Witches and Demons

A Comparative Perspective on Witchcraft and Satanism

Jean La Fontaine

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785330865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Devil worship, black magic, and witchcraft have long captivated anthropologists as well as the general public. In this volume, Jean La Fontaine explores the intersection of expert and lay understandings of evil and the cultural forms that evil assumes. The chapters touch on public scares about devil-worship, misconceptions about human sacrifice and the use of body parts in healing practices, and mistaken accusations of children practicing witchcraft. Together, these cases demonstrate that comparison is a powerful method of cultural understanding, but warns of the dangers and mistaken conclusions that untrained ideas about other ways of life can lead to.

Chapter 1

HIDDEN ENEMIES

Evil at the End of the Millennium

This chapter concerns the main framework of the Christian myth about witches: a conspiracy which is a Devil-worshipping cult that performs heinous acts of sexual abuse, murder and cannibalism in its rituals. Its revival at the end of the twentieth century instigated a moral panic about its victims, allegedly children and even babies. From the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, allegations that children had been sexually abused and even, in some cases, killed¹ in the course of rituals associated with Devil worship or Satanism were being made in Britain. To begin with, its members were referred to as witches but soon the preferred name for them was Satanists.² This label obviously derived from the identity of witches as the servants and worshippers of Satan, an element in the Christian myth that fuelled the early modern witch-hunt. In the modern version the organisation of Satanists was thought to have tentacles that stretched into every walk of life, so that its members were protected by policemen, judges, doctors and politicians. The failure to find and convict members of this secret conspiracy was taken as proof that powerful and exceedingly clever people were involved.

The allegations were very variable when looked at in detail. In many parts of Britain children were said to be telling of terrifying rituals in which they had been abused. Although labelled as cases of ritual or satanic abuse by those who reported them,³ in some cases the evidence for doing so was rather slight. The commonest allegations concerned robed participants, pornography, sexual abuse and human sacrifice. There were usually several perpetrators (sometimes large numbers of them) allegedly involved, including women, and often several young children. Some highly publicised cases, in Nottingham, Manchester and the Orkney Islands were reported in the national press; others were less widely known but clearly part of the same phenomenon.

There was, from the outset, no independent proof of the existence of the satanic cults or of their activities, although in half the instances I collected there was evidence that children had been sexually abused. No reliable witnesses of the rituals came forward, although there were ‘descriptions’ by alleged victims. The police in various parts of England worked hard to find corroboration. In one case a child alleged that large, expensive cars had brought participants in the rituals to her house. Door-to-door canvassing by police failed to find a single person who had seen any Jaguars, Bentleys or Mercedes in their working-class London street. There was no evidence of murders having taken place either: ‘no bodies, no bones, no blood, nothing’.⁴ Believers saw this as the result of the demonic skill of the Satanists in concealing the evidence and of the power of their contacts, just as the absence of evidence for a conspiracy proved the power of conspirators.

What the evidence might have been, was demonstrated by the rare cases of sexual abuse that did involve rituals. There were only three. The perpetrators of the abuse claimed mystical powers to justify the abuse and also to frighten the children and one or two associated adults into silence. In these cases, and in no others, material evidence of what had happened was forthcoming: elements of altars, with cloths and garments that had been used, and books associated with the rituals were found by the police. This was evidence that supported the accusations made by the victims but in all three of them it was clear that the sexual motivation of the single perpetrator was primary and the ritual performance was secondary. I should stress that the evidence did not show any cult organisation. A lone perpetrator had initiated the acts leading to the abuse, although in two of the three cases they had recruited one or two other adults to participate in the rituals they had invented. Even in the one case where the perpetrator came to believe he was Lucifer, the illusion provided him with an excuse to abuse the children without ritual on many occasions as well. Finally there was no connection between the three abusers; each of them assembled a different cluster of supernatural ideas and practices, and the paraphernalia used in each case was unique to it. None of their ideas or practices resembled the ideas or actions of Satanism put forward by believers in the existence of the cults.⁵ As far as satanic abuse went, these cases represented negative evidence.

The lack of independent corroboration was as true of America, Australia and continental Europe as it was of Britain.⁶ The allegations were just that – allegations. The lack of independent support for them encouraged scepticism, but those who did not accept the allegations were left with the problem of understanding what was happening. The large number of cases and the way in which they appeared, spreading like a rash across Western countries, had been explained by those who believed in the theory of Satanism as evidence of an international conspiracy. For everyone else, the allegations of satanic abuse demanded explanations.

An obvious source of the ideas behind the fear of Satanism is fundamentalist and evangelical, particularly Pentecostal, Christianity.⁷ Its publications include accounts by converts whose ‘confessions’ contrast the peace and beauty of the religious life with the evil and sinfulness, often represented as witchcraft and worship of the Devil, in their pasts. It is interesting to note how these accounts reflected current definitions of what acts were considered particularly evil.⁸ In Doreen Irvine’s book, From Witchcraft to Christ (1973), the witches who were the devil’s disciples were involved in drugs and prostitution. But by the time Audrey Harper’s Dance with the Devil was published in 1990, nearly twenty years later, sexual abuse and human sacrifice were integral to the ritual of the satanic cults she said she had joined.

While it is possible to trace a strong evangelical influence in the conferences, writings and videotapes produced by the campaigners against ‘the Satanism scare’, as it has been called, is not explicable solely as a Christian crusade. Many of the most vociferous in their allegations countered this claim by pointing to Jewish upbringings or atheistic convictions. Nor was it solely a popular means of raising a ‘frisson’; accounts of satanic cases were reported in serious as well as sensationalist newspapers, and conferences were held in Britain and elsewhere at which experts, imported to start with from the United States, described the phenomenon to social workers, psychiatrists and policemen. There appeared to be a new and dreadful threat to children. The situation was serious enough for the government’s Department of Health to fund research into what was happening.

The reliability of the allegations was powerfully supported by comparisons drawn with the established facts of child abuse. Immediately after the Second World War the new technique of X-ray had demonstrated that broken bones and skull fractures might not be accidental injuries. Although the passage of time did raise some doubts in particular cases, the public eventually accepted that children might be injured or even killed by those who should have been caring for them. Then came the revelation that incest was no myth and that children might be sexually abused by adults. The evidence for the sexual abuse of children was more debatable than the X-rays of broken bones that supported allegations of baby battering. Experts could and did argue about ‘tests’ for sexual abuse.⁹ But to many, the new crime of sexual abuse was as well established as that for physical abuse. Ritual or satanic abuse, labelled in conformity with the earlier terms, seemed merely a further progression on the same path. Doubt was countered by pointing to the similar incredulity that had greeted the earlier revelations.

The ideas behind the notion of satanic abuse did not disseminate themselves merely through their own plausibility. They were actively promoted by a variety of people, most of them with international connections in the movement, who were usually referred to as ‘experts’ on the subject. Their approach was varied. Christians tended to take a mystical approach, as can be seen in the view that the children taken into care following allegations of satanic abuse should not be allowed to take any objects from home, including favourite toys, since they or letters from parents might be conduits of a satanic force that might be used to control them. By contrast, the more secular experts seemed to have an approach that derived more from the movements to promote belief in the stories of abused children and the victims of rape. They clearly had influenced much of the thinking of experts who came from the professional therapy field.¹⁰ The psychoanalytical axiom that what a patient says may be an emotional rather than a factual ‘truth’, became transmuted, in the hands of some of these ‘experts’, into the axiom that what such patients said must be believed as fact.¹¹

Where children were concerned, the claim was if anything stronger. The assertion ‘Children do not lie’ became a dogma of the anti-Satanism movement, and ‘Believe the children’ a rallying cry.¹² These phrases recalled the arguments advanced in favour of believing children who revealed that they had been sexually abused. The strategy allowed campaigners against satanic abuse to claim that their opponents wished to deny all mistreatment of children. On the other hand, children who did not recount a story that might be made consistent with a diagnosis of satanic abuse were believed to be repressing it, or to have dissociated themselves from traumatic memories. This view was popular in the United States, and transmitted to the U.K. in conferences and in written form. Nevertheless most evidence that was presented as what children had said was in fact the result of adult selective recording and interpretation of their words (La Fontaine 1997: Chapter 7).

In practice, children’s evidence was less important than what the experts provided as a way of diagnosing satanic abuse. Experts distributed lists of ‘indicators’ – symptoms that might indicate ritual abuse. They were handed out at conferences and photocopied by those working in the child protection services to distribute further. The indicators purported to be derived from experience, and included many simple indications of emotional disturbance (such as bed-wetting) as well as elements of more bizarre behaviour. When distributed among social workers, foster parents and others who were struggling to understand the damaged children who had been taken into care, they facilitated the diagnosis of ritual/satanic abuse as the origin of all disturbance. Crucially the lists bypassed the necessity for children to make allegations, since the indicators were deemed sufficient ‘proof’ of what had happened, and all that was then required was to make children describe what the adults knew ‘must’ have happened.

A further proof of the existence of satanic abuse and a major cause of the outbreak consisted of adults, mostly women, who claimed to have suffered ritual abuse at the hands of satanic cults when children. What they said about their past would be claimed as an eye-witness account. Perhaps the most famous of these ‘survivors’, as they were called, was Michelle Smith. She was the co-author, with her therapist Lawrence Pazder whom she later married, of Michelle Remembers,¹³ which was one of the sacred texts of the movement. Survivors’ allegations were elicited by psychiatrists or counsellors (trained and untrained) and at least one article at an early stage pointed out the iatrogenic nature of the results (Mulhern 1991). A dramatic feature of the aftermath of the panic in the United States has been a series of court cases in which the survivors have sued their former therapists for the psychological damage done to themselves and their family relationships by the therapy.

Finally it is very important to remember the role of an element that is entirely modern and very influential: the media. Several journalists in England were keen supporters of the idea of satanic cults.¹⁴ The flames were fanned by the competition between the various newspapers and television programmes. Some papers were sceptical but most appeared to express a firm belief in the allegations. But, as one sceptical journalist commented, ‘Whichever way the story goes you get a good mix of weird sex, drug-taking orgies, bizarre regalia and ritual baby murder’ (Anning 1991). The speed with which the scare spread doubtless owed not a little to the alacrity with which the media seized upon these attention-getting stories.

All these elements contributed to the nature of the scare and played a part in setting it in motion. However the factors that triggered one set of allegations in England do not provide a general explanation of similar sets elsewhere, let alone all such sets. For that we need to consider the phenomenon more analytically. The first accounts of the allegations – by Richardson, Best and Bromley (1991) in the United States, and by Jenkins (1992) in Britain – used the sociological theory of ‘moral panics’ as their framework to do this. The idea of a moral panic rests on the point of view known as social constructionist – that is, understanding social problems not as objective realities existing independently, but as the product of definitions of events made by interested parties and of their attempts made to persuade the public to adopt them. Cohen’s definition, ‘One can speak of a moral panic when the public reaction [as reflected in the media] is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered’,¹⁵ seems to fit the circumstances of the Satanism scare nicely when slightly modified to take account of today’s press.

Those who study moral panics agree that the general state of society contributes the context in which definitions of problems are shaped, and there is also some agreement as to what factors are significant. The most often mentioned are serious and disturbing social change and economic upheavals, which create a general atmosphere of uncertainty. This was certainly true of the end of the twentieth century. The religious understanding of what might be expected at the end of the second millennium increased the general unease. Yet British society has suffered many periods of change and uncertainty since the end of the witch-hunts; why should it produce this scare now?

There is nothing in the theory of moral panics to specify how one identifies the precipitating factors rather than the more general predisposition in social condit...