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Rev. 9/89
Adapted from a presentation given at the llth annual crime
prevention conference of the Virginia Crime Prevention Association,
Chesapeake, Virginia, June 23, l989
NOTE: The views expressed herein are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect opinions of the Department of Criminal
Justice Services or the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Robert Hicks
Criminal Justice Analyst/Law Enforcement Section
Department of Criminal Justice Services
805 E. Broad Street
Richmond, Virginia 232l9
804-786-842l
I wish to alert you to a dangerous cult that has implanted itself
not only in Virginia but throughout the country. This group, called
the Tnevnoc cult, is a "communal, sectarian group affiliated with a
large and powerful international religious organization."/1 I can
communicate something to you of the methods and goals of the
organization by describing the cult's recruitment and indoctrination
practices. The cult aims to recruit young women, either teenagers or
young adults, and does so openly at schools and colleges. Following
indoctrination into the cult, young women eventually lose any power of
will, succumbing entirely to the regimen of the cult.
Cult members must abandon their former lives, even surrendering
their outside friendships and personal possessions. Cult members
activities, then, involve the cult exclusively. Members must arise at
4:30 in the morning, wear prayer beads attached to their wrists,
engage in long, monotonous chants and prayers, and in one of the most
bizarre activities, members consumed food they were told represented
the dead cult founder's body. Women must even pledge in writing
absolute obedience to the cult. To further distance itself from
worldly affairs, the cult assigns new names to members and designates
as their birthdays the dates of their entry into the cult.
After hours of performing menial tasks such as scrubbing floors
coupled with the incessant recitation of ritualistic prayers, members
might occasionally transgress rules which are punished harshly. For
example, punishment might require women to go without food, having to
beg on their knees for the crumbs from others plates. But the most
shocking ritual of all required members to become brides to the dead
cult leader.
I hope that I have sufficiently aroused your curiosity, if not
your indignation and anger that such activities could happen in the
United States. In case you haven't figured it out, Tnevnoc is Convent
spelled backwards. I have just described the socialization of young women into Christian
convents. But, you say, convents are harmless, in a criminal sense
anyway, and in part comprise established religion in our society. In
short, convents are legitimate.
I have described the working of Christian convents in this way
for a few reasons. First, I have used the jargon of police satanic
cult seminars to describe a familiar phenomenon. Viewed in cult
seminar terms, convents appear evil and pernicious. I sprinkled in
the description words which are never defined by cult crime experts,
that is, "cult" and "ritual." Cult crime experts, as they call
themselves, by not defining such words, impart to them connotations of
evil, the demonic, the supernaturally criminal. If you don't think my
description of Christian convents provides a fair comparison to the
way non-Christian religions are described at cult crime seminars,
think again. When convents appeared in the United States during the
last century, many citizens objected to their manipulative,
authoritarian methods by describing the same practices in the same
ways to arose public mortification. Similarly, one reads newspaper
accounts nowadays of how officers investigate ceremonial sites with
altars, pentagrams, melted candle wax in ritually significant colors,
all frequently involving innocuous teenage antics but sometimes
attributable to small non-Christian groups who show no criminal
involvement.
Law enforcement officials flock to training seminars about
satanic cults and crime. The seminars offer a world view that
interprets both the familiar and explainable--and unfamiliar and
poorly understood--as increasing participation by Americans in satanic
worship. The seminars further claim that satanism has spawned
gruesome crimes and aberrant behavior that might presage violent
crime. I suggest that the current preoccupation with satanism and
cults involves nothing new: the phenomenon has a firm and documented
historical and sociological context. I also suggest that the news
media have largely defined the law enforcement model of cult activity
since the evidence offered at cult seminars for cult mayhem is nothing
more than newspaper stories. Frequently, though, the same news
stories don't even attribute nasty incidents to cults, but the police
have been quick to infer from them cause-effect relationships anyway.
The law enforcement model of cult crime is ill-considered, based on
nondocumented secondary sources or other unsubstantiated information,
and is rife with errors of logic. Such errors include false
analogies, faulty cause-effect relationships, and broad, unsupported
generalizations. The cult crime model betrays an ignorance of a
larger academic context of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and
history.
Even the law enforcement literature makes the same mistakes. For
example, Law Enforcement News, a publication of the John Jay College
of Criminal Justice in New York, began an article on cult crime with a
titillating opener: "A l4-year-old Jefferson Township, N.J., boy
kills his mother with a Boy Scout knife, sets the family home on fire,
and commits suicide in a neighbor's backyard by slashing his wrists
and throat. Investigators find books on the occult and Satan worship
in the boy's room."/2 The article, then, implied some connection
between reading books on the occult and the murder/suicide. But did
the boy have a collection of spiders? A stack of pornographic
magazines under his bed? A girlfriend who just jilted him? A history
of psychiatric treatment for depression? Newspaper accounts never mention other attributes of a crime scene
since only those touched by a nameless, faceless evil will suit the
reader's hunger for an explanation of why good boys do terrible
things. And the same newspaper article will be reproduced and
circulated at cult seminars to substantiate the satanic connection.
The cult crime model is in part driven by Fundamentalist
Christianity. The most notable newsletter circulating among cult
crime investigators, the File l8 Newsletter, follows a Christian world
view in which police officers, who claim to separate their religious
views from their professional duties, nevertheless maintain that
salvation through Jesus Christ is the only sure antidote to satanic
involvement, whether criminal or noncriminal, and point out that no
police officer can honorably and properly do his or her duty without
reference to Christian standards. But more of File l8 Newsletter in a
moment. Other cult crime seminar speakers make a living at it:
Thomas Wedge, a former deputy sheriff, maintains a Baptist line of
thinking at his seminars by beginning with his brand of "Theology
l0l."/3 And while cult seminar presenters caution about respecting
First Amendment rights of citizens practicing unusual beliefs, the
same officers can't help but inflict their bias on audiences: anything
that is not mainstream Christianity is dubbed a "non-traditional
belief." Cult officers distribute handouts at seminars showing
symbols to identify at crime scenes, accompanied by their meanings.
The cult cops attribute fixed meanings to the symbols as if satanists
world-wide universally use the symbols in precise configurations with
identical meanings. The handouts typically attribute no sources but
many derive from Christian material. For example, the peace symbol of
the l960's is now dubbed the "Cross of Nero." Someone decided that
the upside-down broken cross on the symbol somehow mocks Christianity.
In fact, common knowledge has it that the symbol was invented in the
l950's using semaphore representations for the letters "n" and "d" for
nuclear disarmament. But cult officers go on their merry way,
uncritically disseminating borrowed, undocumented information.
Fundamentalist Christianity motivates the proponents of cult
crime conspiracy theories in other ways. For example, arguing against
their theory is, to them, attacking their world view. Special Agent
Ken Lanning of the FBI understands this quite well. Lanning, an agent
who specializes in child abuse cases, has offered skeptical
observations about satanic crime at many seminars, only to be branded
a satanist himself by Christian groups. Lanning has noted the irony
of this, since he raises his own family according to Christian
principles. But to some cult crime officers, arguing against their
model denies the existence of Satan as a lurking, palpable entity who
appears to tempt and torture us. Satan becomes the ultimate crime
leader: the drug lord, the Mafia don, the gang leader. Chicago
police investigator Jerry Simandl has demonstrated the cult officer
world view in his work. He doesn't just investigate crimes, he also
interprets cult behavior--particularly that which threatens
Christians--according to the cult seminar world view, interpretations
that were once the province of crusading clergy. He can tell whether
a church vandalism was mindlessly committed by kids or purposefully by
a cult group: "For example, an organ might be vandalized by having
its keys broken. That means the vandals were seeking to deny a
congregation the ability to communicate with God through music."/4
Simandl draws amazing inferences about a crime that experiences the
lowest clearance rate because we are frequently left with no suspects
and no evidence beyond the vandalism. And it apparently occurs to no
one to link a church vandalism to, say, a bias crime, a term coming to
the fore these days in law enforcement practice, a term now taking on
a legal definition.* But no: the vandalism so shocks Christian
sensibilities that the cult officer--armed with his new world view
that cults cause crime--can only interpret the crime as satanic.
As I noted before, cult crime officers do not define their terms:
the words "cult," "occult," "satanic," and "ritual" find casual usage,
the words imbued with demonic and evil associations. Evil is, indeed,
the operative word. Law enforcers who meld cult crime theories with
their professional world views have transformed their legal duties
into a confrontation between good and evil. So back to the File l8
-------------------------------------------------------------
- "Bias crimes, or incidents of hate violence, are words or actions
intended to intimidate or injure an individual because of his or her
race,
religion, national origin, or sexual preference. Bias crimes range
from
threatening phone calls to murder. The impact of these types of
offenses
is far more pervasive than impacts of comparable crimes that do not
involve prejudice because the consequences frighten an entire group.
The fear that such acts generate . . .can victimize a whole class of
people." From
Justice Research, November/December l987, p. l, published by the
National
Criminal Justice Association.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Newsletter. The publication's editor, police officer Larry Jones,
believes that a satanic network exists in all levels of society, a
network that maintains extreme secrecy to shroud its program of
murder. Defensive about the lack of physical evidence of cult mayhem,
Jones states:
Those who deny, explain away, or cover up the obvious
undeniably growing mountain of evidence often demand
statistical evidence or positive linkages between
operational suspect groups. At best, this demand for
positive proof of a 'horizontal conspiracy' is naive. . .
Consider the possibility that the reason supposedly
unrelated groups in different localities over various
time periods acting-out in a similar manner, is that
consistent directives are received [sic] independently
from higher levels of authority. Instead of being
directly linked to each other, these groups may be
linked vertically to a common source of direction and
control. This 'vertical conspiracy model' is consistent
with the 'authoritarian'. . .structure seen in many cult
and occult groups.
Those who accept this theory as a reasonable possibility need to
rethink the meaning, scope, and effects of the term conspiracy!/5
In other words, if the evidence doesn't seem to fit a particular
conspiracy theory, just create a bigger conspiracy theory. Other
hints of File l8 Newsletter's Fundamentalist bias show through in
other ways. Writer Arthur Lyons recounted receiving a copy of the
newsletter accompanied by an article from a Christian magazine,
Passport, entitled, "America's Best Kept Secret."/6 The article
described the "best-kept secret" as the conspiracy of satanists in
America among all classes and races, and the article further noted the
"Wicca Letters," a spurious document which offers a blueprint for
takeover by satanists. Jones has apparently not decided to abandon
Passport of late: in a recent issue of File l8 Newsletter (Volume
IV, No. 89-4) the Passport article is once again available with an
accompanying videotape for "an effective training combination." But
Jones and other cult officers impose any model they can contrive on a
hodgepodge of ideas, claims, exaggerations, or suppositions.
For example, cult investigators would have us believe that cult
practitioners learn skills in the vivisection of livestock and
household pets. One investigator, retired police captain Dale
Griffis, says that "occultists will stun the animal on his back with
an electric probe. Then they will spray freon on the animal's throat.
. .The heart's still pumping and they will use an embalming tool to
get the blood out. It's fast and efficient. Hell, the farmer heard
the animal whine, and he was there within five minutes."/7
A sheriff's investigator, in a memorandum about cattle
mutilations, interviewed a young woman who claimed to be an ex-satanic
cult member who had mutilated animals. Her cult, which consisted of
"doctors, lawyers, veterinarians" were taught by the vets how to
perform the fatal surgery. The animal's blood and removed organs, it
seems, were used for baptismal rites. She further related:
When using the helicopter [the cult members] sometimes
picked up the cow by using a homemade. . .sling. . .and
they would move it and drop it further down from where
the mutilations occurred. This would account for there
not being any footprints or tire tracks. . .When using
the van trucks they would also have a telescoping lift
which. . .was about 200 feet long mounted outside the
truck and would use that to extend a man out to the cow,
and he would mutilate it from a board platform on the end
of the boom and would never touch the ground. . .They some-
times do three or four cows./8
Of course, the cult members went to such lengths because they delight
in baffling the police.
The sheriff's investigator reported to his supervisor each detail
of this story from a convincing woman, but he was obviously
unacquainted with a principle of logic, Occam's Razor. This principle
suggests that when faced with two hypotheses for an explanation, each
of which can explain the phenomenon, one chooses the simpler. The
investigator never considered here the work of a predator, or even the
action of a vandal. Of course, news accounts of such livestock
deaths, particularly if related by cult officers, will attribute
deaths to cultists, and newspapers will use one of my favorite adverbs
for such activities: the animal was killed and organs were surgically
removed. Did a surgeon do the work? Can a police officer tell the
difference between a hole in a cow's head put there by a bullet,
scalpel, or predator's bite? But back to Occam's Razor. Imagine the
woman's story: trucks with 200-foot booms are not plentiful and would
appear conspicuous in rural America, particularly when the cultists
call in helicopter air support.
In other areas, cult crime officers simply deny facts. For
example, one of the recent murders dubbed satanic by cult officers was
that of Stephen Newberry, a teenager from Springfield, New Jersey,
whose friends bashed him to death with a baseball bat. Even though
Larry Jones quotes local investigators, a prosecutor, a psychologist,
and an academic cult expert who claimed that no satanic sacrifice of
Newberry occurred but instead blamed drug abuse, Jones nevertheless
offers the opinion that the experts
do not give credit to the strong influence of the
tenets of the satanic belief system over its initiates.
In some cases the subjects become involved with satanism . . .
prior to the onset of family problems. . . [T]he only true and
lasting solution to 'devil worship' or satanic involvement is a
personal encounter with true Christianity . . ./9
Jones's earlier guess that a "vertical conspiracy" might exist,
that a higher authority directs groups to murder as a form of worship
to Satan within an authoritarian cult led by a charismatic leader, is
a ghost of the cult officer's mind: the police have identified no
such groups.
Characteristically, law enforcement cult seminars all parley the
same model of satanic cults, circulating the same second-hand
information, most of it without documentation or sources for
quotations. The model convinces many because it takes phenomena
familiar to the officer and imbues them with new meanings: officers
learn a new vocabulary to describe old phenomena and therefore see the
cult problem as a new threat to public order.
The self-proclaimed cult experts who teach the seminars advise
officers not to interfere with constitutionally-protected civil
liberties, yet proceed to do just that. Investigator Bill Lightfoot,
Richmond, Virginia, Bureau of Police, recommends confiscating books on
the occult whenever law enforcers find them during investigations
(ritual crime in-service seminar, Petersburg, VA, September l3, l988);
other cult experts such as Dale Griffis have advised officers to ask
public libraries to turn over to police lists of patrons who have
borrowed books on the occult./10 The same self-proclaimed experts
take the bigoted stand that because a person commits a vile crime and
identifies himself as a satanist, then by extension all satanists must
have condoned the crime; the crime must be sanctioned by the satanic
order or church. That relationship between the person and the belief,
then, justifies police surveillance of non-Christian groups. By
contrast, we don't follow the same reasoning when Christians or Jews
commit crimes. In Richmond recently, police arrested a man who had
years ago murdered his family. He had since been living under a new
identity with a new wife. The fact that the murderer was a
conservative churchgoing Christian did not lead anyone to label his
acts as Christian crime, but if the man had professed a belief in
Satan, or in any other so-called "non-traditional belief," such as
Yoruba, voodoo or hoodoo, cult cops would be quick to label the crime
as evidence of cult activity in America.
Larry Jones provides an example. In his File l8 Newsletter, he
discusses some "non-traditional" beliefs and ends up finding fault
even where he can't connect crime with the belief. In a discourse on
Wicca witchcraft, he posits, for example, that any belief system must
set absolute standards of conduct. Relative ones won't do because
they "open the door to excesses."/11 So in a treatment of Wicca he
can only find fault by abstracting this standard of absolute conduct
that measures somehow the legitimacy of belief systems. While
concluding nevertheless that Wicca is benign and that its
practitioners claim no connection with satanism, Jones lumps Wicca in
with "Luciferian" Aleister Crowley with his ties to Black Magic
organizations. Larry Jones forgets that if a belief system "opens its
door to excesses," the history of Christianity provides no small
example of excesses committed for holy purposes.
One doesn't condemn Christianity because Jim Jones and his
group--all Christians--committed mass suicide or because the Pope
spurred a murderous crusade in the Middle East some centuries ago.
Whether or not people can get criminal ideas from belief
systems--whether from Buddhism, Christianity, voodoo, Islam, or
anything else--has little to do with the belief system but rather with
a person's own psychological make-up. And in this realm the police
have no jurisdiction. It is not a law enforcement responsibility to
guess at what might prompt a citizen to commit a crime. Police arrest
people who commit crimes under the influence of alcohol, but we don't
blame the alcohol. People who have domestic disputes live in homes
with guns and knives, but we don't take away such weapons to prevent
a crime.
In the cult crime seminars, cult officers give a disjointed
history of satanism and witchcraft and usually peg two contemporary
satanists who have molded the philosophy of their movement: Aleister
Crowley and Anton LaVey. Crowley, described in police seminars as an
"influential satanist," although indulging in pagan shenanigans during
the early part of the century, promoted the Order of the Golden Dawn
and the Ordo Templi Orientis, "the largest practicing satanic cult
operating today," according to Griffis (advanced ritualistic crime
seminar, Richmond, VA, September 22, l989). Further, say the police,
the main belief fostered by groups deriving from Crowley's legacy
involves "sexual perversion."
LaVey, on the other hand, a former police photographer and circus
performer, founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in l966 at the
zenith of Haight Ashbury hippiedom. Police officers teach that
LaVey's two books, The Satanic Bible and The Satanic Rituals Book, can
be dangerous. In particular, cult officers cite LaVey's nine
principles of the Church of Satan which include:
l. Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!
5. Satan represents vengeance, instead of turning the
other cheek!
8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they
lead to physical or mental gratification!/12
Cult officers maintain that LaVey's dicta foster in his followers the
attitude, "If it feels good, do it," thus justifying criminal acts.
Aleister Crowley, apparently, added a more wicked dimension to
this philosophy for in his Book of the Law he states, "Do what thou
wilt shall be the whole of the law."/13 Taken in context, however,
the book consists of a metaphorical jaunt through the ancient Egyptian
pantheon full of erotic and Masonic allusions. What Crowley said was
not meant to be taken literally, but figuratively.
A reading of Crowley's text reveals that the damning statement
refers to people inevitably moving through their lives according to
their destinies, that people will act according to experience,
impulse, and the "law of growth." In other words, people are going to
do what people are going to do. Put another way, people are what they
are. But Crowley did not worship Satan nor spur his followers to
worship Satan.
I heard Investigator Lightfoot (noted earlier) give a cult crime
seminar (September l3, l988, Petersburg, VA) in which he held up a
copy of Crowley's book and said that short of obtaining one from a
member of the highly secretive Ordo Templi Orientis, one can only
obtain a copy from an obscure Pennsylvania occult bookstore. He said
that he could not reveal how he obtained his copy. I happened to
examine the officer's copy, noted the reprinting publisher's name and
address, and called their customer service representative. The
company, Samuel Weiser, publishes quite a few books under the New Age
category. I asked how to obtain a copy of Crowley: she replied that
I need only send a check for $5.50 and I would soon receive one. When
I told her what Lightfoot had said about the difficulty of obtaining a
copy, she exclaimed, "But we'll sell it to anyone who asks!" She
apologized, though, because the book was only available in soft cover,
not hardback.
LaVey, on the other hand, operates without mysticism or even a
deity. To the Church of Satan, the Evil One is no deity but rather a
symbolic adversary. The Church of Satan pulls a clever trick:
'What are the Seven Deadly Sins?' LaVey is fond of asking.
"Gluttony, avarice, lust, sloth--they are urges every
man feels at least once a day. How could you set your-
self up as the most powerful institution on earth? You
first find out what every man feels at least once a day,
establish that as a sin, and set yourself up as the only
institution capable of pardoning that sin./14
LaVey, then, tries to subvert Christianity by offering what Christian
churches forbid. Since people's guilt, apprehension, and anxiety make
them ill rather than the urges themselves, the Church of Satan offers
people a release: indulge yourselves, says the Church, as long as you
abide by the law and harm no one. Some members have even found the
Church of Satan therapeutic: the Church engineered, for example, a
psychodrama in which a woman afraid of her domineering husband
role-plays him to help reduce his menacing effect on her. An
anthropologist confirmed the therapeutic value of Church of Satan
membership for some people years ago in an academic study based on
months' long participant observation./15
Church of Satan deities even invoke fictional sources, such as
H.P. Lovecraft, H.G. Wells, and Ursula LeGuin. Writer Arthur Lyons
observed, "In joining the Church of Satan, these people not only
managed to inject a little mastery and exoticism into their otherwise
banal lives, they achieved a mastery of their own fates by the
practice of ritual magic."/l6
If LaVey's ideology is contrived of fiction, symbolism, and a
deliberate antidote to Establishment Christianity, and Crowley
retailed in what we now call New Age thinking, why the law enforcement
interest? Cult officers focus on these two because they have
published, because their philosophies are within easy reach. They
make easy targets. One article in a law enforcement journal even
pointed out that LaVey uses a symbolic Satan and noted in context that
the Church of Satan condemns sex crimes including bestiality, but
nevertheless stated, "It seems contradictory for a group to encourage
all forms of sexual expression, and at the same time place parameters
on that activity."/l7
Again, in the fashion of Larry Jones, law enforcers can't resist
criticizing others beliefs. Consider, for a moment, law enforcers
teaching cult seminars by parading books by LaVey, Crowley, and
others, noting the dangerous ideas these books represent. But what is
this? Is this crime prevention? Is crime prevention served by
providing officers with lists of dangerous books? If we wanted to
alert officers to books that might incite people to slug it out, we'd
also have to list The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Mein Kampf by Adolf
Hitler, the Bible, the Koran, to name a few.
But some officers claim that books on the occult have some
inherent force of evil, that weak-minded people may pluck criminal
ideas from them. One law enforcement book went so far as to state,
"[The authors] urge you to continue your education in [satanism] by
reading as widely as possible on the subject. But note: intense study
of resource books and materials by occult sources or practitioners is
hazardous. Preferred is studying overviews and synopses. . .Study
and/or experimentation are to be avoided."/l8 I have tried to show
with Crowley and LaVey that their own purported guides to the occult
hold no particular power or force other than what readers may impart
to them. The satanic or occult books that cult officers use for
show-and-tell either derive from scholarly sources or represent modern
invention. Few can be traced to some remote, pre-Christian occult
mysticism.
Cult officers not only cite LaVey and Crowley as some compendia
of occult knowledge rising from the dim horizon of ancient history,
but also cite as dangerous the occult symbols on rock music albums,
the songs' lyrics, and the fantasy characters that appear in the
popular game, Dungeons and Dragons. Yet as the game's designers take
pains to point out, the D&D gods derive largely from the imaginations
of game designers and the encyclopedia./19
Cult investigators have constructed four general levels of
satanic or cult involvement. The outer, or fourth level, finds the
"dabblers," mostly children, teenagers, or young adults who might play
with satanic bits and pieces. Supposedly Dungeons and Dragons, heavy
metal rock music, Ouija boards and the like rope kids into the occult.
Investigator Lightfoot, like many other cult cops, maintains that
satanic messages are present in rock lyrics when the music is played
backwards. But cult officers don't distinguish between the presence
of messages and their efficacy; they do not critically discuss what
effect the messages have nor agree on their actual wording, and never
describe how kids' brains are supposed to assimilate the messages
anyway. No studies prove the efficacy of subliminal messages, satanic
or otherwise.
Cult officers strike at Dungeons and Dragons as the essential
evil where kids are concerned, estimating that anywhere from 95 to l50
documented deaths of children exist that can be attributed to the
game. While similar figures appear in the press, the fact is that
outside of reporters' suggestions, no documented killing or suicide
exists directly attributable to playing the game. No reputable
authority has ever detected a causal link between playing D&D and
anything but a healthy adventure in the creative imagination.
The next level of involvement includes self-styled satanists, the
killers such as John Wayne Gacey or Henry Lee Lucas. These men,
social isolates and psychopaths, invented or borrowed satanic
trappings to justify their crimes. This idea is the single most
plausible component of the cult crime model: sociopaths or psychopaths
may choose an ideology that helps them reconcile their crimes with
their conscience.
The second level of satanists we have already discussed, the
organized, public groups such as the Church of Satan or the Temple of
Set. While cult officers are forced to admit that such groups have
small, fluid memberships with doctrines that oppose violence and
crime, the same officers recommend placing them under surveillance
because they may harbor criminals or breed psychopaths. By this
logic,then, we will have to do the same for most Christian churches.
What's more, no one even knows how many cults exist in the United
States. Estimates vary from 500 groups on up, with total memberships
from l50,000 to over ten million. Which brings us back to the word
"cult" and its lack of definition.
What and who are cults? Notoriously lacking from cult seminars
is the voice of the "non-traditional belief." Law enforcers declare
themselves experts in and give seminars on groups whose members
they've never met. They interpret signs and symbols of groups that
may not even exist. The scholar of comparative religion Gordon Melton
has noted that, "The term 'cult' is a pejorative label used to
describe certain religious groups outside of the mainstream of Western
religion."/20 Melton's approach to surveying cults, which he has
published in The Encyclopedia of American Religions and Encyclopedic
Handbook of Cults in America, prefers to remove bias and terms other
beliefs as "alternative religions." I refer you to Melton for further
discussion of cults, sects, churches, their definitions and
attributes.
Finally we reach the last level of satanic involvement, the real
evil meanies, the traditional satanists. These folks belong not to
different denominations of the same thing but rather to an
international megacult tightly organized in a clandestine hierarchy.
Dale Griffis has been selling law enforcers on the model of these
people as driven by mind control methods, slavishly participating in
cult ceremonies including sexual assault, mutilation, murder, to name
the most important activities. These satanists' belief in magic
propels them to sacrifice people: they release some primal energy
force through killing which enriches the participants. The abuse of
children itself is a form of worship. While these satanists use their
own children for sacrifice, satanists sometimes collect their lambs
for slaughter at daycare centers. For example, Lightfoot noted one daycare center at which parents
dropped off their kids at the start of the day, whereupon the daycare
staff herded the kids onto busses, took them to an airfield, flew them
to a ceremonial site, used them for rituals, sexually assaulted them
and so on, then returned them to the daycare center by the end of the
day. The parents picked up their kids, none the wiser.
Supposedly, then, we have much to fear from these satanists. Ex-
deputy sheriff Thomas Wedge, who makes a living giving cult seminars,
says, "It doesn't matter what you and I believe. It's what they
believe that makes them dangerous . . .For the first time, we in law
enforcement are dealing with something we can't shout at. . .can't
handcuff."/21 Larry Jones has echoed the same sentiment, even
pointing out that Christian police officers are particularly well
qualified to confront the menace. Cult officers say that the ranks of
secret satanists boast the intelligentsia of our society, hence the
moneyed power behind the rituals. Patricia Pulling, a mother whose
son committed suicide which she attributes to playing Dungeons and
Dragons and who founded Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons (BADD),
maintains that satanic ranks include "doctors, lawyers,
clergymen, even police."/22
Despite this large-scale conspiracy, police still have uncovered
no evidence of cults' murderous activities. Police say that the lack
of evidence owes to the cults' success: cultists eat bodies or
dispose of them without a trace. FBI's Ken Lanning has pointed out
many times that human history cannot produce a single example of any
large scale organized murder (on the order of 50,000 human sacrifices
a year, as some cult officers claim) without someone breaking ranks
sooner or later. No such enterprise has ever existed, one that can
commandeer so many people to carry out for so long thousands and
thousands of violent crimes. People in any group change their minds,
get jealous, build empires, develop rivalries, disagree, ally
themselves in factions. Why should satanists be any different?
Cult officers cite two prime examples of the work of traditional
satanists: cult survivors' stories and child abuse cases. Cult
survivors are the offspring of satanic parents bred to a life of abuse
and witnessed murders. The prototype survivor is Michelle Smith who,
with her psychiatrist husband, Lawrence Pazder, wrote Michelle
Remembers (l980). By her own admission, Smith endured a rough,
unhappy childhood with a violent, alcoholic father. After years of
psychotherapy with Pazder, a new story emerged. Without prompting,
Smith entered a trance in which she regressed to a childhood persona.
In that persona, she told of ceremonies she had witnessed replete with
black candles, black drapes, goblets, dismembered bodies, sexual
abuse, having dismembered baby limbs rubbed on her, imprisonment in a
snake-infested cage, confrontations with red spiders, and watching
satanists rend kittens with their teeth. And all of this through
the introduction of Michelle to satanism by her mother. Some curious
loose ends remain, though. Smith's father denied the incidents, Smith
loved her mother very much, as did her two sisters, not mentioned in
the book, who never witnessed any satanic involvement. One sister has
been deeply distressed at Smith's representation of her mother. Not mentioned either was the Catholic Pazder's divorce, Smith's
conversion as a Catholic and her own divorce in order to marry Pazder,
practices frowned upon by the Catholic Church, yet the book extols
Catholic ceremonies and ritual as a way to combat Smith's terror./23
Nevertheless, Pazder reacts to the lurid stories of his patient
thus: "'I happen to believe you. . .for many reasons . . .but mostly
for what I feel with you. It feels real. . .I think the way you are
expressing the experience is very touching. It is authentic as an
experience."/24 Remember, this is a psychiatrist's talk, not a police
officer's. Feeling the authenticity of Smith's experience may aid a
physician's clinical work. Police officers must approach such stories
differently. Smith is cited as a Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)
sufferer, a complex phenomenon that afflicts some genuinely abused
people, but not others. For a fuller clinical description consult the
DSM-IIIR, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
third edition, revised, l987. Recent research even reveals that
distinct physiological changes accompany personality changes in MPD
sufferers. Such changes include rapidly appearing and disappearing
rashes, welts, scars, switches in handwriting and handedness,
allergies, vision changes and even color blindness. Such symptoms
might easily confuse and alarm an investigator.
The preoccupation of cult officers with MPD sufferers presents
police with some contradictions. On the one hand, police cite the
growing number of cult survivor stories and their sameness as evidence
of the satanic underground (that is, people who have never met telling
identical tales). Yet most MPD sufferers, usually young women, do not
present verifiable stories. None has yielded physical evidence of
crime other than physiological symptoms which are part and parcel of
MPD anyway. Hypnosis for police purposes produces no results. MPD
sufferers can take years to interview to ascertain even a few facts.
But another interpretation of cult survivors' claims can be
offered. As Ken Lanning has noted, he has been unable to find
accounts by cult survivors of Smith-like tales before the publication
of her book. The mass media have fanned Smith's experience through
the tabloids and TV sets of the world, supplemented by the slasher
films and television shows that produce quite creative and believable
monsters. Some MPD sufferers describe ceremonies and rituals that can
only be traced to fiction since many of them have no historic
derivation.
Stories of ritual abuse (that is, abuse committed incidental to a
ritual as a form of propitiation, as cult officers use the term)
present no new phenomena, as folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand has
described in his popular books about urban legends, The Choking
Doberman (l984) and The Mexican Pet (l986). Stories of abduction and
mutilation of children, plus regular appearances of Satan pervade
European and American history. Brunvand describes urban legends as
"believed oral narratives," though not necessarily believed wholely by
their narrators all of the time. Some stories are rumor, or "plotless
unverified reports" as opposed to the legend, or the "traditional
believed story." Most importantly, "urban legends. . .often appear to
be 'new' when they begin to spread, but even the newest-sounding
stories may have gone the rounds before. A 'new urban legend,' then,
may be merely a modern story told in a plausible manner by a credible
narrator to someone who hasn't heard the story before, at least not
recently enough to remember it."/25
One can find abundant folklore literature--particularly the
dictionaries of folklore motifs--which contain all the satanic stories
that appear in the cult seminars, folklore with a very long history.
I'll give an example of a recurring urban myth the spreading of which
takes place every few years. A spurious police circular found its way
through South Carolina a few years ago telling of an LSD-impregnated
Mickey Mouse transfer, thus endangering children./26 Without
verifying the circular, the Pendleton, South Carolina, Police
Department warned the community about the transfers. After the public
sufficiently worried itself, someone checked out the source and found
it was bogus. The same story, with the same anonymous police circular,
recently traveled throughout New Jersey alarming citizens and
police./27
In some cases, police have tried to keep citizens from believing
macabre stories about garden variety violence. In Eloy, Arizona, a
murdered man turned up in a trash bin, having died of head injuries,
his throat slashed. Nevertheless, the police had been powerless to
stem local rumors which persisted in creating the story that the
victim had his chest opened up, his heart ripped out, his blood
sucked./28 In Roanoke, high school faculty and some law enforcers
have perplexedly tried to locate a gang of violent youths, The Posse,
to whom students attribute much violence and disruption, but the local
police have begun to suspect that the gang doesn't exist. The Roanoke
County Sheriff said, "All you have to do is get two kids talking at a
table in the cafeteria. Two other kids at the next table hear half
the conversation, and a rumor is spread."/29
Sociologist David Bromley of Virginia Commonwealth University
classifies such tales into three categories, one of which is the
subversion myth where many satanic tales fit. These myths are
"cautionary tales," stories that reveal tensions which "emanate most
directly from pervasive anxieties about dangers to children."/30
Another sociologist, Jeffrey Victor, tracked down satanic rumors in
western New York, stories which became widespread and publicly
accepted, stories Victor likened to a "collective nightmare."
Throughout the region, rumors of cult meetings, animal killings,
ritual drinking of blood, and an impending sacrifice of a "blond,
blue-eyed virgin" reached a peak of hysteria on Friday the thirteenth
of May, l988./31 In this case, the Jamestown, New York, Police
Department acted with remarkable restraint and insight and even
forestalled a mob bent on vengeance. The police headed off a group of
armed and angry citizens that showed up at a rumored cult site. But
another site, a warehouse rumored to harbor cult meetings, received
thousands of dollars in damage.
I'll give you another example of the police response to myth and
hysteria. The Allenstown, New Hampshire, Police Department received
reports a few months ago that six cats had been found hanging from a
tree, a decapitated dog turned up nearby, and the sound of drums could
be heard in a state park at night. A woman walking her dog came upon
what was described as a makeshift altar supporting a carcass of a
mutilated beaver. The beaver had been skinned. Another beaver turned
up, found upright surrounded by stakes. The police decided to turn to
cult officer Sandi Gallant, San Francisco Police, for help,
who--though in San Francisco and unable to inspect the
animals--interpreted the findings as indicative of satanic rituals.
Since the carcasses were found near May l, the cult officer said that
the recent Walpurgis Night, a satanic holiday, probably stimulated the
sacrifices. The sergeant in charge of the investigation worried about these
events, linking those who sacrificed animals to drug-taking, listening
to heavy metal music, a view confirmed by a local Baptist minister who
believed the devil responsible. The sergeant wanted to find the
satanic group behind this. Characteristically, he said, "Their freedom
of worship is protected. . .but we want to monitor them."/32 The next
day, the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader ran an editorial
which stated, "We have reached a sorry state of affairs when following
the Devil is defined as 'worship'. . ."/33
Within a few days, the mystery unravelled. In fact, no dead cats
were found in trees. The beavers were legally trapped in the state
park. Other dead animals reported by local residents were ones killed
on the road and stacked off the road for later pick-up./34 But even
though the phenomena turned out to be mundane, other law enforcers
didn't remember the follow-up news story but only the original news
report. After the whole incident passed from the headlines, the mayor
of Manchester tried to ban the appearance of a heavy metal band in
town because they would stimulate more incidents similar to what
occurred in Allenstown, forgetting that the Allenstown events had
non-satanic explanations./35
In another incident, a few years back in Brown County, Indiana, a
New Age group called the Elf Lore Family (ELF) arranged to have a
public gathering at a public park. ELF posters around town mentioned
camping, feasts, dancing, "New Age workshops," "bardic tales and
tunes," and other similar events. Many of the organizers described
themselves as witches and even distributed "witchcraft fact sheets" to
explain their beliefs./36 So far, no problem. But by the ELF weekend
gathering, a local church group had planned a strategy to proselytize
the ELFers, and the local sheriff's department became involved through
a deputy who had attended a cult seminar given by two Indiana state
police officers, self-proclaimed experts, who had in turn received
their information from cult consultant Dale Griffis. Following the
weekend, the local newspaper reported the event under the title,
"Satanic rites held at Yellowwood Forest," the article discussing
animal sacrifice, drinking blood in rituals, nude dancing, or dancing
by people in "devil-like costumes." Finally, the ELFers were seen
eating "raw flesh." The news reporter used one source for the
article: the deputy sheriff. Neither a local Baptist minister nor
the park conservation professionals nor the ELFers at all could
corroborate the sacrifices, blood drinking, nude dancing, or any of
the other sensationalistic claims of the local sheriff's department.
The article dutifully noted, though, that "[the sheriff's department]
could not stop the satanic rites because of the Constitutional right
to freedom of religion that protected the worshippers." But the
ELFers are not satanic. The satanism was created by the
seminar-trained police who spent much time and effort watching the
ELFers simply because they were not Christians celebrating in a
conventional way. The sheriff's department, by feeding information to a gullible
journalist, created a new myth: the news article then becomes a cult
seminar handout proving that satanic activity is rampant in the USA.
An Indiana University folklorist who documented the event noted, "The
influence of second-hand opinions proved especially strong among the
law enforcement element." The preconceptions of the law enforcers
colored their perceptions of an innocuous camp-out, and thereby
created a legend.
Thus far I have mentioned cult expert Dale Griffis in several
contexts. Although Griffis appears to act out of concern for
improving law enforcement's handling of bizarre crimes, and although
he certainly earns no big bucks on the lecture circuit, his effort
misleads and confuses. Griffis, a retired police captain, used the
title, "Ph.D." and other cult cops refer to him as "Doctor Griffis."
In truth, Griffis holds a doctorate from Columbia Pacific University
in California, a non-accredited non-resident campus that offers
low-cost degrees with only several months of effort (according to the
CPU brochure and detailed by John Bear in How to Get the Degree You
Want, Ten Speed Press, l982, and by William J. Halterman, The Complete
Guide to Nontraditional Education, Facts on File, New York, l983).
Primarily, CPU offers credit for life experiences, the type of
institution currently under scrutiny by Senate Bill l90 in California
which aims to tighten licensing standards for such "diploma
mills" (detailed in Community Crime Prevention Digest for May, l989,
p. 8). Griffis's degree is in law enforcement, based on a doctoral
thesis, Mind Control Groups and Their Effects on the Objective of Law
Enforcement, which carries no date and is even signed by Griffis with
his title, "Ph.D."
The dissertation reveals Griffis's cult pitch: almost a fourth
of it contains an ad misericordiam argument that his message is
grounded in sincerity, fidelity to the police brother-and sisterhood,
and concern for our posterity. The following statement is typical:
"I am a veteran member of the 'Thin Blue Line'. that which lies
between chaos and democracy" (p. 88). Griffis relies heavily on the
work of Robert Jay Lifton (Thought Reform and the Psychology of
Totalism) to argue a priori that cults, nebulously defined,
deceptively recruit members, place them under control of a charismatic
leader, and direct members to commit crimes. To Griffis, the link
between the existence of cults and crime is also a priori.
Griffis even takes excursions into psychology with odd results: "Let
it be noted that a common factor among recruits is that a high
percentage suffer from sub-clinical depression" (p. 52). Griffis does
not substantiate this assertion, but as proof he offers that
"recruiters carry out their assignments with trained skills and
precise detail. One only has to travel through O'Hare Airport to see
this in operation" (p. 53). Of the estimated 3000 cults in the USA
(Griffis's estimate, not substantiated), he asserts that "the
interest, purpose, magnitude and ultimate goals differ from cult
to cult; however, all demand in common devotion, obedience, and
ultimately, submission" (p. 5l). Again, Griffis offers such
statements repeatedly but without substantiation, no critical review
of pertinent literature on cults, nor with any professional
correspondence with academic experts. And his dissertation has become
his cult seminar platform. While the CPU degree might academic
standing somewhere, officers attending cult seminars point to Griffis
as the man with credentials in both worlds--the police front line and
the academy--to justify his role as cult ideologue.
I can't discuss myths and legends without referring to the
Matamoros drug killings. When the news accounts first appeared in
early April concerning the discovery of bodies on a Mexican ranch near
the Texas border, the Associated Press dubbed the killings "satanic."
That adjective graced many newspaper headlines for weeks. Now,
information concerning the murders continues to be ambiguous because
we have depended on second- and third-hand information about them.
The Mexican police promptly placed their suspects before cameras to
tell gruesome tales. We do not know much of the backgrounds of the
murderers in the drug gang, but recent evidence suggests that the drug
leader, Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, hobnobbed with the Mexican city
elite, providing drugs and limpias, or folk "cleansing rites,"
recruited assistants from the northern Mexican prosperous families,
mostly young adults./37 Apparently, Constanzo did not employ the
semi-literate impoverished Mexicans from the northern part of their
country, the same type recruited for other criminal activities: gun
and stolen vehicle running and herding illegal aliens into the USA.
Where does the satanic label come from? Rex Springston, a
reporter for the Richmond News Leader, decided to trace the label. In
talking to the American investigators cited in the news releases, he
learned that none of them classified the murders as satanic. Only the
Texas attorney general's assistant responded that the attorney general
might have used the label early on. So officials don't view the
killings as satanic. Officials now think that most of the murders
victimized rival drug dealers, not innocent people snatched off the
street. The drug gang leader, Constanzo, according to current
thinking, was a Charles Manson who gathered whatever symbolism and
ritual he could to intimidate rivals and his own lackeys. So he
invented his own symbology (not a belief system, which he did not
invent) to justify his behavior, to offer his workers protection which
he was in fact powerless to provide, to convince people to risk their
lives to become involved with drug dealing where the monetary rewards
for most are meager. Matamoros represents violence associated with
the drug trade with a hint of borrowed religious ritual, nothing more.
No evidence exists--insofar as details of the incident have been made
public--of any participation by Constanzo and his group in satanic
activities, involvement with a satanic organization, or human
sacrifice to propitiate the devil. By April l7, even the mass media
had begun to focus on the incident as drug-related, not satanic,
almost one week after the first reports of the killings./38
But although the Matamoros story is far from over, at least one
local police investigator still misrepresents the events, thus
creating urban myth. Detective Don Rimer, Virginia Beach Police,
recently gave a seminar citing the Matamoros killings as satanic.
Rimer was quoted in the newspapers as saying that the Matamoros
killings "prove that human sacrifices by Satanists are not simply
'urban myths.'"/39 "'Now, those people who talked about the 'urban
myth' and asked, 'Where are the bodies?' are silent," the officer said
to a citizens' group. Well, the Matamoros business displaces nothing
about urban myth, proves nothing about satanism, and should be
properly viewed in the context of Mexican border drug running and its
associated violence.
The central aspect of satanic crime which has seared the American
conscience is child abuse. Beginning with a daycare center in
Manhattan Beach, California and another in Jordan, Minnesota, in l983,
stories of ritual abuse of children in daycare centers has spread to
over l00 American cities. At the core of such stories, one finds
stories by children. The same stories, uncorroborated by physical
evidence or adult testimony, have resulted in indictments of innocent
people, their careers forfeited to the publicity. In the most
comprehensive and critical examination of such investigations to date
(conducted by the Memphis, Tennessee, Commercial Appeal),investigative
journalists found that the system of prosecution fostered the spread
of unfounded allegations. One social worker observed, "During the
course of the investigation, virtually every name that was ever
mentioned became a suspect." Alarmed at the manner in which parents
and therapists prompted and rewarded children's testimony, a
psychiatrist commented, "If [the investigator] got a child to the
point where they believe [the child] helped kill a baby or eaten
flesh, I want to know whether you're a child abuser."/40
The Jordan case, for example, began with a single child's
allegation of molestation and quickly thereafter 60 children began to
claim the same abuse. The phenomena reported by the children included
being bussed to ceremonial sites, digging up coffins, dismembering
bodies, being thrown into shark pits, cooking and eating babies, nude
photography, and having foreign objects inserted into a rectum or
vagina, performing oral sex on daycare staff, and sacrificing animals.
In the end, though, after heated accusations, the FBI concluded that
the children made up the stories of murders and noted that the
investigations had been so flawed that people truly guilty of child
molesting may have gone free.
So what has happened? Many states conduct trials unhampered by
rules of evidence that apply to adults: all states have dropped the
requirement that children's stories be corroborated by evidence or
adults' testimony. Therefore an opportunity develops to suggest the
story to the child: their stories evolve through coaxing until a
coherent narrative emerges. Psychiatrist and child therapist Dr. Lee
Coleman has noted that
[i]n all too many cases, the interviews with the
children are horribly biased. The interviewers assume,
before talking with the child, that molestation has
taken place. The accused persons are assumed to be
guilty, and the thinly disguised purpose of the inter-
view is to get something out of the child to confirm
these suspicions. It is all too easy, with repeated
and leading and suggestive questions, to get a young
child so confused that he or she can't tell the
difference between fact and fantasy./41
Dr. Coleman provided the Commercial Appeal with the
following interview between a social worker and a four-year-old:
Interviewer: What's Miss Frances doing while children are in the
other
room?
Child: I don't know.
Interviewer: Come here. . .I want to talk to you a second. (Boy's
name), you do know. Look at me. Look at me. You know about the
secret. But see, it's not a secret any more, because (another child)
told us about it and (another child) told us about it, and your
parents want you to tell us. . .You can be a very good boy and tell us
about it. . .
Child: I don't know.
Interviewer: Yes, you do. [Later, near the end of the interview, the
social worker asks if the same things happened to the boy that were
reported by other children.)
Interviewer: She did it to you, too.
Child: No. She didn't do it to me.
Interviewer: It's not your fault, OK?
Child: She didn't do it to me.
Interviewer: Yes, she did; yes, she did (stroking the child's head).
Some therapists and counselors--and police officers--inject into
these cases an ideology that presumes that children don't lie about
abuse. We have even created aids to encourage and facilitate
children's stories. Anatomically-correct dolls have proven useful,
but not exclusively so: the dolls themselves can constitute leading
questions by suggesting abuse, or the dolls themselves may have bodies
so disproportionate and bizarre that children can't use them. And
recently two psychologists have estimated that "for every person
correctly identified as a child sexual abuser through such techniques,
four to nine are incorrectly identified."/42 In abuse cases, children
may undergo up to fifty interviews, most by parents and therapists
even before the police become involved. Again, the same parents or
therapists feel that the children must be believed because they have
neither the experience nor vocabulary to talk about sexual
molestation. But the parents and therapists ask leading questions,
offer rewards, and refuse to accept children's denials that
molestation occurred: the kids are called "dumb" for not admitting to
abuse.
Law enforcers must remember that they themselves and the
therapists pursue different goals in these investigations. Therapy
overcomes trauma; police investigate offenses for prosecution. Of
danger to law enforcement, one criminal justice academic noted that if
in interviews, "children denied victimization, then it was assumed
they were concealing the truth, which must be drawn out by some
inducement or reinforcement. The therapeutic process thus became an
infallible generating mechanism for criminal charges. . ."/43 Police
must not simply believe the children; rather, as FBI's Lanning urges,
police must listen. Don't ignore the possibility of bona fide
molestation by losing a case in the pursuit of Satan.
So where do we stand? Child abuse does exist. Some people
commit violent crimes while invoking the power of Satan. Such people
may act with others. But law enforcers cannot demonstrate the
existence of a widespread satanic conspiracy: the evidence doesn't
exist. No evidence links fantasy role-playing games to teen suicides.
No evidence supports the idea that daycare workers subject children to
abuse in propitiation of Satan. No evidence exists supporting the
literal truth of cult survivors' claims. Officers can and should
stick to the Constitutional basics: they investigate irregular
behavior based on a well-founded and legally-defined reasonable
suspicion; they arrest based on probable cause. No one expects
police to ignore pentagrams drawn in blood at a homicide scene:
complete documentation of crime scenes has always been the rule. But
we have no justification for carrying on unwarranted explorations of
the beliefs of the unpopular few, or from waving books at seminars and
pronouncing them dangerous.
Law enforcers have taken on the role of religious theorists. As
Gordon Melton observed sadly:
The Satanic literature has been carried almost
totally by the imaginative literature of non-
Satanists--primarily conservative Christians who
describe the practices in vivid detail in the
process of denouncing them./44
Law enforcers do have tools adequate to do their jobs, if not always
the money to buy them. Advances in criminal investigation from the
Automated Fingerprint Identification System or from DNA typing promise
to revolutionize the business. The FBI's serial crime psychological
profiling model incorporates, without the satanic bias, the proper
questions to ask to correlate a possible criminal ideology to
ritualized (that is, committed similarly on multiple occasions)
violent crimes.
In short, law enforcers must remove the "cult" from cult crime
and do their jobs accordingly. Thank you.
References Cited
1/Bromley, David G., and Shupe, Anson D., Jr. The Tnevnoc Cult.
Sociological Analysis, 40(4): 36l-366. l979
2/Clark, J.R. The macabre faces of occult-related crime. Law
Enforcement
News, XIV (279, 280). October 3l, November l5, l988.
3/Hyer, M. Blue Knights and the Black Art. The Washington Post,
April l8,
l989.
4/Clark, op. cit. 5/File l8 Newsletter, IV (89-l), l989. 6/Lyons,
Arthur.
Satan Wants You. The Mysterious Press, New York, l988, p. l49.
7/Kahaner,
Larry. Cults That Kill. Warner Books, New York, l988, p. l46.
8/Ibid., p. l48.
9/File l8 Newsletter, op cit.
10/ American Library Association, Office of Intellectual Freedom,
Memorandum, January/February, l988. 11/File l8 Newsletter, III (88-3),
l988, p. 7.
l2/LaVey, Anton. The Satanic Bible. Avon Books, New York, l969, p.
26.
l3/Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. Samuel Weiser, Inc., York
Beach, Maine, l976 (reprint), p. 9.
l4/Lyons, p. lll.
l5/Moody, E.J. Magic therapy: an anthropological investigation of
contemporary Satanism. In I.I. Zaretsky and M.P. Leone (eds.),
Religious
Movements in Contemporary America. Princeton University Press, New
Jersey, l974.
l6/Lyons, p. ll6.
l7/Barry, R. J. Satanism: The Law Enforcement Response. The
National
Sheriff, XXXVIII (l): 39, l987.
l8/Smith, Lindsay E. and Walstad, Bruce A. Sting Shift. Street-Smart
Communications, Littleton, Colorado, l989, p. l04.
l9/Stackpole, Michael. Game Manufacturers' Association. Personal
communication, l988.
20/Melton, J. Gordon. Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America.
Garland
Publishing Company, New York, l986, p.3.
21/Hyer, op. cit.
22/Briggs, E. Satanic cults said to entice teens with sex, drugs.
Richmond Times Dispatch, March 5, l988.
23/Things that go bump in Victoria. Maclean's, October 27, l980.
24/Smith, M. and L. Pazder. Michelle Remembers, Congdon and Lattes,
Inc.,
New York, l980, p. l93-4.
25/Brunvand, Jan H. The Choking Doberman and Other "New Urban Legends"
W.
W. Norton, New York, l984, p. 4-5.
26/Ibid., p. l62.
27/Kolata, G. Rumor of LSD-Tainted Tattoos Called Hoax, The New
York Times, December 9, l988.
28/Satanism reports mostly rumor, detectives say. Tucson Citizen
(Arizona), December l9, l988.
29/Hammack, L. Fears grow as rumors spread. Times and World News
(Roanoke, Virginia), November 25, l988.
30/Bromley, David. Folk Narratives and Deviance Construction:
Cautionary
Tales as a Response to Structural Tensions in the Social Order. In C.
Sanders (ed.), Deviance and Popular Culture, in press, p. ll.
31/Victor, Jeffrey S. A Rumor-Panic About a Dangerous Satanic Cult in
Western New York. New York Folklore, XV (l-2): 23-49, l989.
32/Recounted in Noonan, Veronica. Satanic Cult Killed Animals in
Allenstown, Police Say, Union Leader (New Hampshire), May 3, l989.
33/Satanism in NH. Editorial in the Manchester Union Leader, May 4,
l989.
34/Zitner, Aaron. N.H. police chief discounts alleged signs of cult
activity, The Boston Globe, May 5, l989.
35/Zitner, Aaron. Cult scare seen as overrated, The Boston Globe, May
28,
l989.
36/Guinee, William. Satanism in Yellowwood Forest: The
Interdependence of
Antagonistic World Views. Indiana Folklore and Oral History, l6(l):
l-30,
l987.
37/Miller, Marjorie, and Kennedy, J. Michael. Potent Mix of Ritual
and
Charisma. Los Angeles Times, May l6. Also, Debbie Nathan,
investigative
reporter, El Paso, l989.
38/Applebone, Peter. On North-South Line, Violence Grows, The New York
Times, April l7, l989.
39/Crocker, Bonnie. Detective warns of Satanism, Daily Press (Newport
News, Virginia), June l0, l989.
40/Charlier, T., and S. Downing. Justice Abused: A l980s Witch--Hunt,
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee). Six-part series printed
in January, l988.
41/Coleman, L. Therapists are the real culprits in many child abuse
cases, Augustus, IX(6): 7-9, l986.
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