SHOW LINKS

• From Selling Satan, Jon Trott & Mike Hertenstein, Cornerstone Magazine, 1992: A generation of Christians learned its basic concepts of Satanism and the occult from The Satan Seller. Based on his alleged Satanic experiences, Warnke came to be recognized as a prominent authority on the occult, even advising law enforcement officers investigating occult crime. We believe The Satan Seller has been responsible, more than any other single volume in the Christian market, for promoting the current nationwide Satanism scare. Through the years, Cornerstone has received many calls from people who felt something was not right concerning Mike Warnke. After our lengthy investigation into his background, we found discrepancies that raise serious doubts about the trustworthiness of his testimony. We have uncovered significant evidence contradicting his alleged Satanic activity. His testimony contains major conflicts from book to book and tape to book, it contains significant internal problems, and it doesn’t square with known events. Further, we have documentation and eyewitness testimony that contradict the claims he has made about himself from Mike’s closest friends, relatives, and daily associates. These people knew the real Mike Warnke, who was not a drug fiend or a recruiter for Satanism. But he was a storyteller. Warnke produced a never-ending stream of tall tales. “He claimed he had some kind of white witchcraft background,” recalls Greg Gilbert. “He claimed he’d been reincarnated any number of times, that he was born in the Irish moors in the 1570s. He claimed he’d once been a Trappist monk.” In The Satan Seller, Warnke paints himself as a freshman guru, dispensing wisdom to an eager audience of disciples: It was difficult, at times, to know whether Warnke believed his own stories or not. “I don’t think it was in fun. I think he himself wanted to believe it,” says Phyliss Catalano. “I used to sit there and be embarrassed, because I’d think, How could somebody that young have done all these things? He’d done everything. And everything he told was with a straight face.” Phyliss’s mother, Mary Catalano,  saw Warnke on a regular basis when the gang gathered at the Catalano house. “He was a likable young man when he visited our house,” she says, “but anything brought up in conversation he’d done it. He said he’d been a Greek dancer. He said he’d been a professional ambulance driver. And he was a monk: he’d come to the house all dressed in black. Of course, we never believed him. We just said, `Boy, is he one big liar.’ ” 
  • • • In college, as he’d done in high school, Warnke continued to costume himself for his roles. Mike particularly liked being a priest. “I remember at Halloween he dressed up like a priest and went around pretending,” says Dawn. Yet another student, Tom Bolger, recalls Warnke boasting how he’d dressed as a priest and gone panhandling. Greg recalls Mike unsuccessfully using the priest bit to get drinks. Just before he published The Satan Seller, Warnke brought manuscript copies to his old high school friends Jeff Nesmith and Tim Smith, and asked them to sign affidavits swearing the events depicted were true. “My initial reaction to the book was, `Come on, Mike! This is poppycock!’” says Jeff. Tim Smith dropped out of college after only two months, but notes, “I had contact with Mike off and on all the way through the fall of 1965 until the summer of 1966.” Tim states he never saw Warnke with long hair or in the drug-induced emaciated state he claimed to be during that period. “Sign the affidavit? I told him, `Nope. Can’t do that.’ ” Warnke’s two high school buddies saw him sporadically throughout the year, but not every day. Yet Mike brought Jeff and Tim the affidavits, but not Lois, Greg, Dawn or the others. It does not speak well for the veracity of Warnke’s claims that he did not ask those who knew him on a daily basis in San Bernardino Valley College to endorse his story.
    • From Selling Satan: The Evangelical Media & the Mike Warnke Scandal, Jon Trott & Michael Hertenstein, 1993: As the record continued to play, Lois got the full update on Mike Warnke’s accomplishments from her friend Dawne. This was just Mike’s first album, Dawne said; he’s made several since. He’s traveled all over the world doing Christian comedy. And he’s written a best-selling book. “You wouldn’t believe how famous he is,” said Dawne. Wow, thought Lois. He really made something of himself. Lois hadn’t seen her old boyfriend Mike since the summer of 1966 when they’d broken off their engagement. The last thing she’d heard was Mike had married another girl from Valley College and they had a little boy. Lois had eventually lost track of everybody. It was strange hearing about all this wild stuff happening to somebody they had known. Lois’s college experience was long over before the sixties had started getting crazy. It was a relief to know Mike had made it out the other side. But something wasn’t quite right. Parts of the story Mike was telling were in conflict with what Lois knew about his college history. As she listened, Lois tried to reconcile her memories with what Warnke was saying about himself. She looked up at Dawne, who was watching her with an expression that made Lois feel uncomfortable. Her admiration for Mike suddenly turned to anger, an anger that grew as the implications of it all sunk in: this guy was telling lies; he was telling lies about her. He’d made records and gone around the world and become famous telling lies about Lois and her friends! 
      • Lois agreed to meet the Cornerstone reporters in a California restaurant.  As they waited at a table for Lois, the waitress noticed their copy of The Satan Seller on the table. “That’s one spooky book,” she said. “You’ve read this?” asked the trio. “Oh, sure. Mike Varnke came to my church. He told the story about how he put a hex on a bar and burned it to the ground. It gives me a chill just thinking about it.” This surreal conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Lois, who was pert and forty-something with a refreshing frankness. “My boyfriend told me I shouldn’t talk with you guys,” she confided. “But I had to. I’ve been waiting for a lot of years for someone to ask me what really went on with Mike Warnke.” Lois explained that she had long given up trying to connect the story as told by Warnke to what she knew had happened; besides, he’d always been a storyteller. “I used to catch him in lies all the time, stories that didn’t jibe. I didn’t want to believe that it wasn’t possible for him to have done everything. I didn’t want to believe that he was crazy.” As the waitress reappeared occasionally during the evening, she pretended-but not very convincingly-to appear uninterested in the strange conversation at her table. “If he said he was a Satanist between September of 1965 to June of 1966, he’s lying,” said Lois. “How could I not know my boyfriend was into Satanism?” The writers thumbed through The Satan Seller, reading passages out loud and letting Lois respond. How about, for example, the Mike in The Satan Seller who flew around the country on satanic business trips to San Francisco (where he allegedly met Anton LaVey); New York; and Salem, Massachusetts?” “How could he fly when he didn’t have two pennies?” asked Lois. “I don’t remember there ever being a time when we didn’t see or talk to each other every day. We went to movies together; I went to the country club with him in the mountains; we went to the beach. We used to go to Jay’s Coffee Shop in San Bernardino. That was the big thing. He introduced me to hot fudge sundaes. I spent the majority of that year with him.” Mike’s charm impressed Lois. “It was pretty fast that we said we were going to get married,” said Lois. “Within two or three months of school starting, he gave me a rose ring with a diamond in it. It cost sixty dollars. He had to make payments on it. I thought he really loved me. And I thought I loved him, too. I’m just glad I didn’t marry him.”
    • From Satan flirtation claim termed empty boast, Joe Maxwell, Tampa Bay Times, 1993: The Columbia Journalism Review may be an unlikely place for catching up with the Christian evangelical scene, but featured in the November/December issue are Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott, a sort of Woodward and Bernstein of the evangelical world, whose 12-page article in Cornerstone magazine is credited with exposing fraudulent claims by Mike Warnke, who bills himself as “America’s number one Christian comedian” and as an ex-Satanist who later turned his life over to Jesus Christ. Much of Warnke’s fortune is derived from books and tapes that feature tales of his Satanist past, a largely fabricated past, according to Hertenstein and Trott. Over a 20-year period, Warnke, 47, has made himself into an almost legendary figure. Trott and Hertenstein’s expose featured former college friends of Warnke, along with a variety of documents and photographs which counter his claims that at one point during his college years he was in bad health from drugs and alcohol and led a Satanist cult of about 1,500 people. The article on Warnke portrays him as a master storyteller who has trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy and further claimed that Warnke has lived a duplicitous life, asserting strong Christian convictions while engaging in adulterous relationships that contributed to three divorces. Since the Cornerstone article, Warnke has teetered on the verge of collapse. Fewer come to his concerts and and many Christian bookstores, including a chain operated by the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, have suspended sales of The Satan Seller, the book that put him on the map. Word, Inc., an evangelical publishing house, has halted the sale of his records. The same  journalists had previously exposed as fabricated the past life of a woman who said she was a survivor of satanic ritual abuse. The target of that 1989 article was Lauren Stratford, who had told her story in a book called Satan’s Underground. In an effort to save his ministry, Warnke has issued often-conflicting statements regarding allegations. Warnke’s attorney, Michael Conover, disputed as invalid Warnke’s remark to a concert audience that his ministry could be out of business by the end of October. In an interview for that article, Warnke said at least one of Cornerstone’s allegations _ that he had lied in saying he once led a Satanist cult of 1,500 _ was substantially true. In the same interview, Warnke and business partner Rose Warnke made more waves by contending that Cornerstone is part of a Satanist cult out to destroy Warnke’s ministry. Conover said the Warnkes had denied making those comments. https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1992/12/05/satan-flirtation-claim-termed-empty-boast
• From Soc.Religion.Christian, Eric Pement, Usenet, 1992: I’m one of the senior editors for Cornerstone magazine. We are responsible for publishing “Selling Satan: The Tragic History of Mike Warnke.” We are convinced that the information we published is accurate and thoroughly researched. The interviews are devastating to Mike Warnke’s claim to having been a high priest in Satanism. People who knew Warnke during the time of his alleged involvement, Warnke’s closest friends and family members, univocally tell a different story. Moreover, when you work out a chronology of events (try matching the book with a real calendar), you’ll find there isn’t time for Warnke to have done what he says he did. In an interview broadcast on “Focus on the Family” on March 16, 1985, Mike Warnke told the audience that when he was at the height of his satanic power, “I had white hair. It was down to my belt . I had six-inch [long] fingernails; I painted them black.” We published a photograph of Mike Warnke, dated April 30, 1966, next to his fiancee, Lois Eckenrod (never mentioned in “The Satan Seller”). He’s a straight, almost nerdy looking young man, whose hair is so short it doesn’t touch his ears. Normal looking hands and fingernails. Finally, in addition to internal conflicts (e.g., anachronisms) and external difficulties we must realize that Mike Warnke has NEVER produced one person who will (or can) admit to having been actively involved with him in Satanic worship. It doesn’t matter if they’re Christian now or not … if Mike had been leader of 1,500 Satanists, is it too much to expect that he could remember names of his chief lieutenants, underlings, or others he recruited or directed in his coven? Though we would expect him to be able to provide at least a few people who might be able to corroborate his story (even if they’re still Satanist, it’d be **something**), it appears that the reason he has not done so is because he CANNOT do so. He has lied to the Christian world about his background. We are all too well aware of the negative impact this will have on Christians who have trusted him, and on those in the secular world who are already looking for reasons to dump on Christianity. However, it is better to tell the truth than to piously hide a fraud and a deceiver for the sake of appearance. We **have** prayed for Mike and his family. Yes, Mike Warke has responded and the faxes are flying furiously around here. By and large, his response is to offer names of well known people who affirm that his story is true (first wife Sue, co-author Dave Balsiger, radio host Bob Larson, writer Johanna Michaelson), but there is no **positive** evidence in support of his testimony. Mike also claims to be submitted now to certain people, and to know god’s forgiveness for his past sins. Mike learned that we were doing this article many months ago. He didn’t contact us. We contacted him about a month before going to press, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with us without his attorney present. We’re Christian journalists, and we’re interested in truth, honesty, holiness and repentance — not plea bargaining. We’ll try to stay abreast of the postings on this area, and answer as many direct questions as we can. Thanks.
• • From Soc.Religion.Christian, BLD, Usenet, 1992: I don’t often post to this group (although I like most of the discussions), but this topic is too hot to pass up. I too have read the Cornerstone article and found it to be very convincing. As mentioned earlier, it is very well researched and well documented. In an effort to get both sides of the story, I asked about the controversy in a local Christian bookstore. They gave me a 30+ page statement from Warnke Ministries that included a 12 page letter from Mike himself where he basically said the Cornerstone article is full of errors. He unequivocally stated that all events described in the Satan Seller are exactly as described. Most of his letter focused around Carolyn Alberty, his second wife, who he says supplied Cornerstone with all of the “lies.” He even goes so far as to call her “cold-hearted” and “temptress.” He blames Carolyn for the break up of his first marriage to Sue. Anyway, he doesn’t talk about the testimonies of his other 7 or 8 college and high school friends, whose contributions to the Cornerstone article were most convincing. The one thing that his friends all agreed upon was that he was a great “storyteller” and would often stand by a story until one could no longer argue with him. So it comes as no surprise that he would stand by the Satan Seller and everything in it. The remaining 20+ pages are written statements from Warnke’s friends in his ministry. They all say about the same thing, and they all stand behind Mike. Most noteworthy in the statement is a notarized statement from Sue Warnke, Mike’s first wife. According to Mike, Cornerstone made an ethical error by not interviewing her, who would have been able to verify “60%” of the events in the Satan Seller. Sue’s statement did, in some ways, verify parts of Mike’s story, but she admits that during the course of the school year, especially the spring, she “lost track of” Mike. She also does not mention any of Mike’s friends and their testimonies about him. The other five or six letters from Warnke’s supporters are all written by people who have been associated with Warnke since his alleged time as a Satanic high priest. Do they actually have more knowledge and “hard evidence” that you and I? Probably not. They are only character witnesses. P.S. Read Romans 3:7-8 in regards to truthfulness and integrity.
  • From Raising the Devil, Bill Ellis, 1999: In 1970, Mike Warnke appeared at Hotline, a drug rehabilitation center sponsored by a revival center in San Diego, California, where he claimed to have been converted from Satanism to Pentecostalism. Hotline was a forum for many California hippie drug-and-sex confessions, and one participant recalled that the Charismatics were anxious to hear about alleged cult experiences: “The times were right for that kind of testimony. People wanted to hear that their worst fears were true.” Warnke’s conversion itself occurred in a typical Pentecostal way: He complained of demonic attacks, a result of his earlier occult dabblings. Diane Speakman, a member of a charismatic prayer group, advised him to claim the power of The Blood in prayer. A few nights later, Warnke says, he woke to find a “tall, black, humanlike figure … standing in the doorway of our bedroom:’ As Mike fell to the floor in convulsions, his wife claimed the power of The Blood, and the demon left them. From this point on, according to Warnke’s story, his demonic oppression lessened, and a few months later, with the help of Charismatics, he began to speak in tongues.Warnke soon went far beyond the typical confession. Working with evangelist Morris Cerullo, he helped develop a San Diego ministry aimed at teens who dabbled with fortune-telling and the occult. They joined forces with journalist Dave Balsiger to research and write Cerullo’s book, The Back Side of Satan (1973). This book swept together many of the social issues then emerging around the evangelical anti-occult crusade, decried the public attention that the witchcraft revival was receiving, and implied that one effect of this tolerance was “Satanic, incorrectly noting that UC-Berkeley “now has an entire department in witchcraft” (perhaps an allusion to its program in folklore, recently established). Warnke and Balsiger developed the “Witchmobile:’ an early traveling display of occult paraphernalia. These included an Ouija board, a crystal ball, magickal knives, a black robes and candles, and “voodoo” charms like “graveyard dust” and a jinx-removing “bag:’ Traveling with the Witchmobile in the first months of 1972, Warnke testified to his deliverance from the occult before youth organizations and church groups. By June 1972, Warnke and Balsiger decided to form an independent, nationally based anti-occult crusade. Now that Warnke had become something of a celebrity among the young Pentecostals, his detailed confessions soon emerged in own book, The Satan-Seller. Warnke successfully integrated the Illuminati scenario into the hippie blood cult threat, thus providing a broader framework for fitting still more elaborate elements into the developing Satanism Scare.
  • From Confessions of a Creature Feature Preacher, Dave Canfield, Satanic Panic, 2015: As a self-styled entertainer, I was singing for pay at the time, including occasional stints as an opening stand-up act for bands, and my ultimate goal was to be a well-known Christian personality. It’s more than fair to say I wanted to be like Mike Warnke. I also helped others with their ministry by promoting concerts: Distributing handbills, cold calling churches and helping backstage not only got me into concerts for free, but taught me about the business and gave me the chance to meet my heroes. I went to my first Warnke show when I was about 19 or 20. We laughed and, when Warnke talked about the Satanic Ritual Abuse survivors he and his wife Rose were sheltering, we cried. Warnke told us that Satanists were doing anything they could to find and kill them, and armed guards often accompanied him. Especially heart-breaking was Warnke’s story of Jeffy, a young boy found crucified upside-down. When Warnke came back to town a few years later, the promoter offered me the chance to head up the behind-the-scenes preparations. I jumped at the chance—it was fun getting the hall ready, but more than anything I wanted to be the one to drive Warnke to the venue, even though I hadn’t been behind a wheel long. The night of the show, it was dark and misty as I drove my Lincoln to Gippers Hotel and Lounge. When Warnke appeared I think I hit that poor man with every geek move in the book. I sweated like crazy, stammered and stuttered, starting talking about my own standup, recited his own jokes back at him and basically worked myself up into a nice perfect lather. Warnke for his part said little. Then we got into the car. I briefly panicked about a preacher saying something weird on the radio, worried that Warnke would think I listen to this kind of stuff all the time (which I did). I switched the radio off and he turned to me to ask, “Whadja do that for?” Wide-eyed, I said something like “harglegarrrrr.” Because of the misty weather, what should have been a short 10-minute ride to the gig turned into half-an-hour of me weaving all over the road. Warnke kept shooting me increasingly nervous glances until we arrived, and even then there was a problem—I couldn’t remember where the backstage door was. First, I turned into an alley behind the auditorium where a slew of fans literally mobbed my car. Then, I got to the front where my way was blocked by a large stone flower pot, which I accidentally ran into hard enough to knock it over and lodge it under my front bumper. We were now five minutes late. I remember Warnke asking me if I was okay at one point, but he also looked like he wouldn’t have minded a sharp stick just in case the Satanists had sent me to assassinate him. Finally fed up, Warnke yelled, “Son, I used to be a Satanist high priest and you are scaring me to death” At that moment, his travelling companion opened the stage door—I can still remember the sound of him laughing when he saw the state Warnke was in. I was heartbroken and never saw Warnke again.

The post Episode 223: The “Ex-Satanist” Who Fooled America’s Dumbest People (“The Satan Seller”) appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

The post Episode 222: Satanic Comedy appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• BAFO Goat Sanctuary Benefit: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/tstuk—bafosatans-goat-sanctuary-raffle
• 
• From The Devil In The Mirror, Oma, TST New York, 2021: When Columbus came around to conquer the new world we still had a beast-like representation of evil in European christian culture. Given how the indigenous population was depicted by early explorers, it is easy to draw the parallel between the creation of race and the artistic interpretation of the devil.  As the African population grew in our country to replace the absence of the Taino Indians, the subconscious assertion of supremacy was painted with the similar stroke as before: whiteness was pure, blackness was the devil. In Africa you could literally see a white Jesus fighting a black Satan. This left us with a whitewashed history as a norm. There were some salvaged elements of our African heritage masked as catholic saints; however, this practice of Santeria was deemed “black magic” and “devil worship.” The depiction of the Devil in the Dominican Republic always fascinated me as a child. I was lucky to grow up in an environment which promoted independent thought. My parents did not wish to formally introduce religion in my early life, as they believed it would take away from my childhood. Catholicism ran rampant in our culture, and the perceptions of racial inequality via religious imagery were obvious to those who did not have an obligation to respect it. We were all expected to relate to European culture, and religion. We had to remember that the goal was to be like the conqueror. To that end, there was little to no mention of our African and Taino ancestors had in the development of our diverse culture. This left us with a whitewashed history we embodied as a norm. All of this pushback against my Indigenous and African heritage hit a tipping point for me when I first saw the statue of Columbus in the capital. You can notice Columbus looking forward towards America, exemplifying his grandeur as a Taino Indian writes his name below his feet. This imagery quickly reminded me of how the dark skinned and curly haired Satan was below the feet of St. Michael in religious imagery. When I looked in the mirror as a child, I never saw a Columbus nor a St. Michael; I saw a curly haired and dark skinned little boy. It was the ifrst time I sympathized with the Devil and years later, when I identified as a Satanist, I finally understood why.
• From Revealing The African Presence In Renaissance Europe, Jonathan Spicer, Walter Art Museum, 2013: Night was a fearsome time, especially in the cities, where street lighting was at least a hundred years in the future. Loathsome things took place under cover of darkness: necessary actions such as the removal of sewage and the bodies of plague victims, but also crime, sexual license, and the perversities of witches. Even around 1600, associations of night and the devil remained active, as exemplified by Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night in 1594, in which passages abound as “Night is the devil’s black book wherein he records all our transgressions” and also where the devil “spreads his nets of temptation,” or conventional biblical references as in “As god is entitled the Father of light, so is the devil surnamed the Prince of Darkness, which is the night.” Hell, like Hades, the Greek underworld, was a place of blackness in the bowels of the earth. Satan, the distillation of evil and deceit, was black, as were his demons. The baseness of these beings, fallen from God’s grace and initial whiteness, is expressed in their now blackened state, prompting comparison with the monsters still imagined as possibly inhabiting central Africa. 
  • Black devils in Christian mystery plays of the late Middle Ages, still powerful forms of popular culture in 1500, literally brought these demons to life. It is hardly surprising, then, that in literature across the continent, an uncooperative black slave or Othello himself could be castigated as a “black devil,” or that a Portuguese chronicler, seeing blacks among the Berber captives brought to Portugal in 1441, describes them as “spirits from the lowest hemisphere of Hell.” Sin itself was black, blackening and corrupting the soul by soiling it with a rejection of god. St. Augustine made a comparison between the decisions an individual makes in life and those made by a painter who chooses his colors carefully: “The evil man chooses himself to be a sinner. . .” and “Without question, the sinner has chosen to be the black color.” In a Dutch devotional Picture Handbook from around 1400, “Sin” is personified by a man with multiple heads having the color and features of an African, while “The Seven Deadly Sins”  are imagined as black demons tormenting a young blond woman, a “pure soul.” Besides giving a face to sin, the features of a sub-Saharan African might be adapted to give a face to the Muslim world when demonized as the Saracen enemy, a term made popular by the Crusades, still regarded by European Christians as the fundamental battle of good and evil. Muslims could be any ethnic group, but it might serve political purposes to exaggerate the otherness of Muslims by characterizing them as black Africans. 
• From The Divinisation of Whiteness and Demonisation of Blackness in Renaissance Art, Olivia J. Berry, University of Auckland Auckland, 2023: It became apparent that the iconography of angels has contributed to a phenomenon where whiteness is valued as an emblem of ‘angelic’ qualities. Similarly, popular conceptualisations of the ‘demonic’ have been culturally-engineered despite there being little biblical information about what demons look like. Images of horns, tails, hooves, and black or red skin have amassed a significant semblance of legitimacy as the iconography of everything devilish. This image has also created visual connotations representing black skin as something sinister, dangerous, and cursed: To be non-Christian and sullied by Satan is to be in darkness. In the hands of some Christian writers, the deviancy of ‘darkness’ would come to acquire a polemical association with black skin.” Although the Bible does not provide any physical description of demons, many artists and writers have depended on the Bible’s symbolic language of both blackness/dark and whiteness/light to paint their demonic and angelic characters, respectively.  Specific attention will be paid to the racialised imagery of both angels and demons in paintings of the Last Judgement, as these paintings represent the ultimate moment in which Christian history is at last fulfilled. Several of these images conform to a common pattern of depicting angels using the stencil of a genderless white European, while portraying demons as dark-skinned with animalistic qualities. From medieval times, the myriad of spiritual warfare images in the Last Judgement genre of paintings has provided some form of messaging as to the ranking and value of whiteness and blackness—symbolised and personified by angels and demons themselves. Many pieces of art under this category draw on classical ideas regarding the symbolic function of colour, such as the description of demons offered by the Dutch physician and occultist Johann Weyer: “Deprived as they are of grace, they have hopelessly stained and blackened that essence so that they are now called creatures of the lower atmosphere, full of shadow and darkness.” The immense popularity of Renaissance artwork has carried symbolic colourism into later centuries and supported poorly-evidenced arguments for the divinely-mandated enslavement of Africans. Art brings the viewer into direct contact with the holy, providing the mechanism for epiphany: the epiphany for many European observers was that holiness is expressed through the medium of whiteness as demonstrated by the white exterior of God, Christ, and angels when depicted in art.
• From Exploring Representations of the Black Magus, Shania Johnson, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021: The Adoration of the Magi is the name given to the scene in Christian art following the birth of Jesus in which the three Magi are represented as kings. After following the Star of Bethlehem to find Jesus, they present gifts in recognition of his divinity. Late medieval and early Renaissance depictions of the Adoration show the three kings coming from three different parts of the world: the youngest from Africa, the oldest from East Asia, and a middle-aged king from Europe. Many of these scenes depict the youngest king as a black figure positioned farthest in the composition from Christ. Why is he the youngest? Why is he farthest away? What can these details tell us about European views of black people? While European paintings showed that black people were part of medieval societies, these representations have the potential to shed light on European attitudes toward increasing racial diversity during this period. The 1343 Adoration of the Magi shows three Magi adorned in golden robes, two angels at right standing behind the seated Virgin Mary and infant Christ, and three black attendants presented in the bottom left corner. All except the black figures have golden halos around their heads. The artist creates a clear distinction between those who are considered holy and pure and those who are not. Let’s turn to another adoration scene painted by Justus of Ghent in 1480. There are three black figures in this composition: a king, his servant handing him a gift, and a member of the crowd. The composition follows the common tropes of a black king situated farthest from Christ. 
  • While black people increasingly occupied various roles in medieval society, European views toward people who were neither white nor Christian were rife with discrimination. Despite the presence of black Christians throughout Europe, popular works of art employed a specific vocabulary to distinguish black people from their white Christian counterparts, presenting them without halos and placing them in marginal positions. The circulation of these images, and the messages they contain have undoubtedly shaped (and continue to shape) the way people subconsciously or consciously perceive race today. While scholarship in the field is ongoing, it is helpful to consider documentary records of Africans in Western Europe, as well as medieval texts that provide insight into the perception of race in the Middle Ages. While it may seem anachronistic to use words such as “racism” to describe art in the Middle Ages, it really is not. The works of art in this essay are premodern examples of othering. Recognizing that these forms of racism existed in the past may allow us to expand and reframe contemporary discourse around the legacy of racism. https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/exploring-black-magus-in-european-art 
• From Behold the Man, Celeste Carbajal, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 2024: This project aims to unveil and question the representation of race in Flemish artist Anthony Van Dyck’s painting entitled “Here Is The Man,” which was made in about 1625-26 during the artist’s trip to Genoa in Italy (1621-27). Why did Van Dyck decide to depict the soldier tormenting Christ just before his crucifixion as a person of colour, especially when other versions of the painting appear to present a white soldier? The painting was probably commissioned by devout Jesuits and powerful merchants and bankers, whose wealth came from the trade of all kinds of goods such as wood, silk, and spices, mostly with the Middle and Far East. Van Dyck arrived at Genoa having already made his name as a renowned artist and with good connections, which allowed him to quickly establish himself as the painter and official portraitist of wealthy families. Genoa was a deeply religious city, with great economic and political power. The city’s splendour developed during the 14th and 15th centuries, with its control of most of the Mediterranean seaports, its political relations with Spain and the so-called ‘discovery’ of America in 1492 by the Genoese Cristobal Columbus, allowing an unprecedented expansion of trade and cultural exchange. ‘Behold the man!’  are the words used by Pontius Pilate when he presented Jesus to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. In this painting, Christ is mockingly being dressed up as King by a Black soldier, with the crown of thorns on his head and a robe around his shoulders. The figure of Pilate has not been included in the composition, making it a more intimate meditative religious object. 
  • The work is not about the narrative per se, but about what the viewer sees, or even more, what the viewer does not see. The treatment of light and colour that highlights the whiteness and paleness of Christ’s body, in contrast with the obscured image of the Black soldier, leads to a meditation on the ethical and moral connotations historically imposed upon notions of light and dark in a way that promotes piety and obedience to the Church. In this way, the painting upholds the relationship between whiteness and power, and reveals some of the parts that religion played in this during the 17th century. It looks like the soldier has a tear dropping from his left eye, but after examining the latest condition assessment report of the painting it appears this is a small splash mark on the varnish. In this period, onversion was a focus for anyone considered to be non-Christian or un-Christian, including rural villagers, women, and North African people, often Muslims. Further afield, the enslaved Africans in the Americas were the focus of Jesuit missionaries. Was the decision to show Christ’s un-Christian, evil tormentor as a Black soldier made to demonstrate the Jesuit mission to convert these groups of people? As such, “Here Is The Man” is an artefact of racial demonisation and exemplifies the interconnected nature of race and religion in Early Modern Europe. When making the contrasts between both figures in the painting so evident, as with Van Dyck’s specific use of light and colour, which reduces the Black soldier to such a problematic moralistic representation, one may ask what are we truly meditating on when viewing this painting? We cannot change the past, but we can change how we look at the past.
• From Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young, Beehive Books, 2021: Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein offers no overt discussions of racial identity for the creature who is assembled from disparate corpses and rebels violently against his maker. But the figure of a Black Frankenstein monster appears with surprising frequency in U.S. culture from the nineteenth century onward, across many media, in direct and indirect references, and in works by African-American as well as white artists. Described as yellow in Shelley’s novel, tinted blue in nineteenth-century stage incarnations, and colored green in twentieth-century cinematic ones, the monster’s color has often signified metaphorically, on the domestic American scene, as Black. The specter of a Black Frankenstein monster — customarily, a male monster — has sometimes been invoked by political conservatives, for whom it reinforces racist connections between blackness and monstrosity. In 1831, Mary Shelley’s novel was republished in a new edition, with a heavily revised text and a new author’s introduction. In America, 1831 was the year of the most famous slave revolt in U.S. history, that of Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia. The Turner revolt prompted debate over emancipation in the Virginia State Legislature, including a defense of slavery by a politician named Thomas Dew. A pro-slavery apologist, Dew wrote: “To turn the negro loose would be to raise up a creature resembling the fiction of a recent romance; the hero of which constructs a human form with all the physical capabilities of man but finds too late that he has only created a power of mischief, and himself recoils from the monster which he has made.” Dew was quoting a British politician, George Canning, who had spoken in an 1824 debate in British Parliament against emancipating West Indian slaves; his reference was most likely to the stage version of Frankenstein then popular in London. Canning used the Frankenstein story to represent the enslaved West Indian man as an irrational child who should not be freed. In quoting Canning, Thomas Dew reinforced his pro-slavery conservatism, bringing together West Indian with North American slavery. 
  • The figure of a Black Frankenstein monster appears in subsequent decades in political cartoons, oratory, poetry, and fiction, but the most famous transformation of the Frankenstein story came exactly a century later, with James Whale’s films Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. Whale’s Frankenstein focuses on the monster’s creation, his inadvertent murder of a child, and his apparent death in a fire. There are no visible African-American characters in the Whale films, but the films indirectly offer a radical intervention into American iconographies of race, rape, and lynching, offering an antilynching perspective. In both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein the monster is depicted in flight from a crowd of angry townspeople, whose pursuit of him is represented with the visual markers of a lynch mob, including barking dogs, fiery torches, and angry cries. At one point in Bride of Frankenstein, the monster is strung up on a tree as a cluster of white people surrounds him, their anger sparked by his perceived attack on a white girl. The monster is presented sympathetically at this moment, his iconography blended with that of Christian martyrdom. The metaphorical blackness of the Frankenstein monster in the Whale films is made literal in Blackenstein, a film in the 1970s genre of blaxploitation which records the transformation of a young African-American soldier who has lost his limbs in Vietnam. After an operation in a V.A. hospital, Turner reemerges as a monster whose large form and lumbering gait offer an affectionate parody of Boris Karloff ’s Frankenstein monster. The film’s pointed references to the Vietnam War suggest that this individual act is also a national allegory. In a world in which the perception of Black monstrosity continues to have literally murderous effects, a third century of Frankenstein stories prompts an ever-undead metaphor, and writers and artists remain vital to showing how Black lives as well as monsters matter. https://beehivebooks.medium.com/black-frankenstein-85f8a49fa1ba 
• From The White Man Jesus, Edward Blum, Aeon Magazine, 2013: Americans care deeply about how biblical figures are represented in the flesh. Whether discussing the darkness of Satan or the‘sexy whiteness of Jesus, the ethnic ‘look’ of the characters has been just as important (if not more so) than what they have said or done. In previous decades, people asked Martin Luther King Jr what Jesus looked like, and during the 1920s, Americans debated whether it was appropriate to show Jesus in films. In the Bible itself, bodies matter, but not the way they do now: The ancient texts have sick bodies and healed bodies, pierced bodies and resurrected bodies, but for the most part, the Bible is pretty quiet about the colour of those bodies’ skin or the tone of their hair. To understand our contemporary obsession, consider colonial New England, where Puritans differentiated themselves from Catholics by refusing to display Jesus, god, or the Madonna in their churches or on printed materials. Puritans were not absolute in their iconoclasm: but they were fine with other representations, and Satan was sometimes represented as an emaciated dark figure. The lack of biblical detail about Christ’s physical features was crucial to the universal appeal of Christianity: “If He were particularised and localised — if, for example, he were made a man with a pale face — then the man with a darker face would feel that there was a greater distance between Christ and himself,” one presbyterian minister cautioned in 1880.  In 1957, Martin Luther King Jr’s advice column in Ebony magazine received a letter that asked: ‘Why did god make Jesus white, when the majority of peoples in the world are non-white?’ ‘The colour of Jesus’ skin is of little or no consequence,’ King reassured his readers, because skin colour ‘is a biological quality which has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the personality’. Jesus transcended race, but in a society that separated people based on colour, god’s son wasn’t the only challenge for image-makers: the devil was, too. 
  • During the Civil War, one northern African-American, T Morris Chester, had announced that just as it was time for slavery to end, it was also time for women and men of colour to refuse the language and images that associated darkness with evil and whiteness with good. Chester asked his fellows to wield consumer power to effect change. If, he said, you “want a scene from the Bible, and this cloven-footed personage is painted black, say to the vendor that your scruples will not permit you to support so gross a misrepresentation, and when the creator and his angels are presented as white, tell him that you would be guilty of sacrilege if you accepted it.” By refusing the idea of the dark devil, Chester was going up against centuries of Christian iconography. Throughout medieval Europe, it was entirely regular to describe Satan as dark or black. Witches were known for practising ‘dark arts’, and in early colonial America when British immigrants to the New World accused others of being witches, they too conflated darkness with the demonic. The devil was everywhere in Salem in 1692, and he could take any number of physical forms: He did not always come in blackness or redness but most often he did, and the devil came as a Jew and as a Native American as well. The Puritan theologian Cotton Mather associated Indians and black people with the devil and wrote that ‘Swarthy Indians’ were often in the company of ‘Sooty Devils.’ Because of America’s history and its contemporary demographics, there is almost no way to depict Bible characters without causing alarm: To call Jesus ‘black’ signals political values that are associated with the radical left, and to present Jesus as white is quickly understood as a code for a conservative worldview. Little wonder, then, that some Americans are choosing to describe Jesus as ‘brown’ as a way to avoid the white-black binary. https://aeon.co/essays/was-jesus-a-white-man-and-the-devil-black 
• From The Devil Rides Out, Dennis Wheatley, 1932: “Let’s not talk of Black Magic, which is associated with the preposterous in our day, but of the order of the Left Hand Path. That, too, has its adepts and, just as the Yoga of Tibet are the preservers of the Way of Light, the Way of Darkness is exemplified in the horrible Voodoo cult which had its origin in Madagascar and has held Africa in its grip for centuries, spreading even with the slave trade to the West Indies and your own country.” “Yes, I know quite a piece about that, the Negroes monkey with it still back home in the Southern States, despite their apparent Christianity. Still I can’t think that an educated man would take serious notice of that Mumbo Jumbo stuff.” “Not in its crude form perhaps, but others have cultivated the power of Evil, and among whites it is generally the wealthy and intellectual, who are avaricious for greater riches or power, to whom it appeals.The Malgasy are a strange people: Half-Negro and half-Polynesian. A great migration took place many centuries ago from the South Seas to the East African Coast. Most of them settled in Madagascar, where they intermarried with the aborigines and produced this half-breed type, which often has the worst characteristics of both races. And Madagascar is the home of Voodoo and Witch Doctors. I’ve read someplace that such fellows have no power over whites, and surely that is so, else how could settlers in Africa and places keep the blacks under? What we call Magic is the Science and Art of Causing Change to occur in conformity with Will. Very few white men can really get inside a Negro’s mind and know exactly what he is thinking, and even fewer blacks can appreciate a white’s mentality. In consequence, it is infinitely harder for the Wills of either race to work on the other than on men of their own kind. Another factor which adds to the difficulty of a Negroid or Mongolian Sorcerer working his spells upon a European is the question of vibrations: Variation in human beings is governed largely by the part of the earth’s surface in which birth took place. Some races have long wavelengths and others shorter, and the greater the varіation the more difficult it is for a malignant will to influence that of an intended victim. Were it otherwise, you may be certain that the white races, who have neglected spiritual growth for material achievement, would never have come to dominate the world as they do today.”
• From The Republican Devil, Steve Erickson, American Prospect, 2013: In the Bible, the Devil doesn’t show up until relatively late. Over the millennia, as Christians have revised Jesus himself, the Devil has become more charismatic as well. The Devil in some ways has been more subject to interpretation than Jesus. Sometimes he’s an abstraction who’s more chaos than evil, sometimes he’s a seducer and con man, sometimes he’s a fallen angel pitted against a god to whom he’s close to equal. The hooded figure slogging through the Moroccan sands in the History Channel’s recent miniseries The Bible looks rather like President Obama. The Bible‘s producers (one of whom was the star of Touched By An Angel a decade ago) insist the resemblance is entirely coincidental; out of all the actors in all the gin joints in all the world who might have played the part, apparently this one was chosen because it’s a role with which he’s familiar, having played it in the past, though this seems a peculiar sort of type casting. On the other hand, Obama also has been cast before in this part by sectors of the American public when they’re not depicting him as Hitler, a foreign-born Other, or the leading figure in an End Days scenarios. The resemblance on the show was first noted not by paranoid leftists but TV’s Glenn Beck, who makes a point of not voicing the president’s name, in the manner of Hogwarts wizards who won’t speak Voldemort’s. Other professional blabbermouths of the right have said that while the producers didn’t mean to make Satan look like Obama, god guided the hand of the series’ makeup artist and blinded everyone else on the set while they were shooting. Christians have a love-hate relationship with Satan: They would be nowhere without him, and the more god-fearing that one is, the more useful the Devil becomes, until a point is reached when the Devil becomes more useful than god. That is the point where part of the American body politic has been for the past four years, as association with Obama is so all-encompassingly dreadful that some will reverse positions they’ve held for years, even opposing bills with their own names on them, to avoid the sulfuric whiff of presidential support. When a church’s devil comes to mean more than its god (whether that church is political or spiritual), its animating spirit metastasizes and dies, the quest no longer about transcendence but only deliverance.
•  

The post Episode 221: Satan’s Weird Art History Is Racist As Hell appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

All the secrets of Bohemian Grove are revealed, including the fact that these guys reveal themselves way, way too often.

SHOW LINKS

• From I Obtained the Attendance List For Bohemian Grove, Dan Boguslaw, Responsible State Craft, 2026: Bohemian Grove is an exclusive mens-only club that hosts a two-week summer retreat for the rich and powerful at a 2,700 acre compound in the redwoods of Northern California. With a $25,000 initiation fee and a decades-long membership waiting list, the hideaway was described in a 1989 Spy article as “the most exclusive frat party on earth.” The club serves as a popular destination for national security officials and defense industry executives to fraternize and party, far from the public eye. The 2023 camp attendance list includes two former national security advisors, three former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and two former directors of the NSA. A 2017 roster, which lists all dues-paying members of the club, included three former directors of the CIA. Each club member is assigned to one of 130 separate “camps” inside the compound, which act as fraternities for attendees to party together. “Mandalay” is seen as the most elite camp, whose members in 2023 included Henry Kissinger, Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and Riley Bechtel, the billionaire heir of the Bechtel corporation. A visitor once said of Mandalay, “you don’t just walk in there — you are summoned.” “Wayside Log” appears to be another watering hole for the national security community and defense contractors. Its members include former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and J. Michael Myatt, a Marine Corps Major General who became an executive for Bechtel after leaving government. 
  • Bohemian Grove also serves as a place for these buttoned-up generals turned defense executives to let loose. While the rule of not talking business is widely ignored, another unwritten rule is “everyone drinks all the time.” Longtime member and musician Peter Arnott wrote that every camp in the Grove is “competing to pour drinks down your throat” in a summer 2009 edition of the club magazine. While the Bohemian Grove’s motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here,” meaning leave your business outside, this rule is often ignored. More recently, Sen. McCormick wracked up over a dozen high dollar donors from fellow club members ahead of announcing his successful senate bid in 2023. In 1967 President Nixon gave a lakeside talk at the Bohemian Grove that he would later claim was instrumental to launching his bid for the presidency. According to Spy magazine, the practice of flagrantly flouting the Club’s only public rule has been going on since at least 1989, though likely much longer; State Department cables published by Wikileaks indicate that longtime member Kissinger — who attended the 2023 retreat just months before his death — discussed business at the retreats in the 1970s. We reached out to many of the national security officials who are members of the Bohemian Grove, but none responded to a request for comment. https://substack.com/@drboguslaw/p-190622651 
• From Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, Peter Martin Phillips, UC Davis, 1994: For over 150 years private men’s clubs have existed as a place of personal retreat for socio-economic elite men in American society. U.S. elite men’s clubs are seen by some social scientists as the American equivalent to European aristocracy. Defining a gentleman was one of the essential characteristics of U.S. men’s clubs and a mark of success in American Society. Elite men’s clubs tend to be introspectively oriented: Major activities, events and interactions tend to occur within club boundaries primarily for the members’ and guests’ own self-gratification. Clubs tend to establish traditions and maintain an internal culture to which new members receive some form of indoctrination before or after joining. Finally, elite men’s clubs offer their members a safe sanctum that meets personal needs away from less ordered environments. A man is an aristocrat within the confines of his club: He has supportive staff to wait on him and other aristocrats with similar interests. An elite men’s club is a system of ordered civility in what is perceived as an otherwise chaotic and disorderly world. Elite men’s clubs are actually a relatively rare phenomenon, with perhaps fewer than two hundred in the United States. Given the ubiquitous Rotary, Elks and Lions clubs in every small town in American, two hundred elite clubs is a rare phenomenon indeed. London’s West End men’s clubs, the prototype for American clubs, originated as regular gatherings of men with similar interests in taverns or coffee shops. Sir Walter Raleigh is reported to have founded the Friday Street Club which met at the Mermaid Tavern. Club life in London represented the collective alliance of men with similar tastes and perspectives. Scientific and literary clubs were some of the more honorable associations while gambling and drinking organizations abounded. 
  • Organized in 1872, the Bohemian Club was established in San Francisco as a gathering place for newspaper reporters and men who like arts and literature. (The origin of the term bohemian comes from the French artistic movement of the 1830’s and represented the mutual supportive companionship of artists and intellectuals.) By the 1880’s, businessmen had joined the Club in large numbers, as the original Bohemians found that admitting men of wealth helped pay the expenses. Club activities included poetry recitations, performances by musicians, lectures, and frequent plays. Bohemians liked to publicize their prominence by releasing news reports of important guests attending the Grove or Club functions. Oscar Wilde was entertained at the Bohemian Club in 1882 and is said to have drunk his guests under the table. The San Francisco Chronicle gave first page coverage to the opening of the new clubhouse on November 13, 1910. It was even common for the Bay Area newspapers to report on Bohemian elections and present the platforms of the various candidates for office. In the eleven-year period between 1904 and 1915, the Chronicle ran 331 stories on the Bohemian Club. This represented a yearly average of thirty articles, making Bohemia one of the most highly publicized club in the San Francisco Bay Area. 
    •  In 1878, several dozen Bohemians held a gathering in the forest in Sonoma County near what is now known as Camp Taylor. This was the start of a long Bohemian tradition of trekking to the Sonoma County redwoods during July and August for camping and self entertainment. By 1882, Bohemians were doing regular midsummer weekend campouts under the stars at various locations in Sonoma County. They rented what is now known as the Bohemian Grove from the Sonoma Lumber Company. The Bohemia’s symbol is an owl, which has been in use since the first year the Club started. The owl has come to symbolize the wisdom of life and companionship, that allows humans to struggle with and survive the cares and frustration of the world. A forty foot concrete owl stands at the head of the lake in the Grove, built in 1929 to serve as a ceremonial site. The Cremation of Care Ceremony was produced as a play in 1920, wherein a High Priest is confronted by “Dull Care,” wrapped in the chains but not dead because Bacchus, the only warrior Care fears, is dead. (The 18th Amendment was passed in 1919). Care is burned, thereby purging the “sacred Grove.” This ceremony has been rewritten on several occasions but the theme is still the same, and Care is still dispatched yearly in a fiery death that symbolizes the initiation of Bohemian fellowship.
• From Masters of the Universe Go to Camp, Philip Weiss, Spy Magazine, 1989: Monte Rio is a depressed Northern California town of 900 where the forest is so thick that some streetlights stay on all day long. Every summer for more than a century, the Bohemian Club has led a retreat into this redwood forest. The religion they consecrate is right-wing, laissez-faire and quintessentially western, with some Druid tree worship thrown in for fun. For me, the trick was getting in. A guest card was out of the question: club bylaws have stated that a member-sponsor’s application “shall be in writing and shall contain full information for the guidance of the Board in determining the merits and qualifications of the proposed guest.” And my attempts to get a job as a waiter or a valet in one of the camps failed. In the end I entered by stealth. Some observers of the Grove had warned that security was too good and they’d put me in the Santa Rosa jail for trespassing. Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes who used to hunt rabbits in the nearby hills, remembered a fire road leading into the site near the Guerneville waste-treatment plant but said they’d spot me sneaking in. Others mentioned barbed wire and electronic monitoring devices. Finally, a mountain guide demanded only that I keep the methods he devised for me confidential. He had a keen geographical sense and a girlfriend who described a plan to seed magic crystals at the Grove gates to make them open of their own accord so that Native American drummers could walk in. We didn’t do it that way, but it turned out that Grove security isn’t quite what it’s reputed to be. The sociologists who had studied the place were right; there was no real security. I told everyone I was a guest of Bromley camp, where unsortable visitors end up. At 33, I was one of the youngest Bohemians, but I was welcome almost as a policy matter. “We looked around and saw we were becoming an old-men’s club,” a member said, explaining recent efforts to recruit fresh blood. I used my real name. No one inside acted suspicious. One day a member asked if I was related to a Bohemian named Jack Weiss. “No, but I’ve heard a lot about him and I’d like to meet him.” “You can’t,” he said. “He’s dead.” After that I began working a dead West Coast relative’s promise to have me out to the Grove one summer into a shaggy-dog story about my invitation. I was able to enjoy most pleasures of the Grove, notably the speeches, songs, elaborate drag shows, endless toasts, pre-breakfast gin fizzes, round-the-clock “Nembutals” and other drinks — though I didn’t sleep in any of the camps or swim naked with likeminded Bohemians in the Russian River at night.
  • One reason for the Bohemian Club’s poor public relations is the name it gave to the yearly opening ceremony: The Cremation of Care. The cremation is intended to put the busy men of the club at ease and banish the stress of the outside world, but it arouses critics of the encampment because they interpret it to mean that Bohemians literally don’t care about the outside world. Cremation of Care, they fear, means the death of caring. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the “Resurrection of Care.” The club says it serves as a “refuge” from the strivings of the marketplace, and though it’s true that actual deal-making is discouraged, I heard business being done on all sides. A tenet of Grove life is noncompetitive egalitarianism: all men are equal here. But in fact, class and status differences among camps are pronounced. Just as you have to be sponsored for membership, you have to be sponsored for a camp. The sexism and racism were of a peculiar sort: Black jokes are out because there are a handful of black members — though one day near the Civic Center I did hear a group of old-timers trying to imitate Jesse Jackson. As for Jews, old membership lists suggest that they have taken a very small part in the club for decades. That leaves women and Hispanics. When Ronald Reagan came to the green parasol one day, the organ player broke into “California, Here I Come.” Reagan said that it was good to be back. The Grove had been a major factor in his “homesickness… when you are forced to be away, as I was, for eight years.” The speech was canned and courtly. Though he cursed now and then, he seemed uncomfortable with the word damn. It was my last hour at the Grove. My bags were packed — a camera in one pocket, a tape recorder in the other. I’d tried to grab one of the free Bohemian Club walking sticks from the museum, something I could lean against my office wall as a reminder that this had not been just a dream. But there were none left; Bohemians had taken them all hiking.
• From Transcript of the Cremation of Care, Graham Hancock, 2007: O Beauty’s vassals Who keep, in this gray autumn of the world, Her springtime in your hearts, I charge ye all: For lasting happiness we lift our eyes To one alone, and she surrounds you now, Great Nature, refuge for the weary heart And only balm for breasts that have been bruised, Her counsels are most wise. But ye must come As children, little children that believe, Nor ever doubt her beauty or her faith, Nor dream her tenderness can change or die! Nay, thou mocking Care, it is not all a dream. We know thou waitest for us when this our sylvan holiday shall end. And we shall meet and fight thee as of old, and some of us prevail against thee, and some thou shalt destroy. But this, too, we know: year after year, within this happy Grove, our fellowship has banned thee for a space, and thy malevolence that would pursue us here has lost its power beneath these friendly trees. So shall we burn thee once again this night and in the flames that eat thine effigy we’ll read the sign: Midsummer set us free. No fire, if it be kindled from the world Where Care is nourished on the hates of men Shall drive him from this Grove. One flame alone Must light this pyre, the pure eternal flame That burns within the Lamp of Fellowship Upon the altar of Bohemia. Great Owl of Bohemia, we thank thee for thy adjuration. Well should we know our living flame Of Fellowship can sear The grasping claws of Care, Throttle his impious screams And send his cowering carcass From this Grove. Begone, detested Care, begone! Once more we banish thee! Let the all potent spirit of this lamp By its cleansing and ambient fire Encircle the mystic scene Hail Fellowship; begone Dull Care! Once again Midsummer sets us free!
• From PROPOSED REMARKS BY WILLIAM H. WEBSTER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AT THE BOHEMIAN GROVE LAKESIDE TALK JULY 22, 1988, CIA.gov Reading Room: THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I’VE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO TELL YOU ABOUT SOME OF MY RESPONSIBILITIES AT THE CIA, AND THERE IS A CERTAIN IRONY IN THIS FOR ME. AT THE FBI. I SPENT A LOT OF TIME TELLING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THAT WHAT THE FBI WAS ALL ABOUT WAS LAW ENFORCEMENT. NOT SPYING. NOW. I FIND MYSELF SPEAKING TO GROUPS THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY REVERSING ALL OF THAT — ASSURING AUDIENCES THAT AT THE CIA WE ARE NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF LAW ENFORCEMENT. BUT AS FASCINATED AS AMERICANS ARE BY SPYING. THEY ARE OFTEN SKEPTICAL–AS WELLAND WANT TO DISTANCE THEMSELVES FROM THE HARSHER ASPECTS OF INTELLIGENCE. MY GOOD FRIEND, GENERAL VERNON WALTERS. FORMER DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE CIA AND NOW OUR AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS, DESCRIBES THE VIEW MANY HAVE OF THE WHOLE INTELLIGENCE BUSINESS: “AMERICANS.” HE OBSERVED, “HAVE ALWAYS HAD AN AMBIVALENT ATTITUDE TOWARD INTELLIGENCE. WHEN THEY FEEL THREATENED. THEY WANT A LOT OF IT, AND WHEN THEY DON’T. THEY TEND TO REGARD THE WHOLE THING AS SOMEWHAT IMMORAL.” BUT THROUGH TIMELY INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS, THE AGENCY HAS PROVIDED ADVANCE WARNING OF WEAPONS AND WEAPONS SYSTEMS ACQUIRED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. FOR EXAMPLE, WE GAVE ADVANCE WARNING OF THE MOST RECENT IRAQI OFFENSIVES IN THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR, CORRECTLY ANALYZING THE INCREASED RELIANCE ON CHEMICAL WEAPONS. OF PARTICULAR CONCERN JUST NOW IS THE SITUATION IN THE PERSIAN GULF — A SITUATION MADE EVEN MORE VOLATILE BY THE RECENT INCIDENT INVOLVING THE IRANIAN AIRBUS. WE ARE NOW — AND HAVE BEEN PROVIDING DAILY TACTICAL INTELLIGENCE SUPPORT TO NAVAL FORCES OPERATING WITH THE U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND. OUR SUPPORT HAS INCLUDED REPORTS ON IRANIAN ANTISHIP CRUISE MISSILE SITES, NAVAL BASES. AIRFIELDS. AND COASTAL DEFENSE INSTALLATIONS. WE HAVE HAD A NUMBER OF MAJOR SUCCESSES THIS YEAR [the following page redacted] WE WILL BE MONITORING AND REPORTING ON THE SOVIET WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN AND ITS EFFECTS ON THAT COUNTRY. WE WILL ALSO ВЕ PROVIDING INSIGHT INTO WHAT GORBACHEV’S EMPHASIS ON “NEW THINKING” IMPLIES FOR HIS OWN COUNTRY AND FOR THE WORLD. [paragraph redacted] AMONG THE INCREASINGLY INTRICATE ARSENALS ACROSS THE WORLD.. INTELLIGENCE IS AN. ESSENTIAL WEAPON. PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT. BUT IT IS, BEING SECRET, THE MOST DANGEROUS. SAFEGUARDS TO PREVENT ITS ABUSE MUST BE DEVISED, REVISED. AND RIGIDLY APPLIED. BUT AS IN ALL ENTERPRISE. THE CHARACTER AND WISDOM OF THOSE TO WHOM IT IS ENTRUSTED WILL BE DECISIVE.
• From Inside Bohemian Grove, Alex Jones, 2000: I personally am a Christian but even an atheist should be concerned about the information we’re about to bring forth. People travel to Bohemian Grove to engage in bizarre ancient Canaanite luciferian Babylon mystery religion ceremonies–at least that was the rumors. And so I went to the library and got on the internet and saw many of the mainstream news articles admitting that world leaders do indeed go there and they fly into San Francisco uh and other surrounding cities and drive out into the rural uh hills and mountains of Northern California and that these stories have been coming out that they worship some 45ft Stone owl God and then I began to read some of the documentation on this Moloch character of the Old Testament mentioned many times in Leviticus that’s in the Bible. Why are world leaders traveling to the middle of nowhere to worship this thing, well I had to check it out for myself. I successfully infiltrated through the Secret Service uh through the guards through the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department we were inside 4 hours and I hope that our hidden cameras uh can give you at least a small piece of what I witnessed. To have world leaders engaging in this type of sickening behavior just shocks the very foundations of what Americans believe their leaders to be, and then to have it intimately connected with World Governmen–it doesn’t make a lot of sense until you research history, all throughout history spanning back into the midst of the beginnings of civilization we see world leaders uh from the empires of old from the Aztec Kings and priest uh to Babylonian leaders to ancient Rome engaging in Twisted Behavior. Could it be that when you have all the power and all the women and all the money and all the land and all the art you have to do something new you have to go against the basic grain of humanity you have to get off in a sick way; that’s what we witnessed in Northern California.
• From Bohemian Grove: Facts & Fictions, Mark Dice, 2016: A staff of several hundred people help run the place during the summer encampment, most of them local high school kids from nearby towns who have no idea the identities of the men they are serving. For almost a hundred years only men and teenage boys were allowed to work inside. But as powerful as Bohemian Grove is, it’s not strong enough to prevent the feminists from crashing their party. In 1978 the club was charged with discrimination by the state Department of Fair Employment & Housing for not hiring female employees. The club fought the charge and in 1981 a judge dismissed the case, but it was only a temporary victory. The judge’s decision was based on the members ‘freedom to associate and included a statement that since the men “urinate in the open without even the use of rudimentary toilet facilities” the presence of women would infringe on the men’s right to privacy. The feminists didn’t give up and continued to pursue the case. Another judge overruled the previous decision and ordered the club to begin hiring women. To be clear, the court didn’t say they had to allow women as members, but it did force them to hire women as employees. The State Civil Rights Act states “all persons within the jurisdiction of California are free and equal, no matter their sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, or disability and are entitled to full and equal accommodations.” So how is the Bohemian Grove able to legally discriminate against women? Men’s country clubs and organizations like the Girl Scouts can turn down people of the opposite sex for membership without being sued because these clubs are considered private. It’s called the “private club exemption.” from civil rights legislation. Mercy Frost, an employment attorney, says, “The answer is generally yes, they have the right of freedom of association. So at least for now, membership at the Grove means exclusively rereserved for men. Back in 2008, when Hillary Clinton was running for president, Bill Clinto was speaking that at an event when a Heckler began shouting at him about Bohemian Grove. Bill responded, “The Bohemian Club? That’s where those rich Republicans go and stand naked against redwood trees right? I’ve never been, but you ought to go–you’d get some fresh air.”
• From Late Night with the Devil Is Inspired by a Real-Life Secret Society, Trevor Talley & Benjamin Vieira, Comic Book Resources, 2024: David Dastmalchian plays the host of the fictional late night show Night Owls. Dastmalchian’s character, Jack Delroy, is a member of a secret society, and while the film is fiction, what fans of Late Night with the Devil may or may not be aware of is that the “Culte Du Grove” of the film is based on a real-world private organization. The film explores Delroy’s association with a secret society that promises him everything, telling the story of Jack Delroy’s drive to become the top late-night show. The host is failing at this goal. The film goes on to say that The Grove was established in the 1800s, has politicians and major businessmen among its members and that it’s known for its arcane rituals and for making and breaking careers. The Grove visited by Jack Delroy parallels the very real Bohemian Grove, where the Bohemian Club of San Francisco holds its yearly meeting, founded in 1872, back when the American West was still considered wild. In Late Night with the Devil a person in a robe drinks from a chalice in front of a person in an owl suit and other people in robes. The owl statue in Late Night with the Devil is very similar to that of Bohemian Grove. While many accounts of the real Grove say that the event is mostly silly machismo, with a heavy focus on getting hammered and performing jokey or overserious songs and plays, there is also a creepy side to the goings-on, including paintings of naked women and many symbols representing the demand for secrecy, often repeating the motto “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.” Though it was left out of the Oppenheimer biopic, the Manhattan Project met at the Grove during the 1942 event, including Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence and members of the S-1 Executive Committee. It is said that this meeting led directly to the creation of the atomic bomb, something Bohemian Club members hold as a point of pride but which has caused critics much concern that such a world-shaking thing could happen at a private men’s club with no oversight. https://www.cbr.com/late-night-with-the-devil-real-life-inspiration-is-horrifying/ 
•  

The post Episode 220: Satanists Expose Bohemian Grove appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• The AntiBot
• Genetically Modified Skeptic
• Drag Me To Hell, Louisville KY
• Patron Sinner Nominations!
• From I traveled to Jerusalem to face my fear of hell, Genetically Modified Skeptic, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGvcRnlId4k 
• From Heaven & Hell, Bart Ehrman, 2020: Some of my high school friends were committed Christian kids who believed it was necessary to make an active and specific commitment to god by asking Jesus into my heart. They convinced me, and as a 15-year-old I became a born again Christian. From that point on I had no doubt I was going to heaven. I was equally convinced that those who would not make this commitment were going to hell. Believing this made me a christian on a mission. It is not at all unlikely that I was more than a little obnoxious about it. After graduating from a fundamentalist College I chose to pursue the study of the New Testament and went to Princeton Theological Seminary. It was there I started having doubts about my faith. These doubts disturbed me not only because I wanted very much to know the truth but also because I was afraid of the possible eternal consequences of getting things wrong. Would my soul be in serious trouble? There was a particular moment when these worries hit me with special poignancy: It involved a late-night sauna. To pay for grad school I went to a part-time job at a tennis club. Most days of the week I was on the late shift. One of the benefits of the job was that I could take advantage of the facilities, including the sauna, when the place was shut up. The evening in question I’d been sweeping the courts and thinking about everything I’ve been hearing and resisting in my biblical studies and theology courses. I decided to have a sauna. I cranked up the heat as high as it could go and sat down to have a good after work sweat. As I sat on the wooden bench all alone late at night perspiring, I returned to my doubts about my faith. I then I started realizing, wow it sure is hot in here! Oh man is it hot in here! And then naturally the thought struck me: Did I want to be trapped in a massively overheated sauna for all eternity? Is it worth it? For me at that moment that meant: Did I want to change my beliefs and risk eternal torment? Suffice to say that I did eventually begin to change. As a friend of mine, a Methodist Minister, sometimes jokes, I went from being born again to being dead again. A recent Pew research poll showed that 72% of all Americans agree that there was a literal heaven where people go when they die. 58% believe that an actual literal hell. These numbers are of course down seriously from previous generations but are still impressive. One of the surprising things is that these do not go back to the earliest stages of Christianity. They cannot be found in the Old Testament, and they are not what Jesus himself taught. There was a time when literally no one thought that t their soul would go to heaven or hell. But eventually people came to think that this could not be right, largely because it was not fair. If there are gods with anything like a moral code then there must be Justice, in this life and the next. The ideas of the afterlife that so many billions of people have inherited emerged over a long struggle with how this world can be fair and how god can be just, which Jews and Christians came up with over a long period of time that they tried to explain the injustice of the world and the ultimate triumph of good. 

• From The Apocalypse of Peter, Anonymous, Second Century CE…ish: And I saw the place of punishment. There were certain there hanging by the tongue: and these were the blasphemers. There was a great lake, full of flaming mire, in which were certain men that pervert righteousness, and tormenting angels afflicted them. Women hanged by their hair over that mire that bubbled up, and these were they who adorned themselves for adultery. Men who mingled with them in the defilement of adultery were hanging by the feet and their heads in that mire. Murderers and those who conspired with them were cast into a place full of evil snakes, and the souls of the murdered looked upon the punishment of those murderers and said: O God, thy judgment is just. I saw another place into which the gore and the filth of those who were being punished ran down and became there as it were a lake: and there sat women having the gore up to their necks, and over against them sat many children who were born to them out of due time, crying; and there came forth from them sparks of fire and smote the women in the eyes: and these were the accursed who conceived and caused abortion. And other men and women were burning up to the middle and were cast into a dark place and were beaten by evil spirits, and their inwards were eaten: these were they who persecuted the righteous. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/apocalypsepeter-roberts.html

• From Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas, 1274: In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to god for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned. Whoever pities another shares somewhat in his unhappiness. But the blessed cannot share in any unhappiness. Therefore they do not pity the afflictions of the damned. Charity is the principle of pity when it is possible for us out of charity to wish the cessation of a person’s unhappiness. But the saints cannot desire this for the damned, since it would be contrary to Divine justice. The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.  Further, envy reigns supreme in the damned. Therefore they grieve for the happiness of the blessed, and desire their damnation. Even as in the blessed in heaven there will be most perfect charity, so in the damned there will be the most perfect hate. Wherefore as the saints will rejoice in all goods, so will the damned grieve for all good. Consequently the sight of the happiness of the saints will give them very great pain, and they will wish all the good were damned. 
• From the Catholic Catechism, Holy See, 1992: We cannot be united with god unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love god if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves:  Our lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting god’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with god and the blessed is called “Hell.” Jesus often speaks of “Gehenna” of “the unquenchable fire” reserved for those who to the end of their lives refuse to believe and be converted. The chief punishment of Hell is eternal separation from god, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs. The affirmations of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Church on the subject of Hell are an urgent call to conversion: “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from god is necessary, and persistence in it until the end. In daily prayers, the Church implores the mercy of god, who does not want any to perish but all to come to repentance.
• From Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God, John Edward, 1741: The damned deserve to be cast into hell, so divine justice never stands in the way of this nad makes no objection against god’s using his power at any moment to destroy them. On the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of sins. Divine justice says of the tree that brings forth such grapes of Sodom, “Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?” The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over our heads, and it is nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and god’s mere will, that holds it back. And the reason why they do not go down to hell at each moment is not because God, in whose power they are, is not very angry with them, as he is with many miserable creatures now tormented in hell. Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on Earth. The devil stands ready to fall upon them, and seize them as his own, at what moment god shall permit him. They belong to him; he has their souls in his possession, and under his dominion. Were it not for the sovereign pleasure of god, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air does not willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of god’s enemies. The world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of god. If God should only withdraw his hand from the flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath would come upon you with omnipotent power. The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow, and it is nothing but tan angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. The god that holds you over the pit of hell abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent. You have offended him infinitely more. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to Hell last night but that god’s hand has held you up. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and you have  nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce god to spare you one moment.
• From The Devil: A New Biography, Phillip Almond, 2014: For Gregory the Great, the victory of Christ left Satan imprisoned in the bottomless pit, though he would be released again for the final battle at the end of history. However, the continued existence of evil in the world required explanation. So while Satan as “historically” imprisoned in Hell, he was “allegorically” still in the world. According to the Gospel of Nicodemus, demons were both the keepers and tormenters of the dead, although in an alternate text of Nicodeums Satan was not a prisoner in Hell to begin with but was cast into the fires after Christ conquers death. The idea that Satan was incarcerated along with his demons was a tradition that went back at least to the First Book of Enoch, yet remained present. It was a problem over which many puzzled intellectually. To some, the devil and his angels lived in the air beneath Heaven, in order that they should not excessively harass men, and for this reason Lucifer was called the Prince of the Air. On the last day they would be cast down to Hell. Bishop Peter Lombard ambiguously wrote that some demons are in the air and some are in Hell, and that devils come and go to Hell on a daily basis, so that there are always some of them to torture souls. This was hardly a persuasive compromise. The Franciscan writer Bonaventure, in writing on Lombard, ignored the issue of Lucifer being in Hell and located him in the air, since there was no redemption in Hell and if the fallen angels were there they would be unable to ascend to our world to tempt us. Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest of Christian theologians, was unable to resolve the paradox of Satan being bound in Hell and being active among men, or at least we can conclude this from his not having taken up the issue.
• From Really Believing In Hell, Keith DeRose, Yale Department of Philosophy, 2008: Richard Dawkins’s comparison of sexual abuse to being taught doctrines of hell as a child were the subject of some great outrage. Never having been the victim of sexual abuse myself, knowing little about what that must be like, I don’t want to get into the comparative issue here. But some of the outraged seemed to be quite sure that being taught nasty doctrines of hell could not be seriously harmful at all, and that I do want to dispute. As someone who spent many sleepless, terrified nights as a child, I can certainly empathize with this When I was around 7, I got the message that Hell is a place I absolutely do not want to go to loud and clear. And it did terrorize me–and not just worries that I might end up there, but terror at the thought of anyone ending up in such a place. The combination of eternal duration with unspeakable torment really got to me. In a later post I hope to go into the effects – some of them lasting to this day – beyond nightmares. Why do some people who accept a traditional doctrine of hell experience debilitating terror while others don’t? My guess is that having the ability to understand and appreciate the doctrine without (yet) having developed the ability to “quarantine” threatening beliefs is to blame. As a child I really believed a traditional doctrine of hell. Some believers only kinda believe it–and kinda don’t. By the time I was 12, though I still accepted a traditional doctrine of hell, I only kinda believed, as opposed to my earlier, terrorized real belief. The “quarantining”of the doctrine wasn’t a simple matter of fully retaining the belief while blocking it from having some of its corrosive effects. Rather, it seems to me, it reduced the extent to which I could accurately be described as a believer at all. By that time, I didn’t really believe anymore. https://campuspress.yale.edu/keithderose/really-believing-in-hell/ 
• From Religious Abuse Damned To Hell, Carolyn Gage, 2011: It strikes me as a serious political issue, as well as one of children’s rights and one that needs to be understood in the light of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that most Americans believe in Hell. What exactly does it mean that the majority of folks in my country actually believe that they face the possibility of a lake of burning hellfire at the end of their lives? What does it mean that the majority of folks in my country believe that the universe is governed by a tyrannical despot capable of devising this form of torture? Honestly, I can’t even imagine taking these propositions seriously. How do any of these believers ever have a nice day? I was able to outgrow and outlive my abusive human father; for believers in hell, there is no way out. That, in a nutshell, is the definition of trauma: the unacceptable that must be accepted. Black-and-white thinking with good-versus-evil moral codes may keep one out of hell in an afterlife, but they are set-ups for fascist propaganda that leads to the creation of hell on earth. The entire notion of sin stems from a kind of universal depersonalization. Might this take the form of patriarchal structures that replicate imagined scenarios of Judgment Day? Or waging wars to project an overwhelming fear of sinfulness onto some “other” who can then be appropriately punished, the more fiery the punishment the better? Are the infernal weapons of modern warfare some subconscious attempt to gain godlike control over the dreaded hellfire? As lesbian-feminists, we can educate people that religious freedom does not include the right to spiritually abuse. And in doing this work, we can also take the opportunity to look at our own beliefs about an afterlife. Is our end also contained in our beginning? Personally, I find purpose, peace and morality in an observation made by feminist sociologist and novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.” https://carolyngage.weebly.com/blog/religious-abuse-damned-to-hell 
• From The Christians, Daniel Walker, 2017: “The Christians,” now playing at San Francisco Playhouse, goes where seemingly few shows dare to tread: Into the spiritual beliefs of everyday Americans. Anthony Fusco plays the pastor of a multi-million dollar mega church, the kind you see on TV headed up by men who always seem a bit like they’re trying to sell a timeshare–in this case, an eternal one. Then one day he gets up at the pulpit and begins preaching a new, slightly radical, much more liberally-minded lesson: Hell, it seems, doesn’t actually exist; everyone gets into heaven after all. Yes, even Hitler, he admits. It’s okay if people don’t quite understand this new idea, our Pastor adds, because god, it seems, has given him this revelation personally–and you can’t very well argue with that. Except his younger and more ambitious protege (Lance Gardner, as the only character in the play who gets an actual name, “Joshua,” with all that that entails) decides that he’ll argue anyway–right there at the pulpit in front of everyone. Even though they’re arguing about ancient scripture, the dispute does not come off as academic: religion, after all, is always personal. When Gardner returns later in the play for a second confrontation, his monologue about damnation sends chills down the spine. More people spend time wrestling with religious questions like these than, say, questions about physics and consciousness that come up in Tom Stoppard plays. So why isn’t there more theater about it? Most of the flock sides at first with the Pastor, but cracks soon form in his new vision. Eventually even his long-silent wife played by Stephanie Prentice can’t keep her customary silence up anymore, and the tension of their conversation is wounding. Fusco is almost TOO good at communicating the frozen, half-confused panic of someone who has been caught in the act but only just realized it himself. Director Bill English gives “The Christians” an anxious quality, like a stress nightmare, with Michael Oesch’s lights casting an increasingly gloomy pall as church fortunes go down. 

The post Episode 219: Why the Hell Do People Believe In Hell? appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

The post Episode 218: Reliving the Absolute Stupidest Parts of “Michelle Remembers” appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• From The Myth & Truth of Saint Patrick, Morgan Daimler, Irish Pagan School, 2024: Every March the pagan community, without fail, sees a surge in conversations and diatribes on Saint Patrick, usually rooted in the ideas that Patrick was a maniac who wiped out the druids (represented by snakes), destroyed Irish paganism, and converted the entire island. This is probably the thing that I hear the most often about Saint Patrick, leaning into Christian propaganda of the 7th and 12th centuries which positioned Patrick as the champion of Christianity in Ireland. In reality the druids survived well after Patrick’s lifetime. Druids, as a class, are included in the 7th and 8th century laws tracts and although their role had been diminished from their pre-Christian prominence they did still exist. There is even an 8th century hymn calling on god’s protection against “the magic of women, blacksmiths, and druids.” So we can say quite definitively that Patrick didn’t wipe out the druids. Many neopagans firmly believe that the snakes in Patrick’s story are actually a metaphor for druids. But this idea comes from one source, the 1911 book Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries where a man speculates that a certain lake is where Saint Patrick had a final confrontation with the Druids and drove them out, and he assumes the druids and snakes were the same because the lake is also where local folklore says the snakes were driven out. However, there are no earlier sources suggesting this, and it is quite clear that the snakes in the old stories were meant to be literal snakes.
  • Some claim Patrick committed genocide against the Druids, effectively destroying the pagan priesthood and Irish paganism and forcing conversion by the sword. Now, beyond the fact we’ve already addressed Patrick and the Druids above, it must be noted that converting to Christianity in Ireland wasn’t something that happened quickly, nor was any single person responsible for it. Christians have worked hard to make Patrick the face of conversion in Ireland in the 1500 years since his death, but Patrick himself in his book Confessions stated that he didn’t know if he’d had any significant impact in Ireland and faced a lot of pushback from the pagans for his work. Patrick was not the first Christian in Ireland, nor the most significant during his lifetime – that would probably be Palladius. Patrick seems to have little effect on Irish paganism during his life, and only took on the reputation as a converter hundreds of years after his death. Saint Patrick is a figure who has taken on a role as a kind of anti-pagan boogieman, a figure that can be pointed to as all that is terrible in Christian evangelism by those who prefer to consider themselves tragic victims of a cultural change that occurred more than a millennia ago. He is, in reality, someone who should be insignificant to history yet who, thanks to amazing church PR, looms large. Perhaps, as pagans, it’s time we let go of this mythological figure and see past it to the persistence and survival of Irish paganism and stop feeding into a Christian narrative about Patrick that is not only false but actively harmful. https://irishpagan.school/saint-patrick-myths-and-truths/ 
• From the Epic of Gilgamesh, 2000 BCE…ish: As the birds began to sing at the coming of the dawn, The Sun God, Utu, left his royal bedchamber. Inanna called to her brother Utu, saying: “O Utu, in the days when the fates were decreed, When abundance overflowed in the land, When the domains of the Great Gods were divided, And Enki did quest for the Underworld, Then did I pluck the Huluppu-tree from the Euphrates, Then did I plant it in my Holy Garden, and tend it, Waiting for my shining throne and luscious bed. But a serpent nested in the roots and could not be charmed, the Anzu-bird set his young in the branches, and the dark maid, Lilith, built her home in the trunk. How I wept! Yet they would not leave my tree.” Utu, the valiant warrior, would not help his sister, Inanna. As the birds began to sing at the coming of the second dawn, Inanna called to Gilgamesh, saying: “O Gilgamesh, in the days when the fates were decreed, When abundance overflowed in the land, When the domains of the Great Gods were divided, Then did I pluck the Huluppu-tree from the Euphrates, Then did I plant it in my Holy Garden, and tend it, Waiting for my shining throne and luscious bed. Then a serpent nested in the roots and could not be charmed, the Anzu-bird set his young in the branches, and the dark maid, Lilith, built her home in the trunk. How I wept! Yet they would not leave my tree.” Gilgamesh the valiant warrior, Gilgamesh, The hero of Uruk, stood by Inanna. Gilgamesh fastened his armor around his chest. He lifted his bronze ax to his shoulder. He entered Inanna’s holy garden. Gilgamesh struck the serpent who could not be charmed. The Anzu-bird flew with his young to the mountains; and Lilith smashed her home and fled to the wild, uninhabited places. Gilgamesh then loosened the roots of the huluppu-tree; And the sons of the city, who accompanied him, cut off the branches. From the trunk of the tree he carved a throne for Inanna. From the trunk of the tree Gilgamesh carved a bed for Inanna. From the roots of the tree she fashioned a pukku for him. From the crown of the tree Inanna fashioned a mikku for Gilgamesh, the hero of Uruk.
• From the Hymn To Apollo, Homer, 8th Century BCE…ish: But nearby was a sweet flowing spring, and there with his strong bow Apollo, the son of Zeus, killed the great Python, a fierce monster wont to do great mischief to men upon earth, for she was a very bloody plague. She it was who once received from gold-throned Hera and brought up fell, cruel Typhon to be a plague to men. Once on a time Hera, because she was angry with father Zeus, spoke thus among the assembled gods: “Hear from me, all gods and goddesses, how cloud-gathering Zeus begins to dishonour me wantonly, when he has made me his true-hearted wife. See now, apart from me he has given birth to bright-eyed Athena who is foremost among all the blessed gods. O wicked one and crafty! What else will you now devise? How dared you by yourself give birth to bright-eyed Athena? Would not I have borne you a child — I, who was at least called your wife among the undying gods who hold wide heaven.” Then straightway queenly Hera prayed, striking the ground with her hand, and speaking thus: “Hear now, I pray, Earth and wide Heaven above, and you Titan gods who dwell beneath the earth, harken you now to me, one and all, and grant that I may bear a child apart from Zeus, no wit lesser than him in strength — nay, let him be as much stronger than Zeus, as all-seeing Zeus was stronger than Cronos.” And thus she birthed a creature neither like the gods nor mortal men, but fell, cruel Typhon, to be a plague to men. Straightway Hera took him and bringing one evil thing to another such, gave him to Python to raise, and she received him. And this Typhon used to work great mischief among the famous tribes of men. Whosoever met Python, the day of doom would sweep him away, until the lord Apollo, who deals death from afar, shot a strong arrow at her. Then she, rent with bitter pangs, lay drawing great gasps for breath and rolling about that place, breathing forth blood. Then Apollo boasted over her: “Now rot here upon the soil that feeds man! You shall live no more to be a fell bane to men who eat the fruit of the all-nourishing earth, and neither Typhon shall avail you, nor ill-famed Chimera,” and wherefore that place is now called Pytho, and men call the lord Apollo the Pythian, because on that spot the power of the piercing sun destroyed that monster.
• From Satanism Today, James R Lewis, 2001: The word Leviathan is originally Hebrew, and means “the coiled one” or “that which gathers itself together in folds.” It has come to mean any formidable, monstrous being or thing. The term is originally referring to a multiheaded sea monster defeated by Yahweh. Leviathan is associated with—and is sometimes used interchangeably with—Behemoth, another biblical monster. Because of the association between the Devil and serpents, Leviathan is often identified with Satan. Alternately, it is also sometimes used to designate one of Satan’s demons. Leviathan was sometimes portrayed as a kind of aquatic dragon; sometimes as a whale. Most biblical references are, however, tantalizingly brief. It is unclear how much of the content of Yahweh’s challenge to Job refers to an earlier tale and how much is being composed on the spot. In any event, the Hebrew tale appears to derive from a story in which Baal defeats a sea monster with the aid of Mot. This seems to be a variation of the well-known Babylonian myth of Marduk’s defeat of the sea monster Tiamat. In Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh is sometimes depicted as a storm god. The battle between Yahweh and the dragon is very popular in the visions of the later Hebrew prophets, although the dragon usually embodies a purely symbolic meaning as the enemy of Israel, that is to say the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or the Egyptians. The endtime significance of this creature is that Yahweh will release Leviathan to wreak havoc upon the earth shortly before the end of the world. Then god will finally destroy the beast.
• From The Old Enemy, Neil Forsyth, 1987: The serpent of Genesis was quite plainly just a serpent. True, he could speak, and he seemed to know god’s mind. But Genesis nowhere says he was anything other than a talking snake. But in the curious work we know as the Book of Revelation the church found “the great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan.” We have already noticed that these passages bring together most aspects of the apocalyptic combat myth, from the star-like angel to the accuser at the heavenly court and the agent provocateur who leads astray the whole world. Perhaps the author intended the phrase “that old serpent” to refer to the Genesis serpent? Certainly, in view of the Gnostic identity of the serpent, the church found it convenient to think he did. Justin, for example, is clearly alluding to this text in his First Apology: “Among us the chief of the evil demons is called the serpent and Satan and the devil. Christ has foretold that he will be cast into the fire with his host and those who follow him, to be punished for endless ages. ” Justin’s appeal is one of the earliest signs that the idea of a Christian canon was developing and shows that the need to identify the devil was a prime motive. But Revelation does not actually say that by Satan means also the Genesis serpent, and indeed the church would later go to considerable trouble to insist on the equation. Without the Book of Revelation as a sanctified text, the identification of Genesis serpent with the adversary would have stood on much shakier ground. The placing of the Apocalypse at the end of the Bible brought some advantages also for the shape of the canon: Revelation points forward to the end of time, just as Genesis talks of its beginning. The tree of life at the end of the book balances the tree of knowledge at the beginning. And the enemy, he who had started all the trouble in the beginning, could be seen to be finally defeated here at the end. This means of closure gives to the Bible the shape of a combat myth, and thus the identification of Satan/serpent as “he who leads astray the whole world” made the struggle with heresy seem to be an extension of the mythological combat.
• From Satanic Feminism, Per Faxneld, 2017: Feminist historian and mythographer Marina Warner has claimed that in spite of its primary function as the main Christian symbol of evil, the serpent also denotes something positive, ‘‘a kind of heterodox knowledge and sexuality that Christianity has spurned.’ This is true, but primarily in terms of counter-discourses protesting against the hegemonic significance of the serpent and its wider social implications. Serpents can have quite different meanings, as seen, for example, in the one entwining the Rod of Asclepius, which is used as a symbol of the medical profession. Nevertheless, in the Old Testament, snakes are fairly consistently negative symbols, with the exception of Moses’s serpent. Like the notion of the serpent as Satan, the later idea of Eve as a temptress luring Adam to his doom does not really appear in Genesis (she simply gives some of the fruit to Adam, who is with her, and he eats), but was a development that should, as the Bible scholar Jean M. Higgins underscores, be seen as an expression of imagination, drawn mainly from each commentator’s own presuppositions and cultural expectations. Pseudo-Tertullian wrote with horror about the Ophite Gnostics that prefer the Edenic tempter ‘even to Christ himself; for it was he, they say, who gave us the origin of knowledge.’ Subversive nineteenth-century readings of the serpent as a bringer of enlightenment, and Eve as a heroine by implication, occasionally drew on these condemnations for inspiration. 
  • A more straightforwardly female Satan can be seen in the actually very common depictions of the snake in the Garden of Eden with a woman’s head on its serpentine body and sometimes also breasts. This motif was widespread in both visual art and theatre for hundreds of years. JB Trapp even states that it was the most frequent way of representing the Edenic serpent from the late twelfth century until the late sixteenth century, when the human features of the creature disappear and it becomes, once more, only reptilian. Exactly when the notion of a female snake was established is difficult to say, but the earliest translation of the Bible into Latin rendered the word as “serpens”—with a feminine gender.  The first explicit statement of this is probably in the twelfth-century French History of Genesis which suggests that Satan chose this guise ‘since like approves of like.’ A female serpent later appears in well-known literary works like the allegorical poem Piers the Plowman. where it is described as ‘like a lizard with a lady’s visage.’ ’Worth mentioning here is also ‘The Book for the Education of Daughters’ by Geoffrey. Geoffrey attempts to instil in his daughters the lesson that women should defer to fathers and husbands in anything but domestic matters and makes his point by retelling how Eve broke this rule when she conversed with the serpent, ‘whiche as the Hystorye sayth hadde a face ryght fayre lyke the face of a woman.’ There are countless images of a female serpent-Satan in the Garden, and some occupy what must be counted among the most central positions in European culture imaginable. For example, Michelangelo’s Temptation and Expulsion in the Sistine Chapel.
• From The Secret Doctrine, Volume 2, Helena Blavatsky, 1893: The Beings, or the Being, collectively called Elohim, who first (if ever) pronounced the cruel words, “ Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” must have been indeed the Ilda-baoth, the Demiurge of the Nazarenes, filled with rage and envy against his own creature. In this case it is but natural—even from the dead letter standpoint—to view Satan, the Serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the Father of Spiritual mankind. For it is he who was the “ Harbinger of Light,” bright radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehova. He still remains in esoteric truth the ever-loving messenger angel, the Seraphim and Cherubim who both knew well, and loved still more, and who conferred on us spiritual, instead of physical immortality—the latter a kind of static immortality that would have transformed man into an undying “ Wandering Jew.” As narrated in King’s “ Gnostics,” “ Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was not a pure spirit, he was ambitious and proud, and he set himself to create a world of his own and fabricated man, but this proved a failure. Man was a monster, soulless, ignorant, and crawling on all fours on the ground like a material beast. And thus arose out of the abyss Satan, serpent, Ophiomorphos. This is the esoteric rendering of the Gnostics, and the allegory seems true to life. It is the natural deduction from Genesis. Hence the allegory of Prometheus, who steals the divine fire so as to allow men to proceed on the path of spiritual evolution. Hence also, the curse pronounced by Zeus against Prometheus, and by Jehovah-Il-da-Baoth against his rebellious son, Satan.
• From Herbert Sloane, Catherine Yronwode, Satan’s Service, 2013: In 1948, Herbert Sloane was living in Cleveland. As a Spiritualist Reverend it seems likely that Sloane was engaged in seances. According to the 1972 interviews, this was the year that he founded Our Lady of Endor Coven of the Ophite Cultus Sathanas, which he also created. The name of Sloane’s group has puzzled many: “Our Lady of Endor” is a word-play on the use of the common Roman Catholic terms Our Lady of Grace, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and so forth — however, in this case, “Our Lady” refers to the Witch of Endor, mentioned in the Bible in the First Book of Samuel. The word translated as “Witch” in the King James Bible is more properly rendered as “medium,” described as a manifesting spirit medium known for her ability to raise the ghosts of the dead and converse with them. Interestingly, in French books, “witch” is sometimes encountered as “Pythonisse” — a priestess of Apollo, known as a Pythia or Pythoness, named in honour of Pythian Apollo who killed the serpent Python. In French, the word “Pythonisse” refers generally to any female psychic who claims to be endowed with the gift of prophecy, and is also the specific name given to the medium of Endor. The group that Sloane called a “coven” was his circle of seance sitters, but he had left mainstream Spiritualism by this point and was experimenting with dark seance performances: Sloane’s local coven, Our Lady of Endor, was presented as being a branch of the larger Ophite Cultus Sathanas, a Gnostic religious organization. “Ophite Cultus Sathanas” translates roughly from Latin as the Snake-Worshiping Cult of Satan. He apparently chose the word “Ophite” for his cult in reference to a defunct historical group of Christian Gnostics, the Ophites or Ophians, described by Hippolytus. Thus Sloane connected the Witch of Endor to the Pythoness in his over-arching Satanic Snake cult. https://www.satanservice.org/wiki/Herbert_Arthur_Sloane 
• From Holiday displays – including the Satanic Temple’s – return to Illinois, Jerry Nowicki, Capitol News, 2022: The Satanic Temple of Illinois debuted a new display in the Illinois Capitol rotunda Tuesday, taking its place next to the annual Christmas and Hanukkah displays. “Minister Adam” of the Satanic Temple of Illinois was joined by about 15 Temple members to dedicate this year’s display. It consists of a crocheted snake sitting on a book and a pile of apples crocheted by Temple members. “Every year, we do a holiday display and a show of unity and religious pluralism within the state Capitol rotunda,” Adam said. “And this year, we wanted to focus on the book bans that people have been trying to do all over the country.” The book on which the serpent is perched is Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus’ “On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres,” a 1543 work which posited the then-revolutionary idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. The Nativity scene, meanwhile, has been on display for at least 14 years during Christmastime. Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel of the St. Thomas More Society, said the precedent for religious displays in public spaces in Illinois stems from a 1989 court decision regarding a Nativity scene at Daley Plaza in Chicago. That precedent was honored when it came to the state Capitol, he said, when advocates framed it under a free speech lens. While the Capitol Satanic display has received pushback from some religious groups in the past, Brejka said “free speech applies to everybody.” Henry Haupt, a spokesperson for Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, said “Temporary displays of this nature, erected in a public space in the Capitol rotunda, are protected by the First Amendment.” https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/holiday-displays-including-the-satanic-temples-return-to-illinois-capitol/ 
•  

The post Episode 217: To Hell With St. Patrick appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• FORMULA DRIVE, RENO SATANIC
  • From The Powers of Evil, Richard Cavendish, 1975: Beliefs about evil supernatural agencies thought to menace and prey on human beings are known in all societies and were vigorously alive in the ancient world—in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Syria, Greece and Rome, and pre-Christian western and northern Europe. They continued to flourish in medieval Europe, mingling with, influencing and being influenced by Christianity. They remained obstinately alive in subsequent centuries, were exported to America, and still have a firmer grip on our minds than is always understood or admitted, evil gods and spirits, malevolent ghosts, witches, vampires, nightmares and bogles, powers of the underworld and hell, things which prowled in the darkness of night and lurked in shadows and corners, at thresholds and turnings. They were for centuries an accustomed and feared reality of everyday life. They were vital to religion, and to the magic and folk belief which were inseparable from religion. At popular levels the Christian Church was often regarded primarily as a massive bulwark of protection against the evil agencies, the fear of disorder, the refusal to believe in chance and the consequent ascription of accidental harm and damage to supernatural agencies. The difficulty of accepting evil as a necessary ingredient of reality leads directly to concepts of malevolent supernatural forces. If evil need not be and should not be, if things have somehow gone wrong and evil has intruded itself into a world which could have been free of it, who or what is responsible? It cannot be man, because so much of the evil in the world is beyond all human contriving, and so the roots of evil are found in superhuman agencies—god or the gods, fate, the Devil, evil spirits, the dead, creatures of the underworld and the night, monsters, hags, hobgoblins and bogies. Evil impulses which stir and whisper in the brain may feel alien to the person who plays unwilling host to them, as if they had been insinuated by something from outside.This mythology was meant to guarantee order, stability and security, to renew and perpetuate the triumph over chaos,
    • From Demons & Illness in Ancient Mesopotamia, Andras Backsay, 2013: The Mesopotamian worldview included both harmful and benevolent spirits who actively interfered with everyday life. Demons usually appear as representatives of divine anger and carriers of illnesses. Everyone agreed that demons cause physical, mental and moral harm and that they are responsible for illness and misfortune. A particular demon is held responsible for one or more definable diseases. For instance, the alû-demon is associated with strokes, as are Sulak (the lurking demon of the bathroom), river demons, spirits of death, the ghosts of those who died in water, and the roaming spirits of the plains. The ghost eṭemmu was associated with complaints of the head and the neck, stomach problems, breathing problems, fever, and mental disorders. Moreover, the identification of diseases with particular demons changed over time. Hence, Lamashtu was linked with fever but later with diseases of liver and gallbladder. This demon was mainly associated with the death of newborn children, what would be termed today Sudden Infant Syndrome. The Asakku demon (whose name means “he who smites”) is deemed to be the cause of epilepsy, skin-disease, fever,, shivers, headache, jaundice, and possibly malaria. Asakku is the embodiment of heat, and he is associated with the hot winds that bring illnesses in the Gilgamesh Epic. Is the demon an independent mythological figure or the personification of a particular disease? Ancient Near Eastern cultures in general did not establish a sharp distinction between demons and illnesses. Demons appear as mythological figures AND as a personification of diseases. A more realistic picture about the relevant Mesopotamian demon would probably supply a better understanding of the sources of Jewish magic and Old Testament demonology.
    • From Demonic Beings in Ancient Egypt Manal B. Hammad, International Academic Journal Faculty of Tourism, 2018: There is no collective term in the ancient Egyptian language that is equivalent to the English word Demon. The Egyptians believed that they were surrounded by supernatural powers that affected their fate not only in the earthly life but also in their afterlife. These fate demons were benevolent protectors that played the role of their guardian angels from anything that threatened their course of life. However these protector demons were not always able to safeguard them against the evil ones. Demons were believed to have different origins; some were the creation of the gods, while others were a result of human beings either dead or alive. The lack of designated cult places for the demons is an important distinction between them and deities, at least till the New Kingdom. Demons possessed special powers that were not universal, but rather limited in nature and range. Demons do not dwell in the divine land of light or in temples, but they rather live in night, darkness or in natural places such as desserts pools, rivers, streams, ponds, foreign places, mountains, as well as caves, pits, tombs, as all were considered doorways into the netherworld. Some demons are stationary, attached to a certain place that serves as their home and described and depicted in funerary literature as guardians. Wandering demons move from one place to another and were connected to diseases, misfortune to humans, nightmares, and demonic possessions.
    • From Where Demons Come From, Livia Gershon, JSTOR Daily, 2021: The Greeks used the word daimon to refer to minor gods or intermediate supernatural beings, as well as the souls of the dead. A daimon might also be a supernatural entity that causes disease, or the disease itself. Daimons could possess humans, causing madness. But philosophers generally saw daimons as good. And even regular people viewed them not as evil but as capricious creatures who needed sacrifices to mollify them. When scribes translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, they used “daimon” for Hebrew terms referring to pagan gods, human-animal hybrids, and diseases. But notably, they didn’t use “daimon” to mean angel, even though supernatural creatures acting as intermediaries between humans and the divine fit neatly with the word’s meaning to ancient Greeks. To Greek-speaking Jews, daimons were gods of other nations, not creatures within their religion, and the translators might have wanted to avoid suggesting that angels were anything like minor gods. In the New Testament, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke begin to equate demons with evil spirits. They also unify the figures of Satan, the devil, and Beelzebul. But it was only in the second half of the second century CE that Assyrian Christian theologian Tatian fully identified demons as the “arch-rebesl” who followed Satan in his banishment. Understanding how ancient Jews and Christians viewed angels and demons may spark our imaginations to think anew about the cosmos and cosmic demography. https://daily.jstor.org/where-demons-come-from/ 
    • From the Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906: The demons mentioned in scripture are of two classes: The “hairy ones” to which the Israelites sacrificed in the open fields (sometimes translated as “devils” or incorrectly as “he-goats”), are satyr-like demons, described as dancing in the wilderness, and are identical with the jinn of the Arabian woods and deserts. To the same class belongs Azazel, the goat-like demon of the wilderness, and Lilith. The wilderness as the home of demons was regarded as the place whence such diseases as leprosy issued. The Israelites also offered sacrifices to storm demons, believed to come forth not from the heavenly abode of Yhwh but from the underworld.  The main demons were workers of harm: To them were ascribed the various diseases, particularly such as affect the brain and the inner parts. These demons were supposed to enter the body and cause the disease. Demonology among the Jews preserved its simple character as a popular belief, the demons being regarded as mischievous, but not as diabolical or as agencies of a power antagonistic to god. Even Ashmodai, or Asmodeus, the king of demons, who kills the seven successive bridegrooms of Sara before their marital union, is but a personification of lust and murder; but there is nothing Satanic—that is, of the spirit of rebellion against god—in him. It was the demonology of Babylonia which populated the world of the Jews with beings of a semi-celestial and semi-infernal nature. Only after the division of the world in the Zoroastrian system did we see the rise of the Jewish division of life between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of evil.
    • From The Satan, Ryan Stokes, 2016: 
    • From Jubilees, 2nd Century CE…ish: And it came to pass when the children of men began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born unto them, that the messengers of YAHWEH saw that they were beautiful to look upon; and they took themselves wives of all whom they chose, and they bare unto them sons that were giants. And YAHWEH looked upon the earth, and behold the earth had wrought all manner of evil before his eyes.  And YAHWEH opened seven flood-gates of heaven, And the mouths of the fountains of the great deep, seven mouths in number. And the flood-gates began to pour down water from the heaven forty days and forty nights until the whole world was full of water. And when the waters disappeared Noah went forth from the ark, and built an altar on the mountain. And he made atonement for the earth, for everything that had been on it had been destroyed, save those that were in the ark with Noah. [But soon] the unclean demons began to lead astray the children of the sons of Noah, and to make error and destroy them. And he prayed before YAHWEH his Sovereign Ruler, and said: ‘As you have not caused me to perish as You did the sons of perdition, let not wicked spirits rule but bless me and my sons, that we may increase and Multiply and replenish the earth. And You know how Your Watchers, the fathers of these spirits, acted in my day: and as for these spirits, imprison them and hold them fast in the place of condemnation, and let them not bring destruction on the sons of your servant.’ But the chief of the spirits, Mastema, came and said: ‘YAHWEH, Creator, let some of them remain before me, and let them listen to my voice, and do all that I shall say unto them; for if some of them are not left to me, I shall not be able to execute the power of my will on the sons of men; for these are for corruption and leading astray before my judgment, for great is the wickedness of the sons of men.’ And YAHWEH said: Let the tenth part of them remain, and let nine parts descend into the place of condemnation,’ and all the malignant evil ones we bound in the place of condemnation, and a tenth part of them we left that they might be subject before Satan on the earth.
    • From The Gospel of Mark: Unclean Spirits and Demons, Brice Laughrey, Breaking Bread Theology, 2021: Mark uses two terms to talk about demons: demons (of course) and unclean spirits. These seem to be used interchangeably. Demons are always described as possessing a person, either explicitly or implicitly. Mark never describes the demons themselves, and he only describes symptoms of the possessions on three occasions: Convulsing and shouting, Extreme strength, howling, and bruising oneself, unable to speak, unable to hear. Most importantly, in the entire gospel of Mark, the demons are never the main emphasis of the stories. Casting out demons is often mentioned in passing along with other things that Jesus and the disciples were doing, such as proclaiming the message in the synagogues. No special emphasis is given to the demons, except in extended narratives, and even then, the conversations are short and generally serve to set up other interactions. In Mark 3, the scribes accuse Jesus of casting out demons by the power of the ruler of demons. But Jesus wasn’t overly concerned about the demons. He was concerned about the people. Why do people get so caught up in seeking out and “identifying” demons in the world? Why are people so concerned with identifying those who are “in league with demons?” Even Jesus’s harshest responses to others had nothing to do with demons or demonic forces. When we become fixated on “evil spiritual forces,” we often fall into the same trap. Christians should stop using demons as an excuse to be fearful or hateful toward others or say terrible, degrading things about people. At least as far as the gospel of Mark is concerned, that sort of attitude is counter to Jesus’s perspective on demons and unclean spirits. In my opinion, a far better concern is this: how do I love the people whose lives seem to be captive to things outside their control? https://breakingbreadtheology.com/2021/04/11/the-gospel-of-mark-unclean-spirits-and-demons/ 
    • From Perceptions of Demons in Medieval Theology and Iconography, Victoria Burns-Price University of Reading, 2021: There is a stark difference between the nature and physicality of demons as described by theologians and the way in which demons are represented in the visual arts. The idea of demons and their presence in the human world was an increasingly interesting issue for the medieval church. This interest can be found as far back as Augustine, who was writing at a time when pagan concepts were being understood through a Christian worldview and ideas such as daimons (neutral spirits in the GrecoRoman world) were translated into Christian demons, which warranted significant discussion. An interest in these topics was revived in the medieval period for various reasons: There was a widespread belief that the year 1000 would herald the Last Judgement, based on the reference in Revelation 20 to Satan being bound for 1000 years, after which he would be freed to wreak havoc on the world. As a result of this, ideas around hell, eternal punishment and sin became more prominent at this time. In the following centuries, the Church was increasingly concerned by non-orthodox beliefs, heretical groups, and the influence of Judaism and Islam. On demons specifically, Lombard cites Augustine: “All angels before their fall had aerial bodies, formed from the purer and higher part of the air and not suitable for suffering. And such bodies were preserved for the good angels who remained steadfast. But the evil angels in their fall were changed into an inferior quality of thicker air, for just as they were cast down from a worthier place to a lower one, that is, into our cloudy atmosphere, so their refined bodies were transformed into inferior and thicker ones, in which they can suffer from a superior element–that is, from fire.” 
      • This includes demons as hybrid compilations of other creatures and with overtly monstrous features, including unusual colourings, bat-like wings, enlarged limbs and teeth, or horns. It could be that the hybridity of the demonic, especially incorporating the animalistic, is in contrast with the concepts of man being made in god’s image and the incarnation of the divine in Christ. The hybrid nature of the representation of demons in these instances is therefore a way to demonstrate their otherness and that their very existence is in conflict. Many of the mythical creatures in the ancient world were understood as hybrid, and the desire to condemn these creatures as demonic and anti-Christian could have influenced the ongoing association between demons and hybridity. But even within theological contexts, such as illuminations in theological manuscripts, it is very likely that the purpose of the illustrations representing demons was not to reflect theological accuracy. It would be very difficult to represent demons as incorporeal beings made of air. Similarly, showing demons as taking on specific human or animal forms would also be difficult as there would be no immediate and obvious way of determining whether they were demons in that form, or the forms themselves, outside of specific tropes such as a serpent in the garden of Eden. Were angels and demons to be represented according to their true nature, this would not only be impossible due to their incorporeality, but they would also look the same given that demons are fallen angels despite being completely opposite in their fundamental nature, a point which is important to make to clear to the viewer. Standard tropes therefore developed with angels depicted in a similar way to saints, with halos to demonstrate their closeness to god, and wings to mark them as supernatural. Demons, on the other hand, were depicted as monstrous, demonstrating both their wicked nature and distinguishing them from natural animals.
    • From Demons & Their Jobs in Medieval Art, Carolyn Whitson, Pilgrim To the Past, 2024: Based on the artworks, medieval demons have jobs to do: They have duties in Hell, saints to harass, souls to steal, nooks to leap out from to startle sinners.  Some seem to love their job, others seem to find it rather distressing. The ones who are charged with punishing sinners operate under very crowded conditions.  In medieval artwork, they are often crammed into the right side, torturing as best they can. The demons in Santa Maria’s Judgment Portal are each tightly pocketed into a rectangular space, reminiscent of today’s corporate cubicle farms. It looks as though each demon is a specialist, and is not able to just move from one punishment to the next: It’s a career. Some demons suffer under disorganized working conditions, as a tumble of demons and sinners could leave you wondering who is whom. I think the theory here is that Heaven is orderly and so Hell must be chaotic. Some demons have jobs that are fairly working-class, as they do pick-ups and deliveries, they carry bottles for stuffing in dead souls, and something like rakes to catch them. Winged and horned, they have the aspects of animals, but they are attendants of death. In Hell-mouth scenes and rounding-up-sinners scenes, the demons seem to function as bouncers, only in the case of damnation it’s about making sure that everyone gets in, rather than keeping the losers out.   Additional skills in sinner Tetris are appreciated.  Hell is a standing-room-only kind of place, apparently.  Tempting a saint into sin is an important role for demons to play in medieval art.  For the saint to shine, it’s necessary to show his heroic commitment, so the demon’s job is much like a salesman or a trader.  So, which demons have the best jobs? I think they’re the ones who get to ham it up in representations of biblical stories, where sometimes the demon upstages everyone else in the scene. What are entry-level jobs for demons?  Probably the role of being a jump-scare reminder that one’s wandering thoughts (in church) are pathways to evil, like the tiny demon peeking out from the base of a pillar in the nave of Fleury Abbey–he’s so new at his work that he doesn’t even know how to look scary yet. Promotion from jump-scare demons in the church interiors might be to gargoyle: You get to be larger, and you get to show how good the church is at warding off evil from the parishioners within.  It’s a PR kind of job. https://www.pilgrimtothepast.com/post/welcome-to-the-working-week-demons-and-their-jobs-in-medieval-art 
    • From Necromancy: The Art of Controlling Demons, Sebastia Giralt, Science CAT, 2018: Until the thirteenth century, medieval European intellectuals dismissed as rural superstitions the practices of inferior magic or sorcery. However, the Latin translations of texts about magic and astrology that reached the West, made above all in the Iberian Peninsula during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with the other branches of knowledge in the Greco-Arab tradition, caused a revival of magic thanks to the authority conferred upon it by ancient, often mythical, origins, which were based on numerous works attributed to Solomon or Hermes. Thus, it was above all during the thirteenth century when theologians and natural philosophers  began to distinguish between “natural magic” and “necromancy” – now “black magic,” as its purpose was to control devils. The former was closer to the sciences, insofar as it claimed to know and exploit the occult properties originating naturally; the latter, on the other hand, was conceptually closer to religion, as it aspired to obtain the aid of supernatural powers through rites, and because of this it was the one most fiercely opposed by the Church. Witchcraft has very little relation to these magical practices; it might be more correct to call it “anti-religion”: in place of god, the antithetical being, the devil, is adored and consequently it is regarded as being an inversion of the values and rituals of Christianity. The spirits invoked by necromancers from the manuals that they used are linked to heavenly bodies or the natural forces of the Earth but also to demons, angels and other ambiguous spirits in an often imperceptible confusion. All these spirits of different origins are indiscriminately considered demons by orthodox thinking, and their invocation is understood to be equally reprehensible. Demons are everywhere, as Thomas Aquinas said, although theologians believed they inhabited above all the lowest dark air that is in contact with the Earth, and they were organized in a hierarchy under Lucifer. This hierarchical view goes back to Neoplatonism based on the identification of the demons and the deities of Greco-Roman Antiquity with the fallen angels of Judaeo-Christian tradition – together with those of other pagan religions: Celtic, Germanic) and those of the Near East, due to the same wish to degrade them by equating them with magic. Rather than making a pact with the devil, it is the necromancer who demands the obedience of demons and other spirits thanks to the power conferred upon him by god. Consequently, the magician must have a profound belief in god and before performing any operation he must purify himself with a period of chastity, fasting, prayer and perform his ablutions with holy water. The data on the possession of magic manuscripts allow us to learn about their users in greater detail: they were mainly compiled by clerics with a religious dedication, generally monks. Medical practitioners, alchemists and astrologers were the next most significant groups that collected magic books. https://www.sciencia.cat/temes/medieval-necromancy-art-controlling-demons 
    •  

The post Episode 208: History of Demons appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• TRANS LIFELINE SUPPORT, SATANIC CIRCLE
• FORMULA DRIVE, RENO SATANIC
  • From Explicit and Implicit Measures of Black Cat Bias in Cat and Dog People Greg C Elvers et al, Journal of Animals, 2024: The precise significance of a black cat depended on the circumstances: In superstitions from the 17th century on, to see it walking toward you is a good omen, but if it crosses your path it is a harbinger of evil, especially in the morning. Those in dangerous professions, such as miners and fishermen, would often refuse to go to work that day if a black cat ran in front of them. ‘This fear of a black cat crossing one’s path persists in the United States and certain other parts of the world, and in some places spitting is said to be the only way to avert the bad luck it brings. Whether lucky or unlucky, the black cat has long been seen as having special powers, and the black cat as a witch’s familiar is an image common in folklore and storybooks, often believed to be the witch herself in animal form. Folk remedies from the seventeenth century often feature a black cat: rubbing its tail into the eye was a traditional cure for a sty, and drinking its blood was believed to restore health. The idea that a cat may “die” nine times goes back at least to the sixteenth.century and, although its precise source is unclear, it probably has its origins in the belief that a witch could take on the body of a cat nine times. This fear of cats is reflected in the old tradition of entering a house with the greeting “God bless all except the cat.” When a dead family member was laid out in the house prior to the funeral, cats were kept well away to prevent them from jumping onto or over the body, or else the spirit of the dead person would be endangered or the next person to see the body would die. A cat can supposedly foretell a death and will refuse to stay indoors if a member of the family is about to die. They are also reputed to have the ability to “suck the breath” out of infants, and therefore must never be left alone with one. Records show that this belief was so widespread that, in the eighteenth century, one coroner actually ruled a cat responsible for the death of a child.
    • • While a common superstition in the United States is that black cats bring bad luck, that is not universally true across cultures and times: Until 1975, black cats were required to be onboard British ships as a good luck charm. Some of the negative superstitions associated with black cats may arise from the belief that black cats are associated with witchcraft and heresy. After looking at adoption records of over 29,000 cats, black kittens took about 4 days longer to be adopted than kittens who were not primarily black, while black adult cats took almost six days longer on average. In our studies, superstitious behaviors, belief in witchcraft, and religiosity were expected to be directly correlated with black cat bias measured both explicitly and implicitly. These relations are predicted to be stronger in dog people than in cat people. Belief in witchcraft was a predictor of explicitly measured black cat bias for dog people with a medium effect size but not for cat people. As belief in witchcraft increases in dog people, black cat bias tends to increase. Religiosity is also a predictor of black cat bias for dog people. Because self-identified cat people have, on average, more cats than dog people, cat people may have more experience with black cats that offers protection from bias. Given the correlation between religiosity and belief in witchcraft, it is not surprising that black cat bias can also be predicted from dog people’s religious point of view. Partially consistent with the predictions, the bias is more extreme around Halloween, which, in the United States, is a holiday associated with superstition and witchcraft. This finding is important because it suggests that black cat bias might be malleable—it might be changed by external factors. Future research could look at whether an intervention designed to reduce belief in witchcraft could influence black cat bias. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11640230/pdf/animals-14-03372.pdf 
    • From THE CAT IN THE MYSTERIES OF RELIGION AND MAGIC, Mary Oldfield Howey, 1956: The Luciferans worshipped god’s eldest son, who had power over wealth and worldly happiness. They are said to have adored a black cat as the symbol of Satan when celebrating their mysteries, and to have sacrificed children at their nocturnal orgies, and used the victim’s blood in making the Eucharistic bread of their Order. The Gnostic sect of the Manicheans were accused by their persecutors of many terrible and incredible crimes, and were said to worship the devil in the form of a black cat. Confessing witch Rolande de Vernois acknowledged “The Devil presents himself for the Sabbath in the form of a great black cat.” Such beliefs are still prevalent in the remoter parts of Europe. We may instance the peasants of Southern Slavonia who are firmly persuaded that the devil dwells in a black cat. They try to keep clear of such felines by night, as during the hours of darkness the Fiend has power suddenly to resume his proper form and seize and destroy the unwary traveller. To illustrate the survival of the old beliefs in our enlightened land, the well-known ghost-hunter Mr. Elliott O’Donnell assures us that “there are, at the present moment, many houses in England haunted by phantasms in the form of black cats, of so sinister and hostile an appearance, that one can only assume that unless they are the actual spirits of cats, earthbound through cruel and vicious propensities, they must be vice-elementals, i.e. spirits that have never inhabited any material body.”  In the legend of Lilith we recognise the origin of the widespread superstition that cats will suck the breath of a sleeping child, and it is also clear why black cats are banished from children’s cradles. In mediaeval times witches were thought to assume cat form to play the part of vampire, and seem to have usurped the role of Lilith. We may see the lingering remains of this belief among all classes of the population to-day, in the numerous black cats named “Satan,” and images of black cats carried by the superstitious; all so many flags of truce held out to the Lord of the World.
    • From Many Faces of Evil, Pasi Klemettinen, Studies In Folkore & Popular Thought, 2002: Literary sources for European Christian beliefs dealing with the devil and witchcraft usually identify the cat as a faithful ally of the witch. We must remember, however, to make a distinction between animals given to witches by the devil, and demonic creatures in which the devil materializes. In Scandinavian folklore, horses and dogs are more commonly associated with the devil than are cats; in Finnish folk belief, the cat is deemed an unclean animal, thus, the appearance of a black cat, an especially heinous creature, generally foretells unhappiness and warns of imminent danger.. Lencqvist refers to an incantation in which the sorcerer summons a demon cat to his aid. The animal, by causing pain, impels the thief to return stolen goods: “Mistress of Pain, demon cat, give the legs a splendid claw, pain will make him hurry.” In the minds of many, the demon dog and cat are virtually interchangeable as images associated with the kingdom of the dead. Archival materials related to folk beliefs also reveal accounts of the devil himself assuming the form of a black cat. Likewise, one of the most frequent incarnations of the devil in Russian folklore is a black dog or cat. There was a haunted house in Impilahti. At night something would rattle objects indoors and during the day it would cause a ruckus in the attic and even in the hayloft. The people of that household soon had no peace of mind and were growing more and more desperate by the day. Finally, one Sunday after church, the owner of the house went to talk to the priest. The priest went to the house with his holy water and wine and held a sermon, and then walked around the house sprinkling holy water on the walls. They then noticed a huge black cat leave the house and head for the woods. After this the house was no longer haunted, and the people believed that the devil himself – as a black cat – had abandoned the house and stopped haunting it and troubling the inhabitants.
    • From Sketches of Old Dublin, Ada Peter, 1907: The proceedings of the Hell-Fire Club, whether on the summit of Mount Pelier, or within the walls of the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill, were whispered among the plainer folk with awe and horror. It was told how blasphemous toasts were followed by the sudden death of the speaker on more than one occasion, while the sulphurous flames and fumes which were produced at their gatherings caused any country person who happened to witness them to be convinced that they saw the infernal regions. Among the beverages consumed by the members of the Dublin HellFire Club was a mixture made by brewing whiskey and butter together, and as the making of this was an art in itself, they employed a special scaltheen maker. From this man have come many stories of the doings of his wild masters, who, as they imbibed the burning drink so carefully prepared, used, he said, to stand in impious bravado before blazing fires till they dropped down dead from the heat. Again, he related how brimstone certainly was perceptible to the senses and how the very horses showed a dislike to draw their hearses. Of a certain black cat there are several accounts: This animal belonged to the Club, and had a place at the dinner table, when it was always served first, and any insult or neglect to it was regarded as an offence to be punished by the life of the offender. A country clergyman, his curiosity aroused at seeing the cat helped first, inquired as to the reason, and received for answer that it was out of respect for age, as they believed it to be the oldest individual in the company. The clergyman replied that he believed so too, as it was not a cat but an imp of darkness, which had the effect of making the cat assume its proper form of a fiend and forthwith flew away. 
    • From Spinsters, Old Maids, & Cat Ladies, Katherine Barak, Bowling Green State University, 2014: Using Foucault’s notion of “containment strategies,” representations of the crazy cat lady, the spinster, and the old maid negatively frame independent, single women as models of failed white womanhood. These characters must be contained because they intrinsically transgress social norms, query gender roles, and challenge the limitations of mediated womanhood. The cat lady in popular culture has become a shorthand signifier for non-normative femininity. The cat lady addresses the same gender concerns as her predecessors in Spinsters and old maids. Historical context dictates the manner in which they are depicted, but the message has been resoundingly the same: women must adhere to heteronormative gender expectations. Be desirable, flirt, catch a husband, marry, have children, and you will have succeeded as a woman. Whether by choice or situation, spinster, old maid, and cat lady characters neglect their feminine duties and become cultural models for failure. The domestic cat’s nature is marked by ambivalence: They’re wild animals that enjoy the comforts of civilization. Despite claims of domestication and dependence on human intervention, the cat is still resolutely independent. Cats have come to symbolize opposing forces: domestic and wild, dependent and independent, good and evil, innocence and promiscuity, and so on. The same can be said of women – they might be depicted as benevolent or beguiling. 
      • Woman and cat, goddess and sacred animal, witch and feline familiar: the relationship has existed for centuries and the connotations range from domestic home and hearth to the supernatural. Women and cats’ ambivalent iconographies, some of which still exist today in Euro-American popular imagination, took root during the Middle Ages. Sacred animals were not adopted into the larger European religions. This is true of all Christianity, but Protestantism in particular. The cornerstone to Protestantism lay in the relationship of an individual to god. Rather than mediated by saints, sacraments, animals, or the church, the connection should be direct. Medieval European culture shied away from conceptualizing animals as anything more than their use-value in aiding labor, their exchange-value, or a food source. Animals were non sequiturs in worship. This notion was paralleled by animals’ importance within pagan religious rituals. When pagan beliefs were deemed unacceptable alongside sanctioned religious practices the animals associated with those beliefs suffered. Folklorist Katharine M. Briggs blames failed syncretism for the longstanding cultural discomfort with cats. Christianity was on the rise and female deities and their feline companions were no longer respected. In fact, women gathering or participating in rural religious rites or traditions were now indicative of nocturnal ceremonies, sorcery, and witchcraft, and cats, especially black cats, became agents of devilish acts and witches’ familiars.
    • From Witches & Poison Cats, Wu Haiyun & Wang Mingke, Sixth Tone, 2023: In the course of his fieldwork, Wang Mingke, one of the world’s foremost experts on Chinese minority groups, has explored one of the most marginalized groups within these villages: women accused of witchcraft. Known in the local language as “poisonous cats,” villagers are hostile toward these women out of a belief they can transform into animals and perform magic. It’s a near universal form of violence across humanity, one that Wang, always interested in the broader applications of his work, has linked to current hot-button issues like social media “tribalization” and anti-Asian hate. The legend of the “poisonous cat” is widespread in villages in northern Sichuan. The accused typically possess several marginal characteristics: They are female, usually elderly, and many have married into the village from elsewhere. Caught between the village’s fear of external enemies and its suspicions about internal foes, these individuals occupy a complex position: neither fully assimilated nor wholly excluded. Consequently, they become convenient scapegoats for various ills. They can be targeted at any time to alleviate intra-village tensions and unify the community. Poisonous cats may exhibit a defiant and antisocial mentality. For instance, within a traditional Chinese extended family, there may be a daughter-in-law who is treated as an outsider and unfairly blamed when problems arise. In traditional novels or dramas, this young daughter-in-law often resorts to tearful threats of self-harm, but she also might seek revenge through various means, such as spreading rumors about family scandals or inciting chaos by leaving the household. In such circumstances, she transforms into a “poisonous cat.” There are certainly similarities between European witches and poisonous cats: both are invented enemies. However, the difference lies in the fact that the phenomenon of poisonous cats is limited to the internal dynamics of a village, often appearing as idle gossip that eventually fades away. On the other hand, in the case of witches, Europe witnessed a widespread witch-hunting hysteria. Many women accused of being poisonous cats are socially ostracized, and even their daughters have difficulty finding marriage prospects. However, these poisonous cats did not endure the same level of persecution as found in the witch-hunting campaigns in European history. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1013535 
    • From Did Mass Cat Killings Help Spread the Black Death, Jack Izzo, Snopes, 2023: According to some social media posts, during the Middle Ages, cats were considered Satanic and evil because of a 1233 papal decree, so Europeans rounded up cats across the continent and dispatched them in mass killings. But the cats had their revenge from beyond the grave — their pest control prowess would have led to fewer rats had their population not decreased, and in the next century or two, more cats and fewer rats could have saved people from the Black Death. “Vox in Rama” is a real document written as a letter in the year 1233 by Pope Gregory IX. It did indeed target heretics in that area of Germany, who, according to the decree, had formed cults worshipping the devil, and it does mention the use of cats in the rituals. “There is no evidence beyond “Vox in Rama” itself to suggest that these rituals actually took place. Did ‘Vox in Rama’ Lead to Europeans Thinking Cats Were Evil? Not really. While “Vox in Rama” did have papal authority, it wasn’t widely shared. Even if churches did preach about the evils of cats, that would be their fault for misinterpreting the decree, which again does demonize cats per se or compare them to Satan. None of the evidence suggests that mass killings of cats happened. Bubonic plague is caused by a bacteria which infects fleas. These fleas do live on rats, which are carriers of the plague. But cats are actually highly susceptible to plague themselves. According to historian Mike Dash, like many common myths found on the internet, this originated in the late 90s or early 2000s. “The story about the cats is almost certainly a modern internet-based fabrication,” Dash told Snopes via email. Snopes found a reference to the myth in Donald Engels’ book “Classical Cats: The Rise and Fall of the Sacred Cat,” published in 1999. Dash, found a book reference to the idea in “The Cathars” by Malcolm Lambert, published in 1998. The claims likely originated from these books, then spread to blogs on the internet, then beyond. https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/11/08/cats-mass-killings-plague/ 

The post Episode 207: Black Cats & Devils appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• ILLUMINATED BREW WORKS
• From The Birthplace of the Illuminati, Matthew Vickery, BBC, 2017: It was on 1 May 1776 that Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt, founded the Order of the Illuminati, a secret organisation formed to oppose religious influence on society and the abuse of power by the state by fostering a safe space for critique, debate and free speech. Inspired by the Freemasons and French Enlightenment philosophers, Weishaupt believed that society should no longer be dictated by religious virtues; instead he wanted to create a state of liberty and moral equality where knowledge was not restricted by religious prejudices. However religious and political conservatism ruled in Ingolstadt at that time, and subject matter taught at the Jesuit-controlled university where Weishaupt lectured was strictly monitored. After initially handpicking his five most talented law students to join, the network rapidly expanded, its members disseminating Weishaupt’s goals of enlightenment with radical teachings, while at the same time creating an elaborate network of informants who reported on the behaviour of state and religious figures in an effort to build up a wealth of information that the Illuminati could potentially exploit in their teachings. With the help of prominent German diplomat Baron Adolf Franz Friedrich, Freiherr von Knigge – who helped recruit Freemason lodges to the Illuminati cause – the clandestine group grew to more than 2,000 members throughout Bavaria, France, Hungary, Italy and Poland, among other places.“Weishaupt was in many ways a revolutionary,” journalist Michael Klarner continued. “He liked the idea of teaching people to be better human beings. He wanted to change society, he was dreaming of a better world, of a better government. He started the Illuminati with the idea that everything known to human kind should be taught – something that was not allowed here at the university.” The organisation didn’t evade the establishment for long, however. Just a decade after its creation, the secret society was infiltrated by Bavarian authorities after its radical anti-state writings were intercepted by government authorities. The Illuminati was shut down and Weishaupt was banished from Ingolstadt to live the rest of his life in the German city of Gotha, 300km to the north. Yet the idea of a secret society revolting against the state has captured imaginations ever since, encapsulated in conspiracy theories cooked up by those who believe the Illuminati was never actually disbanded – a claim that has been widely debunked by historians. Even still, conspiracy theorists say that the organisation has been covertly working behind the scenes to subvert authority. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20171127-the-birthplace-of-the-illuminati 

• From On Materialism And Idealism: Collected Works of Adam Weishaupt:  All other things being equal, I am inclined to prefer a system that presents god and Nature as greater and more wonderful. This system assumes that species, classes, and natural kingdoms are real and have their basis in Nature herself. And yet I believe that, as such, there are only individuals, and not species, genera or classes, which are only the creations of man’s inability to think of everything individually, which has forced him to take certain matching characteristics in objects and then to divide and classify them accordingly. Thus, if a hierarchy (which has been invented) were to arise from this explanation then every being would have to run through and become not the classes but all the individual instances then I should have to become everything, and everyone else would have to too! What confusion, what a useless and never-ending repetition of the same old thing! Should we have to go round and round forever in an eternal circle? I too postulate a hierarchy in Nature: the law of continuity demands it. However, I believe it manifests differently. I believe that every being walks its own individual path and develops in its own way according to the circumstances in which it finds itself and which are unique to it alone. This development of each individual being then takes hold as a part of the development of the whole. It is only the law by which this happens that has yet to be discovered. This progression of entities is a more wonderful and diverse idea than we find in the system discussed above, where everything stays within the general region of those forms that we already know: no other, more far-reaching and better ones are surmised. I have proved above that all these configurations and forms of things, even these classes in the realm of Nature, are only for these senses. We continuously carry over this transitory world-form to another entirely different one. In our thoughts we dwell unceasingly among these configurations. In this system Nature seems too poor, too uniform, and yet her law is the greatest diversity in the greatest possible unity. The more a system expresses and demonstrates this property of Nature, the closer it comes to the truth. It is precisely this stronger impression of the new life that enables us to understand why at present we can no longer remember anything about the state preceding our present human life, even if we have gained so much precisely through this prior state that, through the use of our faculty of understanding (perhaps acquired for the first time during this stage) and through the ability there acquired to draw analogical conclusions, we can make very confident inferences about this previous state, even if its type and mode, along with its precise nature, are obscured by the more powerful effect

• From Freemasonry in Colonial America, Mark Tabbert, George Washington’s Mt Vernon, 2020: Freemasonry was a phenomenon that was growing in the 1680s through 1720s. The fraternity early on attracted high aristocracy and even members of the royal family, so that just attracted more and more men who might want to join. For somebody like Washington, who is on the edge of the frontier but comes from a well to do family, this is one more means for him to gain entrance into society. When he joined when he was 19 years old,  he presumed at some point in his life he would go to England, socialize in London, and potentially be received in court. The first Masonic book published in the colonies was Benjamin Franklin’s reprint of Anderson’s Mason’s constitution in 1733, and Franklin sent copies of that book to Boston where his family is from and also down to the Carolinas for sale. We also know there were Masonic orations and sermons being published in the colonies in the 1740s and 50s, and the secret work of Freemasonry, the rituals, were being exposed in the 1720s in newspapers. We don’t know exactly what ritual Washington received when he joined in 1752, but there were exposures of rituals in 1760 that were probably very close. The men who supported Freemasonry tended to believe in self-determination, freedom of the press, freedom of religion–very radical ideas in continental Europe. And then the French Revolution, of course, went from relatively peaceful into the Reign of Terror, the rise of Napoleon, and the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, the destruction of monasteries and the slaughter which horrifies Europe to this day. One book by a Scotsman called John Robinson called The Proof of Conspiracies in 1797 allays all these shocking revolutionary things at the feet of the Illuminati, which had attempted to infiltrate Freemasonry. Umberto Eco wrote that  in the absence of a supreme being that you believe is governing the universe and has a plan, when something strange happens human beings chalk it up to some sort of conspiracy, be it a revolution or an assassination or a stock market crash–you name it, we find a conspiracy, and in America because of this history the conspiracies are usually the Illuminati or the Freemasons. https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/freemasonry/freemasonry-in-colonial-america 

• From Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy, Mike Jay, Public Domain Review, 2014: John Robison was a man with a solid and long-established reputation in the British scientific establishment, a Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics and a senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensationalist book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written: Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, which launched the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati was subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world. The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days; Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and what had driven its bloody and tumultuous progress? The power of Robison’s revelation was that it identified within the buzzing confusion of conspiracies a single antagonist and epic struggle between good and evil. The Illuminati became a lightning-rod for the deep anxieties of church and monarchy. 

• Politics had also thrown a long shadow across Robison’s professional life: The physical sciences were in the grip of another evolution after Antoine Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier split British chemistry: some recognised that his brilliant experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of god. Robison had never accepted the French theories, and by 1797 had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminati plot. For him, Lavoisier was a master Illuminist, working in concert with Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism and the new atheist world order where occult priestesses ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry. 

• In an overheated political milieu where accusations of treason were hurled from both sides, Proofs of a Conspiracy was seized on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, the abolition of slavery, and the rights of man, and Jefferson was publicly accused of being a secret member of Weishaupt’s Order. But such charges were never substantiated; the ‘Illuminati Scare’ petered out and the Federalists lost power, never to regain it. Yet the episode had touched a nerve deep within the American political mindset; the doyenne of modern conspiracy theory, 20th century British author Nesta Webster, swallowed this theory whole, but then came to believe the Illuminati were a smokescreen: the true conspirators were the ‘Jewish peril’ whose agenda had, she believed, been accurately exposed in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy/ 

• From Conspiracy, Pornography, Democracy: The Recurrent Aesthetics of the American Illuminati, Gordon Fraser, Journal of American Studies, 2018: United States democracy has long been characterized by fantasies of totalizing, all-powerful enemies, of sexual subjection, and of inescapable racial violence. The particular politics of such fantasies are historically specific, and yet their aesthetics are surprisingly recurrent. In the 1790s, as anti-Illuminati writers began to feel increasing pressure to substantiate their claims, they more fully articulated the specific racial dangers faced by the new United States. During this period, countersubversive writers speculated about whether the “sooty sons of Africa” would collaborate with foreign subversives against the United States. That a conspiracy theory in the United States quickly transformed into a narrative of racial paranoia should be relatively unsurprising: The crisis emerged, after all, in a representational economy already structured by the subjection of black people. When William Brown suggested that French revolutionaries would join self-emancipated black men in “the impure and shocking death-dance of Africa,” he was (perhaps inadvertently) calling attention to an economy in which white men operated at the center of power and discourse; Brown’s promise that the prerogatives of white American men would be upended in favor of black men and foreigners traded in fear, just like Brown’s promise that black men would let loose their “demonic lust” upon white “virgins” likewise allowed readers and listeners to indulge in a fantasy of racial humiliation. 

• The fantasies of racial subjection enabled by the Illuminati crisis in the United States were unlike anything seen during the same paranoid crisis in Europe. The sexuality of black men would be instrumental to the desires of foreign revolutionaries, they imagined, just as the sexual subjection of black women [by whites] would prefigure the sexual subjection of white women. For these counterconspiratorial fantasists at the intersections of whiteness and masculinity, the sadomasochistic fantasies of racialization provided critical aesthetic terrain upon which to organize themselves in relation with the larger world. The Illuminati, recall, were of a piece with the Enlightenment-era project that produced US democracy in the first place. Adam Weishaupt’s intellectual society embodied the “Spirit of 76 ” just as readily as did the Sons of Liberty. To these writers, black and foreign bodies were at once an ongoing threat to political cohesion and an object of aesthetic desire that could be consumed. While many of the counterconspiratorial writers of the Illuminati crisis favored the abolition of slavery, they were nonetheless implicated in an economy that trafficked in the subjection of black bodies.

• • From Raising the Devil, Bill Ellis, 2000: Anti-Semitism did not strike as deeply into American culture as it did in Europe. Likewise, anti-Masonic rumors were not especially prevalent or influential during the early part of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, scattered allusions to the Illuminati myth appeared with the American Communist Scare. In 1953, at the depth of the McCarthy investigations, government agencies such as the California State Senate Committee on Education were learning that “So-called modern communism is apparently the same hypocritical and deadly world conspiracy to destroy civilization that was founded by the secret order of the Illuminati in Bavaria on May 1, 1776,” according to a presentation by conspiracy writer Jordan Maxwell. The most influential source in creating the American Illuminati demonology was Canadian William Guy Carr. Like his predecessors, Carr argued that the Illuminati were only the most recent agents in a cosmic struggle originating with Satan’s rebellion. Jesus Christ was incarnated, according to Carr’s theological vision, to denounce the money-lenders and false priests as the Illuminati. In a remarkable argumentative twist, he argues that the Illuminati managed Jesus’ execution so that the Jewish people would appear to have been responsible for his death. This led to persecution, which in turn allowed the Illuminati to “use the hate, engendered amongst the Jewish people as the result of persecution to further their secret totalitarian ambitions.” According to Carr’s scenario, the Illuminati were founded not by Weishaupt but by a group of rabbis and high priests according to “inspirations given by Lucifer.” The conspiracy thus founded was controlled by a “Supreme Council” of specialists in Jewish doctrine, rites, and ceremony. Asked how he came to know such secrets, Carr explained that much of this information was included in documents being carried by an IIluminati courier in 1785. A bolt of lightning, directed by God Himself, struck the courier dead, and the documents he carried fell into the hands of the Bavarian government. Many of these developed Carr’s Anglophile distrust of United States politics, which he saw as irretrievably contaminated by Illuminati influences. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was assassinated to prevent financial reforms he had planned, and while John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger, the Rothschilds had given the orders. 

• LaVey called his Church of Satan operation mainly “showmanship .. . nine parts outrage and one part social respectability” that allowed participants to channel their “demons” into “a ritualized hatred that finally absorbs the hate itself, rather than turning it loose in such meaningless, antisocial outbursts as the Tate massacre.” As for his religion, he called it “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added,” and he actually looked forward to the arrival of a “benign police state.” But the sex-and-ritual-murder pattern had now been set in the California media after the Mansion Family killings, and it would henceforth be difficult for any non-standard religion to detach itself from that reputation. Other conspiracy elements were quickly added on. The September 1970 issue of American Opinion, the publication of the right-wing John Birch Society, featured a lengthy article referencing Crowley, Manson, LaVey, Roman Polanski, all demonstrating that Satanism, “next to Communism, has become the fastest growing criminal menace of our time.” The article, using a variety of popular sources, traces occult movements through Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati, the members of which, he claims on the strength of 1790s pamphlets, drank human blood, worshipped Satan, and conducted the Black Mass on an altar of human skeletons. The article concluded with an interview with an unusually cooperative “radical socialist” LaVey, who was happy to inscribe a copy of The Satanic Bible for a member of the John Birch Society and show him his extensive library of titles by “identified Communists.” Yes, Weishaupt was indeed “a practicing Satanist,’ LaVey proudly confirmed, and the Illuminati were “quite a powerful force for evil.”

• • From The Illuminatus Saga Stumbles Along, Robert Anton Wilson, 2007: Bob Shea and I began the Illuminatus series in 1969, inspired directly by our work as co-editors of The Playboy Fo­rum. The Forum deals with civil liberties, the rights of the individual, and abuses of government power. Natu­rally, in addition to a great many intelli­gent letters from people justifiably indignant about real cases of unconstitu­tional behavior by judges and legisla­tors, the Forum – especially in those days – received a lot of paranoid rantings from people imagining baroque conspiracies. One day, either Shea or I­ – we don’t remember which-asked whimsically, “Suppose all these nuts are right, and every single conspiracy they complain about really exists?” Thus, the Illuminatus saga was born. The idea was simple-a novel, perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between “proving” the case for multiple con­spiracies and undermining the “proof.” Of course, if Shea andI  had any real sense of the market we would have real­ized that such a deliberately ambiguous work was not going to have immediate commercial appeal. But once we got started, the writing was so much fun we simply forgot about it. We had created an unsolved (perhaps unsolvable) mystery that was not merely puzzling like Agatha Christie but dumb­founding, flabbergasting, and more than a bit unnerving. The commercial results were not quite as bad as you might expect. It took over five years to get such a weird book pub­lished, true-and the refrain “I can’t understand that dammed thing” was heard from Senior Editors, but when it finally got into print, in 1975, the tril­ogy received almost uniformly good re­views everywhere. We even earned fairly decent royalties the first year In-jokes referring to the trilogy creep into other novels, movies and music videos. We have created some kind of “underground classic.” We were writing for neo-pagans, witches, Futurists, space colony advo­cates, longevity and vitamin freaks, and a lot of psy­chologists, psychiatrists, radical M.D.s, and other professionals concerned with the illnesses of our nation. There are also a lot of people who don’t want the Feds taking their dope away, and an assort­ment of anti-IRS cranks. As far as I can make out, the one bond uniting all these diverse groups-and separating them from others with simi­lar convictions-is a deep conviction that the government lies a lot, combined with a refusal to buy into any orthodox school of radical analysis. That is, they believe that any Ideology which claims to explain “what is really going on behind the lies” is just guess-work, and they feel that the jokes, insane exag­gerations and surrealistic twists of Illuminatus are about as plausible, and about as implausible, as the sober, seri­ous, and totally humorless critiques of the New Left, the New Age or any other organized Counter-Culture. I don’t know that this is the best path for a writer, but it seems to be the only possible path for me. The books have a sales chart that goes up, and goes down, and goes up and down, but eventually finds a loyal audience.

• From How Did He Get So Famous? Illuminati and the Pop Star, ELISSA R. HENKEN, University of Georgia, 2013: In Spring of 2012, two UCLA students of film and design told me that, according to at least one of their friends and to lots of messages on electronic media, the singer/actress Jennifer Hudson had made a deal with the Illuminati, including the 2008 murder of her family, in exchange for fame and weight loss. Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Eminem, Lady Gaga, and many, many others all reportedly joined the Illuminati, and the signs are to be found in their gestures, their lyrics, and their clothing as well as in their rapid rise to fame. Uncertain how much their location in Los Angeles and their interest in film and music (one is a deejay) might have affected their awareness of these legends, I asked my own students in Georgia what they had heard. Perhaps a quarter of each class had learned about it aurally; far more had seen something about it on the internet. The Illuminati are popularly understood in this context to be a secret society engaged in a conspiracy to control world affairs and create the New World Order, which itself is understood to entail replacing the established Christian order of Western nations with “an atheistic, socialist, global government.” Most of the related folklore takes the form of rumors—simply stating that some particular star is a member of the Illuminati. One claim making the electronic rounds is that Whitney Houston had to die in order that Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy, a true Illuminata, might live. Most people with whom I have discussed this intersection of the Illuminati and pop stars have immediately made a connection to Robert Johnson and his Faustian bargain with the devil at the crossroads. The preponderance of black artists said to owe their success to the Illuminati suggests some doubt that black artists—men or women— could achieve such success on their own, but there is not enough demographic material on those who either purvey or respond to that material to make any definitive or overarching statements about the racial undertones of these legends. Marc Lamont Hill, a journalist and scholar of African American studies, with a particular interest in hip-hop culture, points out that, “By accepting conspiracy theories as true, we can make sense of other people’s success without having to accept our own shortcomings.” Lack of talent, no matter the artist’s or the narrator’s race, is certainly one of a variety of themes behind these rumors. One white student reported that when she first noticed Justin Bieber—she kept hearing one song over and over—she asked classmates about him and was told that he was Illuminati.

• • From Cultivating Ethical Gameplay Through Illuminati, Rebekah Shultz Colby & Steve Holmes, Journal of Computers & Compositions, 2022:  The card game we examine in this article, Illuminati, constructs a satire of conspiracy theories with its artwork and procedural rules as players are meant to socially form alliances or cabals (some secret) and then ruthlessly break them. While few players take the game’s satirical conspiracy ideology seriously, the rules and mechanics offer a productive case for studying player’s material ethical habits. To procedurally simulate the paranoia of conspiracy theories, the game rules have unbalanced player role mechanics that make it much easier for some players to win over others and encourage players to cheat to compensate. In our study, we interviewed players before and after a play session of Illuminati, asking the same questions for each player. Ideologically, players either did not take the game’s parody of conspiracy theories seriously or implicitly agreed with the ideology behind the parody so unproblematically that they did not reflect on the game’s ideology in the meaningful way. For instance, the player who chose to play as the Discordian Society did not take the game seriously enough to see this as an ideologically motivated decision. As Jesper Juul argues in the paper “Half-Real”, digital and non-digital games exist on a continuum between being rule-bound systems comprised of rules and game mechanics and representing a fictional world through graphics, music, and narrative. Consequently, Sicart argues that games exist in a dialectical tension between being purely rule-based systems and, because of their narrative worlds, also representing a real ideological system and interpellate players by positioning them as a particular type of subject within an ideology. Our study illustrates that the players’ process is much more complicated than the process Sicart defines and will always change depending on different play contexts, especially as they are driven by attractors such as rules or gameplay. Nevertheless, this case study of Illuminati shows how material attractors form a space for certain dispositions which over time construct ethos. Even when the rules allowing cheating for instance, players can still resist these actions, choosing actions that construct dispositions they’re more inclined toward.

The post Episode 206: There Is No Illuminati… appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.