, allowing demonic entities to enter into our reality. This satanic ritual is ultimately blamed for the haunting of the house by a demonic entity. But, is it real? Does the belief in and practice of Satanism actually exist, with all its evil implications?
On the surface, this would seem to be an easy question to answer. Many people presuppose the existence of groups that worship Satan and practice evil black rites due to the popularity of the concept in books, film, media, and folklore; but the truth is that Satanism both conforms to this stereotype and radically rejects it. Satanism is far from an established religion with a solid set of beliefs and practices. Unlike the various denominations and practices of Christianity that all worship the same God who is thought to be an actual, living spiritual being who is at work in the world, the practice of Satanism is not as cohesive in its beliefs and practices. It may be that the very nature and inherent assumptions in the name of Satan and Satanism contribute to a nebulous spectrum of beliefs and practices. Satanism, by its very definition, will defy institutionalization and categorization, because it is a rejection of that which forms the basis of Western knowledge, beliefs, morality, and culture. The word Satan literally means in the Hebrew translation “adversary,” and it is the adverse nature of Satanism that can be seen as its root ethos. It stands, in certain sects, as an adversary to life, goodness, and decency, while in other sects (and certainly the most organized), it stands as an adversary to the Christian base of the Western culture and to the belief in anything greater than the body. Satanism ranges from religious atheism to the reinterpretation of religious texts to the criminal and insane; all of these are as old as belief itself. For every belief, there has been an adversary; and Satanism is the latest and, thus far, the most lasting of those adversarial beliefs.
In the past, nearly any religious belief system that went against accepted Christian doctrine was dubbed as “Satanism” or “witchcraft” (terms that were synonymous during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but now are very different); thus, believers in paganism and various other minor religions, including Judaism, have been accused of everything from cannibalism to kidnapping and infanticide in order to justify the rooting out and destruction of these believers. The fear of satanic rites, as defined by the Malleus Maleficarum in the 1600s, has fueled innumerable prosecutions and executions for witchcraft and for the attendance of witches’ sabbats, where one cavorted with the devil and performed some of these abominable rites. However, these fears were the consequences of the institutionalization of folklore by the church and the aristocracy during the Renaissance and resulted in the European witch craze and later during the American satanic panic of the 1980s. The fears were unfounded, spurred by the panicked reactions of a Western culture dominated by Christian tradition and immersed in a history of folklore that believed in the existence of those who worshipped the very evil that would negate their existence. If we understand the devil, as defined by Christianity, as the ruler and creator of all things evil then the worship of the devil amounts to insanity. For according to Christianity, the devil desires the destruction of mankind and the overthrow of God’s kingdom; he desires al
l that is evil and sick and terrible in the world and ultimately seeks to claim the souls and lives of those who are willing to follow him. Any rudimentary understanding of the Christian devil would reveal that those who follow him are doomed to a tortured existence and the fires of hell. So why would anyone knowingly worship such a figure? It would be moral, spiritual, and physical suicide and pursued by only the insane. But it is pursued.
There are those who knowingly worship the embodiment of evil, and sometimes they become evil and commit evil acts. However, there are others who do not worship Satan as the Prince of Darkness but, rather, see him as the savior of mankind, and still others who see Satan as merely a symbol upon which to rest their atheism. The organized Satanists are small, nebulous groups of people—a far cry from the myth of an international, highly organized, wealthy secret society propagated during the satanic panic—and they largely wish to remain anonymous, rightly fearing a long history of persecution. In the physical world we are told that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; perhaps the same can be said for the spiritual realm as well. There is both good and evil as evidenced in everyday life regardless of spiritual beliefs. There is both God and devil, right hand and left; and for every belief system there is an opposite belief system. Christianity exists as a dichotomy between good and evil, God and Satan; and thus, Christianity, by its very nature, must have its detractors—its opposites—and it is these opposites that the masses have mythologized and feared for centuries.
There are some aspects of Satanism that rightly deserve to be feared; however, there are Satanists who exist and practice as law-abiding believers of a different religion, albeit one whose title immediately inspires long-held folkloric beliefs that are part of the Christian European heritage. Unfortunately, the various manifestations of witch trials have served to root out from society those who were deemed as “other,” whose beliefs and practices went against the norm. Therefore, they were assigned heinous, barbarous acts of satanic ritual, which gave the accusers false justification for the persecution and murder of those outsiders. This ranged from the Jews to Zoroastrians and, in the early Roman Empire, to Christians themselves. The truth of Satanism is that it both exists and does not. It does not exist as it has been purported by witch-hunters and fanatical evangelists throughout the centuries, but it does exist as a small belief system at odds with Christianity. The difficulty with Satanism, as with many other aspects of paranormal belief, is that Satanism defies institutionalization; whether that is due to its adversarial nature or to the influence of and rejection by the mass Christian populace, its pockets of believers find difficulty establishing cohesion.
There are three types of Satanism that will be examined; Satanism as defined by Anton Szandor LaVey and the Church of Satan (symbolic Satanism), which does not believe in Satan as defined by the church but believes in man as god; Theistic or Spiritual Satanism, which believes that Satan is a spiritual entity that is, in fact, good but has been demonized by the church; and what will be referred to as folkloric Satanism, which encompasses the traditionally feared acts of heinous satanic rites. Folkloric Satanists are those who do sacrifice humans to the devil in rituals that they have garnered largely from popular culture and misinterpreted pagan belief systems. They capture headlines, adding substance to fear and creating a hostile world for those who merely believe in an opposite biblical interpretation than what has been put forth for centuries. We will examine this type of Satanism first in order that the myth may be dispelled by the truth.
FOLKLORIC SATANISM
In 1985, Sean Sellers murdered a convenience store clerk and, one year later, murdered his mother and her husband in their sleep. Sellers claimed that the murders were the result of his heavy involvement in Satanism; he believed that he was actually possessed by a demonic alter ego named Ezurate when the murders were committed. “In the months before his first murder—which consummated his effort to break all 10 biblical commandments—Sean became consumed by Satanist ritual. With Richard and the eight or so members of their ad hoc coven, he took over an abandoned farmhouse and used it as a place of worship.”1 He was sentenced to death in 1986, and, at 17 years old, became one of the youngest people ever to be given the death sentence. In 2005, three members of a heavy metal group, called the “Beasts of Satan,” confessed to having killed three people in satanic rituals; two had been committed in 1998 and a third in 2004. “The verdict comes amid growing concern in Italy that young people are turning to Satanism and the occult.”2 In 2010, six members of a satanic cult in Russia were convicted of murdering, dismembering, and eating four teenagers as a part of their satanic ritual in June of 2008.
The self-styled devil worshipers, which included a young teenage girl, lured three girls and a boy aged from 15 to 17 to the spot by plying them with alcohol and inviting them to sit round a bonfire. They then killed them in a sacrificial ceremony, stabbing them 666 times each in homage to the so-called Number of the Beast. Prosecutors say the young killers then dismembered their victims’ bodies and cooked certain body parts such as the hearts and the tongues before consuming them. They buried the rest of the remains in a giant pit, which they marked with an inverted cross—topped with a dead cat. Investigators say the sect was formed in 2006 and gleaned its knowledge of Satanism from the Internet, initially killing cats and dogs before graduating to homicide.3
When the majority of the public hears the word “Satanism,” these are primarily the images and stories that they envision, and with good reason. Clearly such incidents, while rare, do occur and certainly capture mass media attention; furthermore, they are generally committed by adolescents or young adults, a fact that prompts immediate reaction by fearful and concerned parents. Truly, these are the images, actions, and fears that have been passed down through folklore over many centuries; they are images and actions of the adversary, and we fear those who would embrace it and seek to undo the laws and accepted morality of our civilization.
The satanic panic of the 1980s in the United States was a false witch-hunt. The belief that a highly organized and secretive religious group was transcending all societal barriers and conducting rituals such as those mentioned above, thousands of times a year, was the result of the institutionalization of satanic folklore, and it fostered public belief and panic. It has been proven time and time again, both in the court of law and in the investigations of modern writers, that there was no reality to the satanic ritual abuse claims made by therapists and housewives. The entire mass panic has been dismissed so thoroughly that some intellectuals claim there is no form of Satanism that exists that would ever embrace the characteristic violations and abominations that make up satanic legend and folklore. Jeffrey Victor writes, “Almost all teenagers who even profess to be Satanists lack any elaborate belief system focused upon Devil worship. Instead, they have fabricated a deviant ideology in order to: justify their underlying personality dispositions to express aggressive hostility; or to justify rebellion from adult social restrictions; or obtain public notoriety.”4 Essentially, Victor is saying that the Satanism that many rebellious youths express is merely the reenactment of folkloric beliefs and legends—what Bill Ellis calls “ostension.” Youths reenact the rumors they have heard about satanic rituals or the images they have seen in the cover art of certain music albums in an effort to rebel or obtain public notoriety. Even a quick video search of “Black Mass” on Google will yield more than enough videos and images to fully engage any interested person.
However, can it merely be ostension that warps a person to the point where he or she is willing to kill and consume another person in an effort to appease a god or gods? There must be a line that gets crossed between role-playing and rebellion and ritual sacrifice and murder; at some point a person actually begins to believe and to act on that belief. Satanism, as it is feared in folklore, does exist, as is evidenced by the several examples in this chapter; but not as a formalized, dogmatic religion, because it cannot exist as such. Law and society would n
ot allow for the existence of such a religion. Therefore, such practices will never be codified into a solid belief system because, by its very nature, the rituals and practices must be garnered from folklore and legend. An organized belief system that advocates and uses such rituals cannot exist; but there can be small, separate groups that seek to be an adversary to morality, religion, civilization, and life. There exist within every social system anomalies that seek to undo that very system; these anomalies come in various forms such as right-wing extremist militia groups, homegrown Islamic terrorists, and, in some cases, Satanists that carry their belief, like the aforementioned, to its extreme conclusions. Merely because it is not an accepted belief system does not mean that it does not exist; folkloric Satanism does exist in the adversarial outskirts of our society. Whether the Oklahoma City bombing or the Sellers murders, those belief systems exist in various forms and do get passed on to others through literature, oral legends and folklore, and pure imagination.
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