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Robert
A. Lang
Canadian Representative of the Church of Satan |
Infernal Darkness
Exposing Cryptic Satanismby Steve Lillebuen
Originally printed in
THE GATEWAY
(University of Alberta)
The explosion of Satanic cult activity, ritualistic child sexual abuse, and teenage school killing’s are comparatively tame examples of the thousands of accounts of Satanic activity. There is only one problem: there is little evidence to support the allegations.
That which is commonly held as “Satanic” imagery is not a true representation of the cult’s real practices. The public’s perception of Satanism has been tainted by images that show Satanism as a conniving, criminal activity, closely linked to murders and abuse. Stereotypical Satanism is represented by images of sacrifice, rape, and, of course, the Prince of Darkness himself. But there is little evidence, beyond unsubstantiated claims, to even prove the existence of deviant Satanism.
Thus, Satanism-and it’s related images is clouded over in darkness: little is known about the religion, little is known about its history, yet there is something disturbing about calling Satanism non-existent. The contradiction in terms-the infernal darkness explains the true nature, as far as science and theory can allow, of everything that is definable as Satanism. There is a real threat, and there is moral panic; there are claims but no evidence. There is “hellfire” and magic imagery, but there is darkness as well. What can be said about Satanism is that it’s ambiguous.
Satanism takes various forms-some deviant, others not. As Detective Mel Roth of the Edmonton Police states, “Satanism is not against the law; it’s a recognised religion. If a person chooses to believe in something, that’s their right-there’s no law against it.”
Satanic cults have been documented as far back as the Seventeenth Century, but their origins are difficult to trace. It is generally accepted that early Satanism was an extreme form of protest against Judaeo-Christian spiritual hegemony. They were devil worshippers who saw Satan as the antithesis of God—as the God of the Earth, and the God to celebrate. It is not, however, known how accurate the accounts of early Satanic practice are. We know only that many believed that the practices did exist.
Today, there are countless variations of Satanic practice. Some say families pass the religion on to their children in an intergenerational setting, while others see it as a fad for rebellious teenagers.
The problem with labelling Satanism is that no label fits every version of the religion. Some Satanic cults do worship the Devil, while others strive to separate themselves from such “deviant” behaviour. One of those groups is the Church of Satan.
Founded by the so-called “Black Pope,” Anton LaVey, the Church of Satan accepts Satan as a pre-Christian life-principle concept worth emulating. LaVey started his Church in 1966 as a way of focusing the religion. In doing so, he wrote The Satanic Bible, and although there is no Satanic text accepted by all denominations, his book is considered the primary text for many Satanists.
“Upon reading The Satanic Bible, I felt as if I was looking into a mirror which defined exactly how I felt about the world,” recalls Robert A Lang, the Canadian representative for the Church of Satan. “Satanism provides the necessary metaphors, symbols, and trappings of religion—and combines them with a realistic philosophy based upon responsible indulgence and sinful pride.” As a result, Lang feels the Church of Satan accurately represents Satanism. “To us, Satan is an archetype, a symbol representative of the opposition to all religions and movements who have attempted to stifle man’s carnal instincts. Satan is what is best in man.”
There are other forms of Satanism that take an approach different to that of the Church of Satan. However, there are so many differing definitions of what Satanism is, that learning about the actual religion becomes difficult. B. A. Robinson of the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance wrote in 1997 that “Some believe if a person does not worship their God and hold their beliefs, then they must be worshipping Satan, they are, by definition, Satanists. Thus, ... Satanists make up perhaps 95 per cent or more of the world’s population.” Later, he states, "Such definitions create great confusion, and stir up religious animosity against followers of benign faith traditions.”
Because of the ambiguity about the definition of Satanism, it has been generally accepted by sociologists that to be classified as a Satanist, the person must either worship the Christian Devil, worship a precursor to Satan (like the ancient Egyptian God Set), or accept Satan as a life-principle involving pre-Christian concepts. Limiting Satanism within these three areas brings the number of practising Satanists to a substantially lower percentage.
Actual figures on Satanic membership have never been accurately calculated. In 1978, Karla LaVey, daughter of founder of the Church of Satan, told The Gateway that membership in the Church of Satan was over 2.5 million. “We stopped counting at that point,” she said.
Yet Lang, the Canadian representative, says that “Official membership numbers are never released to the public. That would only serve the public’s need to pigeonhole us and perhaps perceive us as some kind of threat.” The disparity between their comments perhaps proves the infernal darkness theory: they are everywhere, but they are nowhere-which are we to believe?
It should be noted that the Church of Satan is an officially registered religion, and has never been linked to a crime of any sort. The only links are unsubstantiated. There are people who have incorporated their own set of behaviour, disparate from the actual teachings of The Satanic Bible, and convinced themselves in the process that it was all right to kill. Some followers of Charles Manson, for instance, had at one time been followers of Anton LaVey, but, as his daughter explained more than two decades ago, “We don't want those kind of people [in our Church]. The Church of Satan, contrary to popular opinion, is not made up of criminals and fanatics.”
Satanists not associated with the Church of Satan, however, have been under attack since the publication of Michelle Remembers (1980), which details the supposed Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) suffered by the co-author, Michelle Smith. She describes the five years of her childhood when she was raised in a Satanic cult. The alleged cultists inflicted horrendous sexual and physical violations; she also claims they practised human sacrifice and cannibalism. Her book triggered a North American-wide frenzy called Satanic Panic, where similar stories shot up across the Western world, while the media fuelled the public’s perception that their children were at risk of being sacrificed to Satan by such groups.
Stephen Kent, a University of Alberta sociologist specialising in non-traditional and alternative religions, has heard many accounts firsthand. “Many have a level of fear that is remarkable to see—they are terrified... Some people have been able to patch their lives together, while others have been disabled by the memories that they have,” he says.
Rumours of a “Satanic Underground” arose as these accounts became widespread. It suddenly became general knowledge that Satanic cults were anarchists ready to destroy society. As Lawrence Trostle of the Alaska Justice Centre explains, “[some believe that] they attempt to reach their goals by infiltrating the power structure and by corrupting the innocent through lures of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll music, and fantasy games, or through brainwashing and terror. They commit ritual murder and child abuse in a bid for supernatural power.”
Stories of day-cares being run by Satanists appeared in California and Australia; parents feared their children were being molested in an attempt to please Satan. In 1988, television host Geraldo Rivera said outright that “There is no doubt that teenage Satanic activity in this country is increasing dramatically,” while more and more stories of SRA flooded the offices of psychiatrists and sociologists alike.
Kent wrote extensively on the topic in 1993. In a two-part article on deviant scripturalism, he claimed that there could be a connection between SRA stories and Judeo-Christianity. Simply put, Kent argues that many of the rituals fit well within deviant strains of established religious traditions. “Deviance could take readily available religious scriptures from several traditions,” he writes, “find the passages in which God says don’t do something, and then do it. It’s a reversal of religious values. They act in this way to satisfy their deviant acts, or attempt to gain power from who they believe to be the God of this world—Satan. So it’s not saying that Satan as a figure is in any way true; it’s saying that some people act as if Satan were true. It’s a classic sociological position: things are true, if they are true in their consequences.”
Although no one doubts that SRA survivors feel they were victimised, the problem is coming up with the evidence. Detective Roth explains: “Over the years we have received claims of people being victimised in this way, you do research to find some evidence that substantiates the claim, and there is none. This is not saying that they were never victimized—we don’t dispute that at all—but it’s to come up with the actual evidence that can assist us in laying charges.”
Stephen Kent, to an extent, agrees: “I can think of so many cases where people would give clear directions of where to find supporting material and I—often in conjunction with someone else—would go there, do what the person says, and not find anything. So what some of us have learned, is that the intensity in which people believe they remember ritualised abuse is not necessarily indicative of what actually happened.”
There is also the theory that the entire SRA scare is non-existent. Many feel that they are false memories, accentuated by going to therapy that create events that never happened, or heavily distorted memories of real events. Some, as Robinson explains, feel that SRA is an iatrogenic disorder—one that is not present in nature and must be artificially created through the interaction of therapist and patient. “By the year 2000, SRA lives on mainly in court cases where victims of incompetent counselling are suing their therapists for having induced false memories of SRA. Multi-million dollar settlements have been reached in some cases.”
Therefore, SRA is a prime example of the difficulty of discussing the topic of Satanism. Which story should the public believe? It was proven that many of the stories written in Michelle Remembers were false, yet can every single SRA story—which “prove” the existence of deviant intergenerational Satanism—be completely false? Kent thinks stories do have validity, albeit one that is difficult to prove scientifically.
“The phenomena of people believing themselves to be ritually abused goes right across the Western world. I can’t say what the numbers are of people, I can’t say how many of their accounts are true, ... yet there are stories—compelling stories—compelling, and in varying degree plausible stories, that force me to entertain the possibility that some of the accounts might be true,” Kent says.
Notable is the fact that Kent is very careful with his words. “I have to be,” he says. “I can’t speak beyond the science. It would he irresponsible to say ‘it’s everywhere.’ I don’t want to speak beyond the evidence and the evidence is sufficiently conclusive that intergenerational Satanism, for the most part, does not exist.”
So if science has shown that during the last 20 years, no SRA story has been conclusively tied to Satanism, then what about the constant news of teenage rebellion and dabbling in the Satanic arts? That topic, as it turns out, is even more complicated.
In October of 1997, Luke Woodham entered his school—Pearl High School in Hattieburg, Mississippi—with a gun, and began firing at his classmates. Before he was stopped, he had killed his mother, ex-girlfriend, another student and wounded seven other students. The shooting was the first in a series of school-related attacks across the nation which some allege to have been linked to Satanism.
Perhaps the best suggestion of a link is that Woodham himself directly testified that he was involved in Satanism. In a rambling testimony, he said he had felt isolated by his peer-group and turned to Satanism, which “...bestows power over many things. You can send demons to go and do things. I’ve seen them,” he said. “I know what I was dealing with. I felt like I had complete control, complete power over things. I know it’s real in spite of what people think.”
Although it seems like an obvious link to Satanism, neither that case, nor any other instance of teen crime, can be expressly associated with Satanism’s precise definition. “Some adolescents do develop eclectic philosophies,” says Trostle of the Justice Centre, “which adopt bits and pieces from witchcraft, the occult, traditional religious Satanism, and related systems of thought, and mesh them together into a new belief system that cannot be strictly equated with any pre-existing belief system. In many—probably most-cases, such philosophy does not properly constitute a cult because it has only one believer and practitioner— the youth who created it.” Therefore, murderers like Woodham cannot be classified as practitioners of “orthodox” Satanism because they developed their belief system independent of actual Satanic practice.
This is a viewpoint shared by sociologists and representatives of the Church of Satan. Robert Lang, for instance says he is sick of having his religion blamed for criminal behaviour. “We do not feel the least bit responsible for those who would commit crimes and call themselves Satanists,” he says. “It’s about time people started placing responsibility on the criminal rather than on the book they read, the music they listened to, or the upbringing they had. Satanism stands for ‘responsibility to the responsible.’ ”
To a degree, Lang is correct. Never has there been a criminal charge that has been successfully blamed on membership in the Satanic institution—it is always the individual. But sociologists also believe in the slippery-slope theory: teenagers start with heavy-metal music, Dungeons & Dragons, and then slide into Satanic dabbling. Books like The Satanic Bible become their guides, somehow slipping them further into hooliganism and possibly serious criminal behaviour.
“The problem with a group like the Church of Satan,” Kent explains, “is that regardless of whether those members are doing anything illegal, their publications can inspire dabblers to combine that information with additional sources to make their own ‘toxic brew.’ ”
The last 20 years have seen an explosion in reports of Satanic activity. Most of the accounts—if not all—have been dismissed as having nothing to do with actual Satanism. The numbers are fuzzy to say the least, the definitions are elaborate, and Satanism seems inconsequential to illegal activity. What the public perceives of the “evil” religion, is, to an extent, not accurate enough to warrant further insight. Satanism may be one of the largest scapegoats that society has ever created. But there are still many questions concerning the possible link between criminal activity and the religion. Placing the blame firmly on the shoulders of Satanic cults is a cocksure attitude lacking in substantiation, even with the countless accusations of Satanic criminality. The infernal-darkness theory is an attempted definition to describe this ambiguity. We do not wish to brush off the possibility of Satanism and the link to society’s woes, yet it is irresponsible to blame a group when there is no evidence. Perhaps further discussion on this issue will open the secret nature of the religion and allow us to gain, across Western civilisation, a more valid perspective on the religion called Satanism.
“SATAN IS WHAT IS BEST IN MAN.”
Robert A. Lang
Infernal Darkness originally appeared in THE GATEWAY, a publication affiliated with the University of Alberta, Canada and is copyright © by Steve Lillebuen and reproduced here with his permission.
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