Ritual as accusation and atrocity: Satanic Ritual abuse, gnostic libertinism, and primal murders

History of Religions

Volumn 40, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 354-380

  Frankfurter, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449124919     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/463648     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Among the most important studies of this phenomenon, see James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, eds., The Satanism Scare (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1991);
2. Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Chicago and LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1993);
3. Sherill Mulhern, "Satanism, Ritual Abuse, and Multiple Personality Disorder: A Sociohistorical Perspective," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 42 (1994): 265-88;
4. Nicholas P. Spanos, Cheryl A. Burgess, and Melissa Faith Burgess, "Past-Life Identities, UFO Abductions, and Satanic Ritual Abuse: The Social Construction of Memories," International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 42 (1994): 433-46;
5. Mary DeYoung, "One Face of the Devil: The Satanic Ritual Abuse Moral Crusade and the Law," Behavioral Sciences and the Law 12 (1994): 389-407;
6. Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: Basic, 1995);
7. Karen Leigh Stroup, "The Rediscovery of Evil: An Analysis of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Phenomenon" (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1996);
8. J. S. La Fontaine, Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Primary sources elaborating the Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy include David K. Sakheim and Susan E. Devine, eds., Out of Darkness: Exploring Satanism and Ritual Abuse (New York: Lexington, 1992);
9. See Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994);
10. David Frankfurter, "Religious Studies and Claims of Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Rejoinder to Stephen Kent," Religion 24 (1994): 353-60;
11. and La Fontaine, pp. 22-37, 180.
12. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, Michelle Remembers: The True Story of a Year-Long Contest between Innocence and Evil (New York: Congdon & Lattès, 1980). On the influence of this book and its authors,
13. and Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck, "Suggestibility of the Child Witness: A Historical Review and Synthesis," Psychological Bulletin 113, no. 3 (1993): 403-39. On the broader cultural dynamics and anxieties that gave rise to fears of Satanic ritual abuse conspiracy,
14. see David G. Bromley, "Satanism: The New Cult Scare," in Richardson et al., eds., pp. 49-72;
15. and Debbie Nathan, "Satanism and Child Molestation: Constructing the Ritual Abuse Scare," in Richardson et al., eds., pp. 75-94.
16. Jeffrey S. Victor, "Social Construction of Satanic Ritual Abuse and the Creation of False Memories," in Believed-In Imaginings: The Narrative Construction of Reality, ed. Joseph de Rivera and Theodore R. Sarbin (Washington, D.C.: APA, 1998), pp. 191-216.
17. The transformation of local psychotherapists to SRA "experts" offers a close parallel to witch finders in Africa and Europe: each constitutes an itinerant professional in the identification of evil. See Maia Green, "Witchcraft Suppression Practices and Movements: Public Politics and the Logic of Purification," Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (1997): 319-45; on the comparison,
18. see David G. Bromley, "The Social Construction of Subversion: A Comparison of Anti-Religious and Anti-Satanic Cult Narratives," in Anti-Cult Movements in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Anson Shupe and David G. Bromley (New York and London: Garland, 1994), pp. 49-69;
19. and Anson Shupe and David G. Bromley, "The Evolution of Modern American AntiCult Ideology: A Case Study in Frame Extension," in America's Alternative Religions, ed. Timothy Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 411-16.
20. See esp. George A. Fraser, "Ritual Abuse: Lessons Learned as a Therapist," in The Dilemma of Ritual Abuse: Cautions and Guides for Therapists, ed. George A. Fraser (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1997), pp. 119-35;
21. Pamela S. Hudson, "The Clinician's Experience, pp. 71-81;
22. Phil Mollon, "The Impact of Evil, pp. 136-47; Sandra L. Bloom, "Creating Sanctuary," pp. 285-91;
23. and Sheila C. Youngson, "Ritual Abuse: The Personal and Professional Cost for Workers," pp. 292-302, all in Sinason, ed. Louise Armstrong attributes the growth of SRA beliefs to such politically motivated credulousness on the part of feminists and child-care advocates;
24. The influence of evangelical Protestantism in the development of the SRA panic has been thoroughly documented in Robert D. Hicks, "The Police Model of Satanic Crime," in Richardson et al., eds., p. 182;
25. see Stephen Hunt, "Managing the Demonic: Some Aspects of the Neo-Pentecostal Deliverance Ministry," Journal of Contemporary Religion 13, no. 2 (1998): 215-30;
26. see Gail S. Goodman, Jianjian Qin, Bette L. Bottoms, and Phillip R. Shaver, Characteristics and Sources of Allegations of Ritualistic Child Abuse: Final Report to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (Washington, D.C.: National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1994), pp. 99-121;
27. cf. Bette L. Bottoms, Phillip R. Shaver, and Gail S. Goodman, "An Analysis of Ritualistic and Religion-Related Child Abuse Allegations," Law and Human Behavior 20, no. 1 (1996): 10, 31,
28. and Donald Capps, The Child's Song: The Religious Abuse of Children (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1995).
29. see her "Denying Ritual Abuse of Children," Journal of Psychohistory 22, no. 3 (1995): 334-36;
30. cf. Catherine Gould and Louis Cozolino, "Ritual Abuse, Multiplicity, and Mind-Control," Journal of Psychology and Theology 20, no. 3 (1992): 194-96.
31. David Finkelhor and Linda Meyer Williams, Nursery Crimes: Sexual Abuse in Day Care (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988), pp. 59, 61. Finkelhor originally entertained this category as a hypothesis based on children's alleged testimony and pending forensic evidence; with no such evidence forthcoming since 1988, he has admitted that the category may be imaginary (personal communication with author, November 8, 2000).
32. Susan J. Kelley, "Ritualistic Abuse of Children: Dynamics and Impact," Cultic Studies Journal 5, no. 2 (1988): 228; emphasis mine.
33. Alistair McFadyen, Helga Hanks, and Cath James, "Ritual Abuse: A Definition," Child Abuse Review 2 (1983): 38; emphasis mine.
34. On the construction of such subversive organizations as the framework for Satanic abuse rumors, see David G. Bromley, "The Satanism Scare in the United States," in Le Défi magique 2: Satanisme, sorcellerie, ed. Jean-Baptiste Martin (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1994), pp. 49-63.
35. Anne Hart, "A Survivor's Account," in Patricia L. Pike and Richard J. Mohline, "Ritual Abuse and Recovery: Survivors' Personal Accounts," Journal of Psychology and Theology 23, no. 1 (1995): 47.
36. Sharon J. Ireland and Murray J. Ireland, "A Case History of Family and Cult Abuse," Journal of Psychohistory 21, no. 4 (1994): 425-26. The authors admit that the patient "has never referred to the cult as 'Satanic' but calls it a 'Christian-like' meeting" (p. 427).
37. See Michael W. Cuneo, "Of Demons and Hollywood: Exorcism in American Culture," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 27, no. 4 (1998): 455-65, on the impact of popular films on American concerns with demonology.
38. Massachusetts State Police, Roll Call Newsletter (January 1989), p. 3,
39. On attempts at precision in using the term "ritual" and distinguishing it from other types of gesture and performance, see, e.g., Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 1983);
40. and Talal Asad, "Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual," in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 55-79.
41. Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London: Paladin, 1975), chaps. 1-2;
42. M. J. Edwards, "Some Early Christian Immoralities," Ancient Society 23 (1992): 71-82;
43. Andrew McGowan, "Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism against Christians in the Second Century," Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 413-42;
44. and James B. Rives, "Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians," Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): 65-85.
45. See discussions of such themes in children's testimony by Fred Jonker and Ietje Jonker-Bakker, "Effects of Ritual Abuse: The Results of Three Surveys in the Netherlands," Child Abuse and Neglect 21, no. 6 (1997): 550;
46. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner's, 1971), chap. 3;
47. and Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 360-62.
48. S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (Houndmills and London: MacMillan, 1999), p. 107.
49. Peter Burke, "The Repudiation of Ritual in Early Modern Europe," in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 223-38;
50. Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. pp. 44-46;
51. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, pp. 253-67;
52. see Philip M. Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 60-69, 152-58.
53. John Wesley, Concise Ecclesiastical History (London, 1781), 1:262, quoted in Barnett, p. 115. On ludic inversions of Catholic liturgy,
54. see Dominique Lesourd, "Culture savante et culture populaire dans la mythologie de la sorcellerie," Anagrom 3/4 (1973): 63-79;
55. Clark, Thinking with Demons, chaps. 2-6;
56. and further on symbolism in carnival, Ingvild Salid Gilhus, "Carnival in Religion: The Feast of Fools in France," Numen 37, no. 1 (1990): 24-52.
57. Noblitt and Perskin (n. 1 above), p. 159.
58. Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (London: Routledge, 1911;
59. see Corinne Bonnet, "Franz Cumont et les risques du métier d'historien des religions," Hieros 5 (2000): 22-24.
60. Smith, Drudgery Divine, pp. 31-46;
61. cf. Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament I: History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), pp. 196-203, for useful criticisms of the concept of mystery cult.
62. See more recent appraisals of these religious associations and their rituals by, e.g., Richard Gordon, "Who Worshipped Mithras?" Journal of Roman Archaeology 7 (1994): 459-74;
63. Philippe Borgeaud, "Taurobolion," in Ansichten griechischer Rituale, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner, 1998), pp. 183-98 (on the cult of Cybele);
64. and Françoise Dunand, Isis: Mère des Dieux (Paris: Éditions Errance, 2000), pp. 101-40 (on the cult of Isis).
65. Pseudo-Nilus Ancyranus, Narrationes de caede monachorum in monte sinai, ed. Fabricius Conca (Leipzig: Teubner, 1983), chap. 3, sec. 12-13.
66. W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (New York: Appleton, 1889), p. 320.
67. Lollianos, Phoinikika in Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments, ed. Susan A. Stephens and John J. Winkler (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 314-57;
68. Cassius Dio 68.32, 72.4.
69. Jack Winkler, "Lollianos and the Desperadoes," Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980): 155-81;
70. McGowan (n. 26 above), esp. pp. 425-27;
71. Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 6-8;
72. See Sander Gilman, "The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality," in his Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 76-108, esp. p. 83: "Buffon, the French naturalist, credited the black with a lascivious, apelike sexual appetite, introducing a commonplace of early travel literature into a pseudoscientific context."
73. See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), pp. 52-53;
74. Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions, pp. 5-8;
75. and Jonathan Z. Smith, "The Domestication of Sacrifice," in Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation, ed. Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), pp. 191-205.
76. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995 [1912]), p. 218. O
77. Victor Turner, "Passages, Margins, and Poverty," in his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 257.
78. On critiques of Turner's functionalist juxtaposition of ritual antistructure to normative social structure, see John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, "History, Structure, and Ritual," Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 136-39.
79. trans. Philip R. Amidon, in The "Panarion" of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis: Selected Passages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 76-77.
80. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. and ed. Robert McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 247-63;
81. Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 8;
82. Guy Stroumsa, "Gnostic Justice and Antinomianism: Epiphanes' On Justice in Context," in Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1999), pp. 246-57.
83. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1963), pp. 273, 274.
84. See Michael Waldstein, "Hans Jonas Construct 'Gnosticism': Analysis and Critique," Journal of Early Christian Studies 8, no. 3 (2000): 341-72.
85. Scholem refers to family traditions among the Dönmeh, a neo-Sabbataian sect in modern Turkey, that their recent ancestors had engaged in orgies and adultery for religious purposes; but these traditions as he reports them more likely point to communalistic sexuality or to the appropriation of negative caricatures. See Scholem, "Redemption through Sin," p. 114,
86. Cf. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), pp. 270-82,
87. Stephen Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 72.
88. Leslie Bennetts, "Nightmares on Main Street," Vanity Fair (June 1993), p. 50.
89. Sally Hill and Jean Goodwin, "Satanism: Similarities between Patient Accounts and Pre-Inquisition Historical Sources," Dissociation 2, no. 1 (1989): 40-41;
90. Noblitt and Perskin (n. 1 above), pp. 134-35.
91. See, e.g., Hill and Goodwin; Noblitt and Perskin, pp. 128-33;
92. and esp. Stephen A. Kent, "Diabolic Debates: A Reply to David Frankfurter and J. S. La Fontaine," Religion 24 (1994): 362, 364, 374, n. 28, invoking Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Filoramo for the position that witches' sabbats and Gnostic libertine rites existed and should serve as historical precedents to contemporary Satanic cults.
93. Evans-Pritchard (n. 44 above), pp. 24, 43, 47.
94. See Williams (n. 50 above), p. 182.
95. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), p. 142;
96. see generally pp. 132-61.
97. see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 327-35;
98. and Robin Fox, "Totem and Taboo Reconsidered," in The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, ed. Edmund Leach (London: Tavistock, 1967), pp. 161-78.
99. è siècle" (n. 27 above), pp. 131-33.
100. René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 22.
101. Compare René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), chaps. 4-5, 8;
102. and J. Bottum, "Girard among the Girardians," First Things 61 (March 1996): 42-45.
103. Compare Raymond Dart, Adventures with the Missing Link (Philadelphia: Institutes Press, 1967), pp. 191-92, 200-202;
104. as well as Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey's cogent remarks, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Warner, 1981), pp. 65-66.
105. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), quotation from p. 3.
106. Compare Walter Burkert, "The Problem of Ritual Killing," in Hammerton-Kelly, ed. (n. 44 above), p. 172.
107. Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 4-7.
108. For example, Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).
109. Quotation from Lloyd deMause, "The History of Child Assault," Journal of Psychohistory 18, no. 1 (1990): 1.
110. See critical discussion of deMause's activist psychohistory in Charles B. Strozier and Daniel Offer, "The Growth of Psychohistory," The Leader: Psychohistorical Essays, ed. Charles B. Strozier and Daniel Offer (New York and London: Plenum, 1985), pp. 63-64;
111. and Henry Lawton, "The Field of Psychohistory," Journal of Psychohistory 17, no. 4 (1990): 353-64.
112. See also Sandra Bloom's mandate for psychohistory in the service of clinical practice, "The Clinical Uses of Psychohistory," Journal of Psychohistory 20, no. 3 (1993): 259-66.
113. and another by a freelance crime writer (Michael Newton, "Written in Blood: A History of Human Sacrifice," pp. 104-31).
114. Compare also Lloyd deMause, "The History of Child Abuse," Journal of Psychohistory 25, no. 3 (1998): 216-36, esp. 223 on ecstatic Satanism.
115. On reducing guilt, see deMause, "History of Child Abuse," p. 223;
116. and on achieving magical power, see Gail Carr Feldman, "Satanic Ritual Abuse: A Chapter in the History of Human Cruelty," Journal of Psychohistory 22, no. 3 (1995): 340-57.
117. Lloyd deMause, "Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children," Journal of Psychohistory 21, no. 4 (1994): 510, 511;
118. Brett Kahr, "The Historical Foundations of Ritual Abuse: An Excavation of Ancient Infanticide," in Sinason (n. 1 above), p. 53.
119. and Stephen A. Kent, "Deviant Scripturalism and Ritual Satanic Abuse, Part 1: Possible Judeo-Christian Influences," Religion 23 (1993): 229-41.
120. On the continuity of Protestant anti-Catholic caricatures in the SRA panic, see Philip Jenkins and Daniel Maier-Katkin, "Occult Survivors: The Making of a Myth," in Richardson et al., eds., pp. 129-30.