The Satanic Panic - Historical, Mythological & Social Origins - How it Nearly Destroyed MY Life

through the 1980s and 90s a shocking social panic ignited in the united states before spreading through the rest of the world here law enforcement psychiatrists social workers and occult experts uncovered a vast satanic conspiracy which predated upon hundreds if not thousands of children at daycare's infiltrated heavy metal music it lured in teenagers through the role-playing game dungeons and dragons and all of this was thought to be organized by a grand network of satanic covens presided over by shadowy forces this satanic network organized the worst imaginable crimes all in the interest of furthering their own power through allegiance to the great rebel angel the panic filled lurid paperbacks with tales of satanic ritual abuse it populated daytime talk shows with imagery of inverted pentagrams painted in dank basements and was the topic of top psychological conferences in support of the rise of religiously motivated occult experts to advise law enforcement all of which resulted in constant bullying for social non-conformists hundreds of arrests prosecution guilty verdicts and long prison time even death sentences along with accusations which ruined people's lives and livelihoods for hundreds and thousands the results of the satanic panic are even more shocking when considering that no evidence and even evidence to the contrary of such claims has come to light in the now 40 years that have passed feeding on centuries of demonological lore set into the social and economic degradation of the last quarter of the 20th century the satanic panic had a decisive cultural impact elements of which appear to be re-emerging in the new religious movement of the qiunon and the popularity of the character of eddie munson in the recent season of stranger things because in the 80s and 90s you either knew an eddie munson or you were an eddie munson the satanic panic also very nearly destroyed my life if you're interested in magic hermetic philosophy alchemy kabbalah or the history of the occult make sure to subscribe here to esoterica and check out my numerous other contents on topics and esotericism including curated playlists on various topics also if you want to support this work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and esotericism here on youtube for free i hope you maybe consider taking a look at my patreon maybe consider a one-time donation to the project or you could even use the super thanks option down below the video now let's explore the satanic panic its ancient origins and its survival i'm dr justin sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music] hegemony or dominant social power comes with a range of prices one of which is anxiety even with christian hegemony established in medieval europe institutional religious power experienced a constant anxiety of heresy apostasy and heterodoxy while christianity was meant to supersede judaism and be the final revelation until the second coming of christ the continued existence of the jewish people seems like an indictment of that very supersession and the rise and success of islam an indictment of the inevitability of that christian endgame not only was jewish survival itself theologically vexing but the jew increasingly became more and more than just an other of christianity but a very near enemy of christendom itself here the genealogy of conspiracy mutated as a weapon against the jews from anti-judaism to anti-semitism hellenistic diatribes against jewish superstition took the form of claims that jews engaged in annual human sacrifice the pagan romans had spread rumors that the early christians engaged in incestuous orgies and ritual cannibalism in their nocturnal superstitious rituals among the tombs of the dead these rumors were then co-opted ironically enough by early christians to slander their religious competitors those that we now call the gnostics by the 12th century these accusations further mutated and began to appear in england that christian children were being ritually murdered by the jews in the early version of this narrative in an international group of jews decided which christian would be killed as a part of rituals to return the jews to their ancestral homelands other versions of this have that the killing was done as a ritual mockery of the torture and execution of jesus the mature version of this narrative involves the murder of a christian child typically in order to use their blood in the preparation of the ritual matzah bread for passover pesach while the institutional church to its credit did attempt to prevent extrajudicial mob violence this conspiracy theory in the subsequent programs would begin in england and spread quickly to the rest of the continent evidence for such international ritual killings by jews when rarely produced was you guessed it inevitably extracted through unimaginable torture now known as the blood libel this would be the first truly international conspiracy theory which when combined with the elaborated theory of witchcraft would form the mythological core of the satanic panic to come centuries later though the blood libel against jewish communities would continue through the centuries till now somehow unabated a new mutation in the q anon new religious movement that claims that political and social elites sometimes globalists which is just a riff on the old international jew canard this idea that they are extracting adrenochrome from children in forms of ritual satanic abuse this is simply a contemporary variant of this very ancient anti-semitic conspiracy theory the theological anxieties mentioned earlier were met with political and social instability and into those dreadful margins came war and inquisition even against fellow christians here came the persecution of heterodox christians such as the waldensians whose insistence on radical apostolic poverty threatened the entirety of the church aristocracy it was horrifically extended into the wars to root out what the medievals called the albigensians or the manikins who we now call the kathars of southern france the area around languedoc upon whom the same old slanders of incestuous orgies and cannibalism would be heaped the massacre at besier in 1209 claimed the lives of thousands with the so-called heretics being indistinguishable from the rest of the population one crusader is said to have remarked caideos dominos them all the lord will know his own tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered and subjected to trial and torture during the war in the 20-year long inquisition that followed you may be surprised to learn that an emerging scholarly position now holds that no such cathars at least as an institutional rival to the medieval church ever even existed a tiny few of those tortured and massacred were perhaps heterodox christians maybe duelists of a certain kind though yet they were christian while the rest were simply regular medieval people caught in a religious territorial dispute that cost them their lives the kathars were as the emergent position argues invented in the minds of inquisitioners and then further discovered in the tortured confessions of those accused as such finally in the theological economic and social anxieties of the period following the black death emerge a new kind of heretic the witch in this theory what is now called the elaborated theory of witchcraft as developed in the minds of inquisitors and jurists theologians and philosophers of the late medieval world and to some degree the early modern period held that a new woman-led heretical sorcery sect had appeared in europe marked by entering into a pact or covenant with the devil and thus fundamentally this was apostasy from christianity to secure this covenant there were sexual relations with the devil and various demons aerial flight for the purposes of attending a sabbat or a synagogue of satan which again a little anti-semitism in there which is presided over by satan himself at which point the initiates enter into said pact typically by signing their name in blood followed by incestuous and promiscuous sex remember that back from earlier the general practice of maleficent magic the slaughter of fetuses and babies remember that whole eaten babies part cannibalism and various means for preventing human beings from procreating whose aim the entire aim of this heretical sex so-called was to undermine christendom as part of the devil's ongoing war with god in fact by the mid-15th century this theory had become positively apocalyptic and was arguing that the new witch heresy was actually the final attempt on the part of the devil to forestall his impending doom by sending human beings down a spiral of sin and crime as a kind of final outrage against god but also the way of delaying the apocalypse regardless the elaborated theory of witchcraft as it is called now while it varied from region to region or writer to writer had pretty much coalesced by about 1500 and thus set the stage for the frenzied persecutions which would follow resulting in the deaths of around 40 to 60 000 people mostly women up to around 1750. that's not counting the people simply accused imprisoned tortured stripped of their lands reputations and their human dignity remains unknown no one knows how many people that was but again what's clear from the evidence of hundreds of years of scholarship is that virtually all of those people subject to the wish trials they were just christians and not an international conspiracy of satanic witches or pagan survivals from antiquity they were just innocent christians again with the witch like the gnostic or the cathar they were a fantasy of demonologists reinforced by confessions had at torture the ascendancy of the mercantile banking classes and the rise of the enlightenment with its focus on reason evidence-based critical thinking the rejection of dogma individual rights and the shift toward materialist naturalism the separation of religion and politics a la spinoza did much to stop the objective spread of these mythological tropes and the judicial and extrajudicial violence that had accompanied them for centuries jews would eventually gain civil rights religious difference was eventually tolerated and the presumption of innocence of the accused meant that the procedures and evidence would determine guilt with torture finally finally disappearing from jurisprudence officially and unofficially of course none of this happened perfectly even up to this day but in light of what i've just discussed it's at least substantial progress and any kind of post-modern cynicism about progress and meta-narratives they can be damned in my opinion that's real progress but there's no denying that the mythological substratum the religious or social other as enemy the international conspiracy against christendom or the west and the specifically satanic elements of sorcery and child sacrifice that mythological substratum remained more or less totally intact as a kind of meme unit and as post-world war ii america began to spiral into social political and economic crisis it would re-emerge as a satanic panic of course the first great other in the post-war period was communism and the house of committee on un-american activities and senator joseph mccarthy laid the public groundwork for wide scale conspiratorial thinking and along with the second red scare came additional conspiratorial comorbidities as i call them such as the idea that fluorinated water was used for mind control or that the polio vaccine was a red plot to weaken the population for a future communist invasion yeah the anti-vaxxers they were also anti-polio vaccine because it made the reds yeah social and economic conditions would continue to weaken through the 1960s which saw the first explosions of the hippie subculture widespread experimentation with drugs and other mind-altering substances the rise in popularity of the new religious movement along with the disaster of the vietnam war greatly weakening the idea of american world supremacy the gay liberation movement the rise of the civil rights movement and the increasing stagnation of the us economy this period would also include the founding of the non-theist but highly publicized church of satan the tate labianca murders framed as a cult killing by the prosecution meant to induce a race war though that narrative has been subject to intense and reasonable doubt along with the general occult revival prominently featuring the religious thought of folks like alistair crowley along with the fertility nature-based new religious movement of wicca neither of which neither of which are in the least bit satanic nor linked with any criminal activity the 1973-1975 recession and the world oil crisis would signal the real stagnation to come in fact real wage growth in the u. s has been basically flat given inflation for this entire period up until now along with the 1980 through 82 recession this would see the worst u.

s unemployment since the great depression that figure by the way the one from the 1980 to 1982 recession that's only been matched this year in 2022 we are in a recession about like that no matter what anyone says further and in light of this real and perceived degradation of the social religious and economic stability of the us would see the rise of the moral majority this was a major foray of evangelical christians into politics as a block really greatly fostering a conservative reaction from the local social layer to the american presidency by the early 1980s it is into this complex social economic political and religious matrix of real perceived u. s degeneration in the final decades of the 20th century would come ancient legends of cultic sorcery witchcraft ritual abuse human sacrifice and an international network of satanists as a means to make sense of just that degeneration the satanic panic would truly emerge in 1980 with the publication of michelle remembers by the canadian psychiatrist lawrence poster just as a content warning the following couple sections detail the disturbing claims of so-called satanic ritual abuse in this decisively important volume pastor's patient and eventual wife wife can you marry ethics would come to recount how she was subject to what is now known as satanic ritual abuse from 1954 to 1955 in victoria british columbia michelle would allegedly uncover lurid details of torture sexual assault child and human sacrifice a horrifying body modification including having horns and a tail sewn onto her body before being ripped off being put into a cage with snakes being covered with various kinds of insects etc etc this satanic cult led by her own father allegedly was even once presided over by satan himself before michelle was saved by the miraculous intervention of the virgin mary and and jesus the memories of this horrifying abuse were repressed until being later unlocked through the rather unconventional unethical therapy of dr pastner including her therapeutic conversion to catholicism his religion by the way during one of her therapy sessions despite the numerous and horrible details no evidence has ever cooperated any of the claims made in this book her father denies such abuse ever took place her sisters who are never actually mentioned in the book danielle deny any such tales there's no record of her missing school to endure some of the rituals which in her telling of it went on for weeks at a time and of course there are no spikes in missing babies or children during that period and the gathering that she describes of hundreds of satanists in the forest would be pretty hard to disguise further the sessions themselves seem infused with leading questions including details that pastel may have actually picked up during his time in west africa and some of the rituals that he witnessed there along with the standard set of legends that survived from the middle ages in fact there seems to be good evidence that demonological lore is being interpolated back into some of these narratives michelle's account would be featured in people magazine prior to publication a very popular magazine it's like the kind of thing at the grocery store aisle where it attracted intense public attention something about this narrative grabbed the general population's imagination thus even prior to publication pastor gained a hundred thousand dollar advance in the 19 late 70s late early 80s on the hardback version and another 242 thousand dollars for the eventual paperback publication with both pasder and michelle who despite now both being catholic divorced their previous spouses to marry one another they became overnight occult experts and began appearing on a host of television shows to promote their book and by extension promote the idea of satanic ritual abuse without doubt michelle remembers became the standard narrative that served as the foundation for become a cottage industry of memory recovery practices in the emergent psychiatric communication network something that had a kind of beta testing in some of the recover memory stuff from the ufo phenomenon among this network of trained professionals would spread the idea of repressed memories containing narratives of widespread satanic ritual abuse these narratives then would go on to be publicized often on national television only for new cases to emerge as a now feedback loop began to develop and deepen confirmation bias leading questions questionable forms of therapy and the administration of psychotropic drugs a total misunderstanding of the nature of memory social pressure not to question survivors of this and group think within the very psychiatric communication network even in academic settings surprise surprise group think in academia not only perpetuated both the notion of widespread ritual satanic abuse but also legitimated the accounts as confirmed by phds and licensed doctors without even a thought of recourse to you know corroborating some of these claims with this thing called evidence and ignoring always incontrovertible evidence to the contrary the michelle remembers virus was now loose within the psychiatric and psychological worlds and if it could spread an infect among university-trained doctors you can only imagine what it was about to do at every other layer of society among the earliest level panics occurred unsurprisingly near the location of the alleged events of michelle remembers that's the area around victoria british columbia in 1982 just two years after the publication of the book where reports emerged from an anonymous child abuse tip line that a baby would be kidnapped and sacrificed by a satanic cult on june 14th the threat which otherwise sounds well it sounds completely crazy was taken seriously probably because of the impact of michelle remembers and armed guards were placed in maternity wards of local hospitals rumors of animal sacrifice began to fly with animal remains found in a nearby forest taken as evidence because you know animals never die in the forest and things begin to get worse from there provincial level government alerted social workers to report any babies that may be in danger again a very vague warning as if social workers aren't already looking for babies that are maybe endangered this community panic fueled by local and national reporting began to spread all through the united states and canada by 1983 a mother suffering from severe mental illness accused the son of the owner of her child's daycare of sexual abuse what followed was the mcmartin preschool trial one of the most expensive public trials in u. s history by 1983 seven people were charged with nearly 350 counts of child abuse based on accusations of children informed by leading questions resulting not only in abuse allegations but also depictions of witches flying through the air rides and hot air balloons secret tunnels beneath the daycare where the abuse is said to have taken place the participation of the abuse by naked people from hollywood orgies at car washes and even airports secret pipes where the children would be flushed down to be abused before being cleaned up by their parents sounds like super mario brothers even action star chuck norris chuck norris was accused of participating in this abuse the trials lasted for seven years they cost 15 million dollars they they rendered no real evidence and resulted in no convictions it maimed the lives and reputations of those involved it traumatized those children and their parents so much so that there are still people out there looking for secret tunnels after the dust has settled all these years this wing of the satanic panic would ignite a wave of satanic ritual accusations against over a hundred different day care providers some of which are still serving present sentences on basically nothing evidence and inflammatory nonsense the effect of all this would only further entrench the very social problems that gave rise to the panic in the first place in fear of the prosecution many child care workers simply shuddered their facilities thus transferring that burden of child care onto women especially working-class women who were already experiencing the worst of the brunt of the recession that was fueling many of the elements that gave rise to the panic this again further entrenched the feedback loop in the social level that was giving rise to the panic in the first place by 1984 we see the first appearance of an idea of a teenage devil worshiping cult appear linked with nocturnal rituals which were probably just late night legend trips whereby youths go to local locations often graveyards or bridges in the folklore telling and reenacting cycle by 1985 this trope that the satanic cultists would target blonde blue-eyed children on halloween now introduced a specifically racial component into the panic combined with the emergent stranger danger narrative that was taking hold in the 1980s that same year local law enforcement publicly speculated there are at least 1500 secret satanists active in ohio alone and that many of them are homosexuals now introducing homophobia into the panic with the gay community already in the midst of the aids epidemic an epidemic already left to rage unchecked because of institutional homophobia on may 16 1985 the popular nationally syndicated show 2020 ran a segment entitled the devil worshipers greatly accelerating the national spread of the panic by now local media had reached the national level and the feedback loop deepened daytime tv shows would act as a kind of social multiplier effect with the most important being appearances on the oprah winfrey show and the sally jesse raphael show which would feature largely women recounting alleged abuse at the hands of the satanic cultists and those featuring accounts of alleged satanic cults throughout the entire country on the geraldo riviera show with the november 19th 1987 show proving absolutely decisive in the history of the satanic panic followed up on the next year with three three back-to-back episodes in the october of 1988 driving home the topics of teenage satanism or satanic breeders babies for sacrifice and devil worship while geraldo would eventually apologize in 1995 for the devastating impacts these rating seeking episodes would have they would likely prove to be the catalyst for some of the most intense periods of the panic costing many their dignity and even their freedom by the late 1980s the satanic panic had spread deeply into the united states in the first cases of daycare workers and teenagers would begin to appear in the united kingdom the netherlands and australia and beyond the satanic panic by the mid to late 80s had spread well beyond the borders of the united states and canada who were the victims in the satanic panic of course the first and foremost were vulnerable children these kids were the first victims of priming a form of leading questions and indirect suggestion by which the answers the answers to all of this was satanic ritual abuse would be fed to those children and the questioning arranged to reinforce the answers were satanic ritual abuse of course children are highly impressionable and highly imaginative and once suspected by social workers or religious zealots or law enforcement it was only a matter of time before it was discovered through the process of priming and the leading questions a technique actually developed all the way back by the inquisitors of the middle ages it was so effective it often didn't even need torture though there can be no denying that leading children to induce such horrors as their own abuse and then implanting that abuse as a form of memory then convincing their parents of such abuse in the process of prosecuting the alleged abusers actually only deepened and widened the circle of trauma further were the daycare providers themselves many of these people were lifetime professionals with a deep love of children being accused of horrible abuse ruined their lives emotionally financially legally and socially further victims were people suffering from mental illness whose very mental health professionals manipulated them through a range of therapies which included deepening their trauma by planting false memories of satanic ritual abuse as noted earlier many of these people never recovered with the professional and ethical failures of the psychological and psychiatric community never fully accounted for at least in the literature the next victims were those who stood at the edges of the local social systems and were made to be the scapegoats as a satanic panic fell upon their community the real and perceived social degeneration of religious social moral and economic life especially in the hardest hit working classes communities of the early 1980s required some social explanation the rise of the reagan and thatcher administrations were socio-political attempts to return to the glory hollywood years of a couple generations prior but social conditions actually continued to slip in those hardest hit communities this pent-up frustration anxiety and rage needed it needed an outlet unfortunately that outlet would be those to blame within their own communities for turmoil especially in the event of a shocking crime or unexpected tragedy that would push that community over the edge in fact a wide range of community disruptions would trigger a panic and those targeted were usually those at the social margins very often the initial targets would be teenagers that willfully rebelled against an otherwise increasingly conservative social system that rebellion took the form of alternative clothing and hairstyles listening to emergent heavy metal music often imbued with mythological and maybe sometimes satanic imagery the emergingly popular form of horror films rejecting or rebelling against standard religious i.