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 
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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.

SHOW LINKS

• UNHOLY ROSARIES

• From Geometric Symbols & Divine Proportions, Douglas C. Youvan, 2024: The pentagram is one of the earliest geometric symbols used by human civilizations, with its origins traced back to Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE. In Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, the pentagram was often inscribed on clay tablets, amulets, and other artifacts. The pentagram was associated with directions and the known world, often used to represent the five regions of the earth or the five visible planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—each of which was associated with a particular god in the Sumerian pantheon. The points of the pentagram were thought to correspond to these celestial bodies, symbolizing the unity of heaven and earth in a single, harmonious design. This use of the pentagram reflects the early Mesopotamian belief in a cosmology where the earthly and the divine were inextricably linked. In Babylonian culture, which inherited much of Sumerian symbolism, the pentagram was also linked to cosmological and astrological concepts to symbolize the movements of the planets and their influence on earthly affairs. The pentagram’s five points may have been seen as a symbol of the cyclical nature of the universe, with each point representing a different phase of a celestial cycle. This interpretation aligns with the Babylonian understanding of the cosmos as an ordered system governed by divine laws.

• As Christianity began to spread in the early centuries of the Common Era, the pentagram found new meanings within the context of Christian symbolism. In early Christian art and literature, the pentagram was used to represent the five wounds of Christ—two on the hands, two on the feet, and one on the side— inflicted during his crucifixion. This association gave the pentagram a deeply sacred significance, symbolizing Christ’s sacrifice and the redemption of humanity through his suffering. In addition to representing the wounds of Christ, the pentagram was also associated with the five senses, which were seen as gifts from god that allowed humans to experience and appreciate the divine creation. The use of the pentagram in this context reflected early Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the human body and the importance of maintaining spiritual and physical purity. The pentagram was also employed as a protective symbol in early Christian communities, believed to have the power to ward off evil spirits and to protect the wearer from harm. This protective use of the pentagram may have been influenced by earlier pagan practices, where the pentagram was seen as a powerful talisman against negative forces.The pentagram’s use as a Christian symbol gradually declined as the cross became the dominant symbol of Christianity. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Douglas-Youvan/publication/383214202_Geometric_Symbols_and_Divine_Proportions_The_Pentagram_Hexagram_and_Their_Religious_Significance_Across_Cultures/links/66c28591145f4d3553663e40/Geometric-Symbols-and-Divine-Proportions-The-Pentagram-Hexagram-and-Their-Religious-Significance-Across-Cultures.pdf 

• • From A Slip of the Tongue In Salutation, Lucian, 2nd Century CE: The admirable Plato would have us reject the salutation Joy altogether; it is a mean wish, wanting in seriousness, according to him; his substitute is Prosperity, which stands for a satisfactory condition both of body and soul; in a letter to Dionysius, he reproves him for commencing a hymn to Apollo with Joy, which he maintains is unworthy, and not fit even for men of any discretion, not to mention gods. The divine Pythagoras, although he did not see fit to leave us any writings of his own, still, as far as can be judged from the writings of his disciples and other companions, did not begin letters with the traditional ‘be joyful’ or ‘do well’, but exhorted them to begin with ‘be healthy’. All of his followers, at any rate, in writing letters to each other, when they were writing something serious, would exhort (each other) to be healthy at the very beginning, as the thing most fit for the soul and the body. And their pentagram, drawn to each other in five lines, which they used as a token for the like-minded, was called ‘health’ by them. They believed that doing well and being joyful were wholly part of being healthy, but not that being healthy was entirely part of doing well or being joyful. Some also called the tetractys — their greatest oath, which for them completes the perfect number — the beginning of health. And it was true wisdom, in my opinion; that all other good things are worthless if health is wanting. 
  • From The Witch, Ronald Hutton, 2016: The distinctive contribution made by Christian Europe to the magical tradition seems to have been geometric: the use of the consecrated circle as the normal venue for a magical operation, with special significance often given to its four cardinal directions, and the identification of the pentagram as the most potent symbol of magic. Pentagrams are found in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman art or on coins, and also in the Christian early Middle Ages, but without any single tradition concerning their meaning and use: in many contexts they seem simply to have been decorative. There is no real evidence that the pentagram had any special association with magic in the ancient world. It appears once on a warrior’s shield painted on a Greek cup, which may have reflected a belief in its protective qualities…or it may just have been a decorative star. The most careful study of its ancient significance concludes (reluctantly) that its wide distribution in ancient times may have been ‘simply a question of decorative motif, with or without any particular meaning. The magic meaning of the pentagram was not yet apparent before the later Middle Ages. 

• As soon as Western Europeans acquired complex ceremonial magic in the twelfth century, seemingly as the result of their translation of Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic texts, they showed their preference for the pentagram, and it was especially associated with Solomon, the wisest of biblical kings, who had been reimagined in the late antique period as a mighty magician. The Sworn Book of Honorius, from its earliest surviving manuscripts of the fourteenth century, put the pentagram at the centre of the ‘Seal of God’ which was the most important work in the achievement of the divine vision. The pentagram also penetrated popular culture, as it appears in many parts of Western Europe by the end of the Middle Ages, on houses, cradles, bedsteads and church porches, as a protective symbol. The reasons for the new importance of the design are easy to propose: One of the prime concerns of the considerable intellectual ferment of Western Europe in the twelfth century was the reconciliation of ancient learning with creative literature, Christian beliefs, and study of the natural world. Honorius asserted that the human body is constructed on a base formed by the number five, having five senses, five limbs (including the head) and five digits on hands and feet. This made the pentagram an obvious symbol of the microcosm that the human form represented, of the divine image in which it had been shaped. 

• From Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, Anonymous, 14th Century, Translated by JRR Tolkien: Then they brought him his shield that was of brilliant jewels, with the pentagram depicted in pure hue of gold. By the baldric he caught it, and about his neck cast it: right well and worthily it went with the knight. And why the pentagram is proper to that prince so noble I intend now to tell you, though it may tarry my story. It is a sign that Solomon once set on, a figure that in it five points holdeth and each line overlaps and is linked with another, and in this way it is endless; and the English, I hear, name it the Endless Knot. So it suits well this knight and his unsullied arms, forever faithful in five points, and five times under each, Gawain as good was acknowledged as gold refinéd, devoid of every vice and with full virtues adorned. So there the pentangram painted new he on shield and coat did wear, as one of word most true and knight of bearing fair. Faultless was he found in his five senses, and in the five fingers he failed at no time, and firmly on the Five Wounds all his faith was set that Christ received on the cross, as that Creed tells us; and wherever the brave man into battle was come, on this beyond all things was his earnest thought: that ever from the Five Joys all his valor he gained that to Heaven’s courteous Queen Mary once came from her Child: free-giving and friendliness first before all, and chastity and chivalry ever changeless and straight, and piety surpassing all points: these perfect five were hasped upon him harder than on any man else, fixed at five points that failed not at all, coincided in no line nor sundered either, not ending in any angle anywhere. Therefore on his shining shield was shaped now this knot, royally with red jewels upon red gold set: this is the pure pentangle as people of learning have taught. 

• From Medieval Mythbusting Blog, James Wright, 2021: In a recent post on the online forum Mediaeval and Tudor Period Buildings, a user uploaded a photograph of a five-pointed star carved onto a piece of stone at St Mary & St John (Somerset), and asked the deceptively simple question: “Would anyone know what this symbol might mean? If we discard the facetious suggestions by amateur comedians (18.7%), the remaining people had explanations which included: pagan symbol, holy star, Star of David, Satanic symbol, graffiti associated with boredom, builder’s sign to show structural problems, Seal of Solomon, mechanism to express proportional geometry, hobo mark, Knights Templar, Freemasonry or Illuminati symbol, etc. Some of the more outlandish identifications – including signs left by the Knights Templar, Freemasons or Illuminati – can perhaps be laid at the door of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, where Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor in the fictional discipline of “symbology,” intones: “The pentacle is a pre-Christian symbol that relates to Nature worship. The ancients envisioned their world in two halves— masculine and feminine… This pentacle is representative of the female half of all things— a concept religious historians call the ‘sacred feminine’ or the ‘divine goddess.” The pentagram IS a pre-Christian symbol, but in that period it was not associated with the attributes assigned by the fictional Langdon. His explanation seems to more closely align with the thinking of magical practitioners from the late nineteenth century onwards. This went on to influence later neo-pagan and Satanic beliefs. 

• Prior to the introduction of Christianity the pentagram was a symbol variously associated with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar or Greek notions of health, wellbeing or geometrical purity. However, these explanations do not bear much relevance to how the symbol came to be carved on the walls of a parish church in Somerset. So, what is going on here? In the theology of mediaeval western Christianity, god gave King Solomon a seal ring which had the power to repel demons. This story was originally told by the Jews and, in their iteration, and as the story of the ring passed down through the Abrahamic faiths, the ciphers were subsequently re-interpreted by Arabic Muslims as a six-pointed star and European Christians as a five-pointed star. The mediaeval Christian belief that the pentagram was a powerful repellent of evil was apparently widespread. A reliance on such iconography can also be seen, physically, in fourteenth century ecclesiastical architecture – including pentagrams set out in the great west window of Exeter Cathedral and on the tower at Hannover. The pentagram has been noted as a motif found during historic graffiti surveys of mediaeval buildings. At one site a pentagram has been carved directly over a graffito of a demon – perhaps explicitly linking the symbol to its perceived function of warding off evil. Although the pentagram was an important shape in Classical theories of proportion, its use in mediaeval architectural design was rare. Consequently, when we encounter regular, chisel-cut examples of the pentagram, the symbol is less likely to be part of an architectural drawing and will often be a stonemason’s mark.

• From the Oral Talmud, Gittin 68, Third Century CE: Why was it necessary for Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, to gather demons? The answer: As the temple was being built, Solomon said to the sages: How shall I make it so that the stone will be precisely cut? They said to him: There is a creature called a shamir that can cut the stones, which Moses brought. Solomon said to them: Where is it found? They said to him: Bring a male demon and a female demon: It is possible that they know where, and they will reveal the place to you. Solomon brought a male demon and a female demon and tormented them together, and they said: We do not know where to find the shamir. Perhaps Asmodeus king of the demons, knows. He is on such-and-such a mountain. He has dug a pit for himself there, and filled it with water, and covered it with a rock, and sealed it with his seal. And every day he ascends to Heaven and studies, but he comes back and checks to ensure that nobody has entered his pit, and then he uncovers it and drinks from the water. Solomon sent for Benayahu, a member of the royal entourage, and gave him a chain onto which a sacred name of god was carved, and a ring onto which a sacred name of god was carved. What did Benayahu do? He went down the mountain, drained the water, and poured wine into the pit. When Asmodeus came and found the pit to be filled with wine. He said that it is written: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is riotous; and whosoever wallows in it is not wise, I will not drink this wine.” But when he became thirsty, he was unable to resist the wine and he drank, became intoxicated, and fell asleep. Benayahu threw the chain around Asmodeus, and when he woke Benayahu said to him: The name of your master is upon you, the name of your Master is upon you, do not tear the chain. And they brought him to Solomon after three days. 

• From Transcendental Magic, Eliphas Levi, 1854: The pentagram signifies the domination of the mind over the elements, and by this sign are enchained the demons of the air, the spirits of fire, the phantoms of the water, and ghosts of earth. Equipped with this sign, you will be ministered unto by legions of angels and hosts of fiends. Spirits are subservient to this sign when employed with understanding, and, by placing it in the circle or on the table of evocations, they can be rendered tractable. The intelligence of the wise man therefore gives value to his pentacle, as science gives weight to his will, and spirits comprehend this power immediately. Thus, by means of the pentagram, spirits can be forced to appear by themselves or their reflection, which exists in the astral light. Pregnant women are influenced more than others by the astral light, which concurs in the formation of the child, and perpetually offers them reminiscences of the forms which abound therein. This explains how it is that women of the highest virtue deceive the malignity of observers. The Kabbalistic usage of the pentagram can therefore determine the appearance of unborn children, and an initiated woman might endow her son with the characteristics of Nero or Achilles as much as with those of Louis XIV or Napoleon.

• We must, however, remark that the use of the pentagram is most dangerous for operators who are not in possession of its complete and perfect understanding. The direction of the points of the star is in no sense arbitrary, and may change the entire character of the operation. At this point, let the ignorant and superstitious close the book ; they will either see nothing but darkness, or they will be scandalised. The pentagram, which, in gnostic schools, is called the blazing star, is the sign of intellectual omnipotence and autocracy. It is the star of the magi ; it is the sign of the Word made flesh; and, according to the direction of its points, this absolute magical symbol represents order or confusion, the divine lamb of  St John or the accursed goat of Mendes. It is initiation or profanation; it is Lucifer or Vesper, the star of the morning or the evening. It is Mary or Lilith, victory or death, day or night. The pentagram with two points in the ascendant represents Satan as the goat of the Sabbath ; when one point is in the ascendant, it is the sign of the Saviour. The pentagram is the figure of the human body, having the four limbs, and a single point representing the head. A human figure, head downwards, naturally represents a demon ; that is, intellectual subversion, disorder, or madness. Now, if magic be a reality, if occult science be really the true law of the three worlds, this absolute sign, this sign ancient as history, and more ancient, should and does actually exercise an incalculable influence upon spirits set free from their material envelope.

• From the Golden Dawn, Israel Regardie, 1940: The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram: Take a steel dagger in the right hand. Face east. Touch thy forehead and say (thou art). Touch thy breast and say (the Kingdom). Touch thy right shoulder and say (and the Power). Touch thy left shoulder and say (and the Glory). Clasp thy hands before thee and say (forever). Dagger between fingers, point up in the air towards the east and, bringing the point of the dagger to the centre of the pentagram, vibrate the deity name, imagining that your voice carries forward to the east of the universe. Holding the dagger out before you, go to the south, make the pentagram, and vibrate similarly the deity name. Go to the west, make the pentagram, and vibrate. Go to the north, make the pentagram, and vibrate. Return to the east and complete your circle by bringing the dagger point to the centre of the first pentagram. The Uses of the Pentagram Ritual include as a form of prayer: The invoking ritual should be used in the morning, the banishing in the evening. The names should be pronounced inwardly in the breath, vibrating it as much as possible and feeling that the whole body throbs with the sound. Also as a protection against impure magnetism: The banishing ritual can be used to get rid of obsessing or disturbing thoughts. Give a mental image to your obsession and imagine it formulated before you. Project it out of your aura with the saluting sign of a Neophyte, and when it is about three feet away, prevent its return with the Sign of Silence. Now imagine the form in the east before you and do the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram to disintegrate it, seeing it, in your mind’s eye, dissolving on the farther side of your ring of flame. It can also be used as an exercise in concentration. Seated in meditation or lying down, formulate yourself standing up in robes and holding a dagger. Put your consciousness in this form and go to the east. Make yourself “feel” there by touching the wall, opening your eyes, stamping on the floor, etc. Begin the ritual and go round the room mentally vibrating the words and trying to feel them as coming from the form. Finish in the east and try to see your results in the Astral Light, then walk back and stand behind the head of your body and let yourself be reabsorbed.’

• From The Purpose of Your Altar Pentacle, Sable Aradia, Patheos, 2018: I make and sell altar pentacles at my Etsy store.  I started doing this several years ago because I noticed that you couldn’t find them anywhere.  There was a plethora of wands, numerous chalices, and even a handful of athames available at most metaphysical stores in the late eighties and early nineties, and there were hundreds of silver jewelry pentacles available, but pentacles intended for your altar were nowhere to be found.  At the time I chalked that up to the Satanic Panic; the pentacle is the most obviously “Wiccan” of the four traditional altar tools, and big pentagrams made people nervous. I was taught that there is a difference between a pentagram and a pentacle, though a dictionary will often give them as synonyms: a pentagram is an equilateral five-pointed star, and a pentacle is such a star within a circle, or a similar object used in magic, such as the Earth Pentacle used by the Golden Dawn and various of the Seals of Solomon. Typically Wiccans and witches use the upright pentacle, and Aleister Crowley made use of the inverted pentagram in Thelema.  The association with the Horned God of Wicca in the inverted pentagram is largely due to tradition, stemming from the Goat in the Star from The Key of Black Magic, an 1897 grimoire. This was [incorrectly] thought to be a secret symbol of the Templars in their (alleged) secret worship of Baphomet.  The pentacle is usually placed at the center of the altar; and some books will tell you to place objects on it when you’re consecrating or enchanting them because you’re using it as a focus to direct all of those energies into your sacred and magickal work; manifesting the powers of the gods and the cosmos into physical reality. Sometimes the pentacle is used as a tangible, magical shield to protect you against danger and attack.  Just as vampire hunters in all the movies present crosses to the Undead boldly in order to drive them away through the power of faith, witches can aim their pentacles boldly against psychic attack. This is a simple method of calling upon the gods and the Universe to lend their formidable powers to your protection. You could use it as a focal point for meditations that make use of the pentagram; such as the Iron Pentacle or an elemental pathworking; you could hold it aloft towards Venus at sunset or sunrise to invoke the Goddess, Lucifer, or any goddess associated with Venus; you could hold it to your body with a point directly facing the ground to invoke the Horned God. It is a holy symbol of the powers of the Universe coming together, a celebration of the integration of spiritual and material. 

• From Satanism Today, James R Lewis, 2001: Richard Ramirez, better known as the Night Stalker, was a sadistic serial murderer who terrorized the Los Angeles area in the mid-1980s. He was captured by civilians on August 31, 1985, following an all points bulletin in which his mug shot was broadcast on television and printed in newspapers. After a fourteen-month trial, he was convicted of thirteen murders and thirty other felonies. A self-identified Satanist who had read Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, Ramirez’s crime spree was one of the few cases that might legitimately be called “Satanic crime.” His “calling card” was the inverted pentagram, which he left drawn on a wall, or, in one case, carved into the body of a victim. In 1983, he made a special trip to San Francisco to meet LaVey personally. LaVey was later reported as commenting that, “I thought Richard was very nice—very shy. I liked him.” Because Ramirez was a fan of the rock group AC/DC—a group that at one stage of their career adopted Satanic imagery and incorporated infernal references into their music—the case was given special attention from people concerned about the negative influence of rock music. Ramirez would engage in such antics as flashing a pentagram he had drawn in the palm of his hand, shouting “Hail Satan!” and holding up his fingers alongside his head in imitation of devil’s horns. It is clear that Satanic ideology is not an independent motivating factor that somehow transforms otherwise nice people into criminals. Rather, as reflected in the remarks Ramirez made at his sentencing, such individuals are criminals who adopt Satanism as a way of justifying their antisocial actions. Many police officers ask what to look for during the search of the scene of suspected satanic activity. The answer is simple: Look for evidence of a crime. A pentagram is no more criminally significant than a crucifix unless it corroborates a crime or a criminal conspiracy. If a victim’s description of the location or the instruments of the crime includes a pentagram, then the pentagram would be evidence. But the same would be true if the description included a crucifix.

• From No Converse Didn’t Replace Its ‘All-Star’ Logo with a Satanic Symbol, Bethania Palma, Snopes, 2021: In July 2021, Christian news outlets reported that sneaker brand Converse had replaced the iconic “All-Star” label on its shoes with a satanic symbol. “Converse Unveils Designer Shoes with Satanic Symbol Replacing Brand’s Star Logo,” Faithwire reported. “More Corporate Satanism: ‘Converse’ Unveils New Occult Shoe Line,” the Media Research Center reported. Converse hasn’t replaced the All-Star logo, which famously adorns its classic Chuck Taylors. The new symbology is instead the result of a collaboration between Converse and DRKSHDW, the brand run by goth-inspired fashion designer Rick Owens. The logo for DRKSHDW contains a pentagram, or five-point star. A spokesperson for Nike, which owns Converse, told Snopes in an email: “Converse’s collaboration with fashion designer Rick Owen’s DRKSHDW brand incorporates the DRKSHDW pentagram logo design, which has been used in his line for many years. The pentagram, which has many different associations, is in no way a comment from Converse on religion, nor does it replace the iconic All Star logo on our shoes.” In an Instagram post promoting the brand collaboration, Owens explained why he uses the pentagram in his own work: “I’ve been using this pentagram for a long time because obviously, it has adolescent occult associations. But I like geometric diagrams like that because, in a very primal way, they are a culture’s grasp for control. And a way to organize thoughts and systems. And a pentagram, in this day and age with all of its associations… I like the fact that it refers to an alternative system. And that suggests openness and empathy. It suggests the pursuit of pleasure, this pursuit of sensation. But one of the main things that I think it suggests is empathy and a consideration of systems of living that might not be standard. So that leads us to be more accepting and tolerant of other systems, which I think is a good thing.” 

The post Episode 205: Oops, All Pentagrams Edition appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• From Genius Missing at MSU, Gregory Skwira, Detroit Free Press, 1979: Police continue to search the area Thursday for a missing 16 year old computer science student last seen August 15th in his Michigan State University dormitory. “At this point we do not suspect Foul Play,” said Sergeant Larry Lyon of the MSU campus police. “But we haven’t ruled it out either.” James Dallas Egbert III, a sophomore, was attending a summer session and was last seen in a dormitory cafeteria. He was reported missing by a friend on Tuesday, days later. He had very few friends, Lyon said. “He was a loner and he was obviously a genius.” Egbert had been studying computer science at MSU since last fall. “Many nights when it came time for me to lock up the school I would have to run him out of the computer room where he would still be working,” the school’s principal told reporters. Police weren’t surprised that Egbert had missed four days of class before he was reported missing. “He evidently had a habit of not going to class all that often,” Lyon said. “He really didn’t have to. He had an exceptional grade point average.” A university spokesman said, “We don’t have a bed check. Kids are pretty free to come and go as they want.” Egbert’s parents refused to talk with a reporter. When police searched the youth’s room Lyon said there was no indication that clothes had been removed and anticipation of a trip. “That concerns us a great deal,” he said.”Egbert’s dormitory neighbors were knowledgeable that Egbert hadn’t been around for several days before the youth was reported missing. But that’s not unusual in a dormitory situation, he said. Students sometimes go off for 2 or 3 days to get themselves together. Police have located two friends of Egbert’s and neither say he seemed troubled. Final exams for the summer session begin next week. Egbert once left MSU for 2 weeks during the past school year, but he told someone he was leaving. “We have no other record of him doing that here,” said Lyons.

• From Student’s Disappearance a Puzzle, United Press International, The Daily Breeze, 1979: A thumbtack-studded bulletin board that could be a map or part of a bizarre game could be a clue in the mysterious disappearance of a teenage Michigan State University computer wiz. One theory is James Dallas Egbert III, 16, “is playing a game with us” said Sergeant Bill Wardwell of the MSU campus police. “He was quite a game person.” Police have called in computer and logic specialists plus those familiar with an elaborate game popular among college students in an effort to decode the board left behind by the young genius. The precocious sophomore computer student left behind a note asking his body be cremated if it is found. The police said they are not convinced the message was intended as a suicide note. Egbert, a science fiction devotee, was seen on campus August 15th at a dormitory cafeteria. He had a history of walking off for days at a time. Although certain that Egbert left campus voluntarily and was not abducted, police are not really out of the possibility he ultimately was the victim of Foul Play. The puzzling bulletin board had been removed from the wall and placed conspicuously in the middle of Egbert’s dorm room. Thumbtacks were stuck in the board in a pattern resembling a square with one corner indented. Please have compared the pattern to the shape of several campus buildings but have not reached a final conclusion. Others suggest the board might have been up for a round of Dungeons and Dragons, a highly complex game involving fantasy and roleplaying. Wardwell said police are trying to locate students who played the game with Egbert who might be able to interpret the bizarre diagram and unlock the secret of his disappearance. “I hate to say it’s a secretive game, but you only get into it by invitation,” Wardwell said. “Those people just haven’t come forward.” Wardwell said Wisconsin authorities were contacted because a Dungeons & Dragons conference was scheduled in that state, but nothing came of the inquiry. Wardwell admitted the police are grasping at straws a little bit but added. “That’s all we’ve got right now.”

• From The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III (Part I), Shaun Hatley, Places To Go People To Be, 1999: Dallas was a D&D player. That is not in dispute. It is also not in dispute that students at MSU played live-action games in tunnels under the University buildings. There are other facts to be considered, however, which got nowhere near as much coverage: Dallas was either gay or bisexual. He was also a drug user who used his knowledge of chemistry to manufacture his own supply. Dallas also suffered from severe depression caused or exacerbated by, in the opinion of an MSU psychologist, “parental pressure, criticism, academic pressure, and the failure of all persons to realise that, although Dallas Egbert was a genius, he was socially [helpless].” When William Dear was called in, he learned all of this. He also found a board in Dallas room which had a strange arrangement of drawing pins placed into it. The design was a map. Dallas had attempted to mark all the rooms in the tunnels underneath the University, as close to scale as he could manage. The only one he had not marked was the room he intended to hide in. Dear considered a number of possibilities: That Dallas had committed suicide. That Dallas had gone into the steam tunnels and been injured or killed. That Dallas disappeared for the sole purpose of making people look for him. That Dallas had overdosed on drugs. That Dallas was being held by a gay man or a group of gay men. That Dallas had been kidnapped by some sort of intelligence group to make use of his special talents and intelligence. That Dallas had come to identify so much with his D&D character that he believed he was his character. That Dallas had been sent on some sort of a mission by a D&D Dungeon Master in order to prove that he was worthy to play in an advanced game. Dear wanted to keep the drug and sex theories out of the papers for several reasons: The first one was that he didn’t want any people holding Dallas to panic and kill him, because they thought the law was closing in. He also wanted to protect Dallas, and Dr and Mrs Egbert as much as possible. For these reasons, he pushed the Dungeons & Dragons theory. Dallas had been planning to disappear for a long time. His reasons differed at different times. He planned suicide over a nine month period, and at other times decided merely to run away. He took sleeping tablets in the tunnels with the deliberate intent of ending his life. He awoke the following night and went to a friend’s house. This was a gay man in his early twenties, and Dallas stayed there about a week. When the story of Dallas’ disappearance broke, this man felt himself to be in danger from the police and did not come forward. Dallas took a train from Chicago to New Orleans and lived on the streets for several days before meeting a man from New York. They became friends, and this man helped him to get a job as a roustabout in the oil fields near Morgan City. It was this man eventually who persuaded Dallas to contact William Dear.

• From The Dungeon Master, Publisher’s Preview, 1984: William Dear wears cowboy boots, sports enough gold nugget jewelry to make a cattle baron envious, and would have you believe he’s a good old boy. Don’t believe a word of it. The super sleuth extraordinaire obviously has his suits tailored, his custom boots made from sharkskin, and is suave enough to have tea with the royal family. The London Times once said, “If there is a real James Bond, he’s in Dallas and his name is Bill Dear.” Unorthodox his methods may be, with spies spying upon spies and mysterious planes landing in the dark. “Any deviations I have made were necessary to save lives. If they want to take my license because I helped save the human life then let them try,” he says. Dear is well known for his investigations and solutions on many difficult cases. His lifestyle is also legendary. Dear’s million dollar home on Cockrell Hill Road draws sightseers from far and near. Security is tight at the residence of Bill Dear/James Bond because it is necessary. “In this business you get threats all the time.” One room is filled with the most advanced spy gadgetry available. His bedroom is a replica of James Bond’s in “Diamonds Are Forever.” For hasty getaways his limousine is equipped with a remote control starter. Deer is unmistakably Texan in his three-piece Bond suit  and the rings he sports on each finger. When James Dallas Egbert III disappeared for the Michigan State University campus in 1979 the family called in Dear, the real life James Bond. Dear’s search for the boy reads like a sensational novel although in fact every detail and adventure is true. The Adventures of Bill Dear read and sound like a Hollywood script. Perhaps it is why so many Hollywood producers have acquainted themselves with them over the years.

• From The Dungeon Master, William Dear, 1984: They suggested we search out near Party Hollow, the clearing in the woods that campus groups use for a variety of purposes. The Tolkien Society meet at Party Hollow once a year for a ritual to celebrate the birth of Gandalf the Magician. It was perhaps thirty yards in diameter, a clearing in the middle of the forest. In the center, arranged in circular fashion, were signs that big bonfires had been built here: ashes, charred rocks and wood, the remains of seared newspapers. I could imagine a bonfire out in this remote spot. Had it risen eerily to the tops of the trees while strange rites were being performed, or had it been a pleasant campfire, with songs filling the air, hot dogs and marshmallows roasting, sweethearts cuddling in the crisp, cool night? I imagined that Dallas had come out here to think. I wondered if he had come out here to die. But if Dallas had died out here, he would have been found by now. Party Hollow was obviously a place that had frequent visitors. The note had indicated that a meeting was planned. It was almost surely something completely harmless, a college get together under the stars. Yet it might be more. Lambert and I had seen pentagrams painted on trees surrounding the clearing. Between the two circles were magic symbols which, I was later told, were associated with druidic witchcraft, and were used as protection by a sorcerer against demons. Pentagrams had also been drawn into the ground, where a sorcerer could stand on them and be safe .I retreated back into the woods, and soon there were four students, two boys and two girls. There seemed to be nothing out-of-the-way or bizarre about their dress—no pointed wizard’s hats or strange polka-dotted costumes. From what I could tell, which was hardly a great deal despite the light from the fire, they were dressed as thousands of other college students might be. They formed a diamond shape around the blaze, hunched much as I was, and if a single word could capture the atmosphere, that word would be serious. No one had lugged a case of beer out to Party Hollow. The four crouched around the fire. One of the girls, wearing a necklace, rose and tilted her head skyward, and I heard her voice cry out, “Great Gurdjieff, guide us to the goodness of God’s goals!” These were the only words I understood the entire evening. The students remained 45 minutes, then extinguished the fire and trekked back through the woods. I was interested in how many such cults existed on campus? One of them might have the answers I sought.

• From The Exploitation of James Dallas Egbert, Grady Hendrix, Reactor Magazine, 2014: If you’ve played D&D you know that a game “goes wrong” when someone throws a hissy over a roll or one player keeps screwing around on his phone and ignoring what’s being said. And if you’ve never played D&D you assume that when a game “goes wrong” Satan is summoned and sucks out everyone’s soul.By the time Dallas Egbert was found, two books about the more colorful version were already on their way to market. The first was from Rona Jaffe, extremely famous author behind the scandalicious bestselling proto-Sex and the City novel, The Best of Everything. Mazes and Monsters is a book written by an author who knows nothing, and cares less, about roleplaying games. Each of the kids turned to RPGs because something was broken inside of them (Kate’s parents are divorced; Daniel’s parents push him too hard; Jay Jay is neglected by his divorced parents; and Robbie’s brother ran away from home). Mazes & Monsters is probably best remembered today for its TV movie version, which aired in 1982 and featured Tom Hanks in his first leading role as Pardieu the Holy Man, freaking out on the streets of New York, then trying to jump off the World Trade Center. (“I have spells,” he says. “I’m going to fly.”) It’s an unwritten rule that if you’re going to try to make a quick buck off a young person’s attempted suicide you should at least be entertaining. Jaffe broke that rule, but the next book would not repeat her mistake. 

• John Coyne was a slick journeyman writer, turning out relatively forgettable mass market horror paperbacks in the wake of Stephen King’s massive success. His cash-in attempt, Hobgoblin (1981), isn’t a thinly veiled account of Egbert’s story and the result is a book that is  less offensive. Meet Scott Gardiner, exactly the kind of kid Jaffe warned us was vulnerable to the lurid lure of RPGs: brilliant, creative, socially awkward, and WITH A DEAD FATHER OMG NO THIS KID IS DOOMED. Scott is obsessed with a truly terrible RPG called Hobgoblin that may be less boring than Mazes and Monsters but only just barely. One part RPG, one part Magic: The Gathering, it’s based on Celtic mythology so it’s full of unfortunate character names like “Boobach” and questionable spells like “fairy vision.” Players speak in fraught, reverent tones (“The dice? Oh, God, Gardiner, no! It’s too risky.”) and, in a deeply unrealistic touch, Scott is wildly popular after introducing this role-playing monstrosity to his fancy boarding school. Scott is a whiny jerk with a hair trigger temper. When Valerie, the resident hot girl at school, falls for him because he memorizes his locker combination so quickly, he tries to make her play Hobgoblin, gets angry when she doesn’t take it seriously enough, then erupts into a rage when she calls him a “turkey” (“Kids say it to each other all the time,” she explains. “Not at Spencertown. I never heard it at Spencertown.” he mutters). After a ambling along like a relatively slow-moving character study for 18 chapters, chapter 19 is a gibbering, blood-drenched scene from a slasher movie set during the school’s Halloween dance, For all that Dear, Jaffe, and Coyne posit that RPGs are a way for disturbed individuals to escape from reality, it turns out that they themselves were the ones running from the truth, fabricating a fear of games based on false information about a missing persons case. https://reactormag.com/summer-of-sleaze-the-exploitation-of-james-dallas-egbert-iii/ 

• From Mazes & Monsters, Rona Jaffe, 1981: In the spring of 1980 a bright, gifted student at Grant University in Pequod, Pennsylvania, mysteriously disappeared. Vanishing students were not unheard of, particularly during the stressful period before final exam time, but when the police were finally called in, it was revealed that the missing student was one of a group at Grant who were involved in a fantasy roleplaying game called Mazes and Monsters. Played with nothing more than a vivid imagination, dice, pencils, graph paper, and an instruction manual, Mazes and Monsters is a war game with a medieval background, in which each player creates a character who may be a fearless Fighter, a treasurehunting Sprite, a magic-using Holy Man, or a wily Charlatan. The point of the game is to amass a fortune and keep from getting killed. The characters are plunged into an adventure in a series of mazes, tunnels, and secret rooms filled with frightful and violent dangers— monsters who can kill, maim, paralyze, and enchant the players. But if the players can kill, maim, trick, or stop their assailants they can take home fabulous treasure. What made the student’s disappearance so ominous was that the police discovered this particular group of players had begun to act out their fantasies in a real environment, taking the game to the underground caverns near the university campus.

• Last year the four of them had been perfect. Daniel had been the Maze Controller because he was a computer genius with a wild imagination. Also Daniel was calm, and he was never arbitrary. If he said the King of the Gray Rats had bitten off your arm, he was indisputably right. Kate, Michael, and Jay Jay had been the players. Kate was the bravest, Jay Jay the cleverest, and Michael— well, forget him, he was scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins now. At the end of last year they had decided that this year they would all get single rooms, but Michael would room with Daniel and they would use the extra room just to play the game. It would be sacred. Every room had a lock on its door. They would have their own fantasy world just for themselves and no one would know. But the dummy had been so involved in the game that he stopped going to classes, stopped studying, and blew it. Kate was small and tough and fearless and independent. It was typical that when they chose which characters they would be, Kate had made herself Glacia the Fighter. Jay Jay had been Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir, a Sprite, with his flighty but wily ways, the scamp, the trickster. But secretly Jay Jay knew that he and Kate were just the same. For under that armor she wore for the world, he had seen what no one else had been able to see: seen it and loved it and loved her for it— her frightened, vulnerable, wildly beating heart.

• “A half day’s walk from a small town there is a wasteland of gnarled hills, covered with withered trees and dried grass. Beneath these hills is the entrance to the forbidden caves of the Jinnorak. As long as anyone can remember, no one has entered these caves, and it is rumored that within them lives a mutated people, once human, now changed from generations in the foul depths to creatures unrecognizable and vicious. But perhaps that is just a rumor. But it is also known that there are wondrous things within, for those brave and clever enough to take them. Shall you enter?” Kate felt herself entering the landscape of the game now, and her heart began to pound. It was dangerous to light her lantern in case there was a monster in the room who would then be able to see them and attack them. But darkness frightened her more. Darkness was one of the most terrible things she knew, with the sound of breathing; the thing that had happened that night . . . but she wouldn’t think about it now. Now there was only the game, where she would take revenge and kill, and conquer. There was writing on the doors; Daniel rolled an 8. “Pardieu will be able to decipher the language, but the message will be garbled.” Kate said, “If it’s running water behind one of these doors it might be magic water and we don’t want to let it out. “She threw the dice; a 12. “You can open one of them,” Daniel said.

• They were only dimly aware of how much the game had taken over their lives already. All they knew was that nothing else, not even this special party with its atmosphere of affection and luxury and celebration, was as real to them as the game. And each of them felt, in some secret, guilty way, that they wanted to get the party over with so they could go into Daniel’s room and enter their world. “You have found the talking sword of Lothia,” Daniel said. He held the dice in his hand and looked at the three eager faces of Glacia, Freelik, and Pardieu. The dice he held were both chance and power. As he surveyed the underground perils he had laid out so carefully, he wondered whether all of these adventurers would still be alive at the end of this night. He didn’t want them to die. He was as excited as they were as they fought their way deeper and deeper into the maze, winning battles with strength and wits, amassing plunder. He knew he had to be objective in order to be an effective M.C., but he wanted them to find the treasure. It didn’t belong to him–it belonged to the evil king of the Jinnorak. “You have found tht walking sword of Lothia,” Daniel declared. Glacia grasped the talking sword and gazed into its polished surface. The light of her lantern glanced off it, gold and silver, and her heart turned over with fear. But this was her sword, no one else’s, and it would obey her commands. It would kill her enemies and it would speak to her of secrets none of them yet knew. “What lies beyond that door?” she demanded. “Wait,” Pardieu said. “Talking swords have been known to tell lies. How do we know this is a truthful sword? We must test it.”

• Long before she was Kate’s mother, Meg Porter had grown up as a perfect child of the Fifties. She fervently believed every movie she’d ever seen, and when life did not turn out like the movies she never questioned the movies; she thought something was wrong with life. She was a cheerleader in college, leaping around with pom-poms, and she was also an honors student. She was a mischief-maker who never did anything really bad, so she didn’t get in trouble. People thought she was cute. When she was at college her friends used to say: “I have to get married before all the good ones are taken.” Surrounded by the “good ones,” popular and secure, Meg waited for her own special Mr. Right. She knew when he came along she’d know it immediately, just like in the movies.Mr. Right was Alan Finch. She found his name romantic and English. He was a veteran, a former lieutenant. They were always lieutenants in the movies. He even looked like an actor; the nice one who got the girl at the end. He was four years older than she was and seemed experienced and sophisticated. She met him on a blind date in Senior year, and they were married right after she graduated. She pictured the two of them growing old together. by the time he told her they had already grown old together she was shocked. What did he want her to be? He said he was bored, sad, disappointed. She had never been bored. How could he be disappointed when they had everything they’d dreamed about? He tossed her and the children away as if they were biodegradable.

• On the commuter train to New York from a suburb not far from where Robbie and his family lived, a man named James Herman looked at Robbie’s picture in the newspaper and his jaw tightened in anger. He felt a little fear too, and a great sense of irony. His shoulder still hurt from where he had been stabbed, and even though the stitches were out there was an ugly fresh red scar. He was lucky he hadn’t been killed. It was hard to tell from a newspaper photo, and it had been a while, but he was positive this “nice” Robbie Wheeling was the hustler who’d tried to kill him the night he’d been cruising. No wonder the kid wouldn’t talk about where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Wouldn’t that be a shock for the parents! James Herman sighed and tried to relax. Life was shit, and there wasn’t much left you could believe in. He had two kids of his own, teenagers, and he hoped he was bringing them up well. He had a responsible, well-paying job in a big company, a bright wife, a comfortable home complete with swimming pool. There was also a dark side to his nature— the compulsion to seek out young men in degrading places for sex–but no one knew. No one ever would. He didn’t know what had turned him into the kind of man he was: a respectable, well-meaning citizen with one fatal flaw. He didn’t know what had turned that privileged college student into a knife-wielding junkie. He worried about his own children. He worried about the whole damn world.

The post Episode 204: Mazes & Monsters appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• • • From Azazel, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906: On Atonement Day, the high priest presented two young goats for a sin-offering, one for Yahweh and one for Azazel. The goat that fell to Yhwh was slain, but the goat of Azazel (now usually known as the “scapegoat”) was made the subject of a more striking ceremony: The high priest laid his hands upon its head and confessed over it the sins of the people. Then it was “led forth to an isolated region and let go into the wilderness. The sending of the goat was a symbolic expression of the idea that the people’s sins and their evil consequences were to be sent back to the spirit of desolation and ruin (Azazel), the source of all impurity and personification of wickedness. Evidently the figure of Azazel was an object of general fear and awe; as a demon of the desert, it seems to have been closely interwoven with the mountainous region of Jerusalem and of ancient pre-Israelitish origin. The realm of Azazel is the lonely wilderness; and Israel is represented as a nomadic people in the wilderness, though preparing to leave it. Necessarily their environment subjected them to superstitions associated with the local deities, and of these Azazel was the chief. The point of the whole ceremony seems to have been that as the scapegoat was set free in the desert, so Israel was to be set free from the offenses contracted in its desert life within the domain of the god of the desert.There has been much controversy over the function of Azazel as well as over his essential character. Azazel would appear to be the head of the supernatural beings of the desert. The symbolical act was really a renunciation of Azazel’s authority: such is the significance of the separation of the scapegoat from the people of Israel, and thus could be fulfilled only in the wilderness. In this way the complete separation was effected. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2203-azazel#6890 
    • From The Outsiders, Howard Becker, 1963: The outsider-the deviant from group rules-has been the subject of much speculation, theorizing, and scientific study. What laymen want to know about deviants is: why do they do it? How can we account for their rule-breaking? What is there about them that leads them to do forbidden things? Scientific research has accepted the common-sense premise that there is something inherently deviant about acts that break social  rules. It has also accepted the common-sense assumption that the deviant act occurs because some characteristic of the person who commits it makes it necessary or inevitable that he should. Scientists do not question the label “deviant.” The sociological view I have just discussed defines deviance as the infraction of some agreed-upon rule. It then goes on to ask who breaks rules, and to search for the factors in their personalities. This assumes that those who have broken a rule constitute a’ homogeneous category because they have committed the same deviant act. Such an assumption seems to me to ignore the central fact about deviance: It is created by society by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and then labeling the rulebreakers outsiders them as outsiders. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an offender. The deviant is one to whom that label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label. The unmarried mother furnishes a clear example. Illicit sexual relations seldom result in severe punishment or social censure for the offenders. If, however, a girl becomes pregnant as a result, the reaction of others is likely to be severe. The illicit pregnancy is also an interesting example of the differential enforcement of rules on different categories of people, as unmarried fathers escape the most severe censure visited on the mother. Deviance is never a quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it.
    • From Evil Incarnate, David Frankfurter, 2006: Classical and late antique materials showed themes of ritual otherness across geographical boundaries. On the periphery of Roman culture lay cultures supposedly prone to cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, either in ecstatic or deliberately systematic rights. Monstrous rituals implied an ambiguous humanity, and association with beasts in one sense, but human Devotion to sacrificial Precision in another sense. One allegedly found monstrous rituals especially among nomadic peoples or those people perceived as Interlopers in society, such as Jews. Roman culture became increasingly fearful of such monstrous rituals, but even in cases of outright panic it is important to note a feature of voyeurism. Underlying all of these representations of monstrous ritual is a horrified fascination with ceremonial abuse. This geographical fantasy soon gave way to a missionary Zeal. From the missionary perspective, the distant image of cannibalism, incest, and ritual sacrifice proved less comprehensible than the more Sinister idea that Indians now we’re considered devil worshipers, with priesthood, rituals, and formal ordoers, all brought into the service of Satan. And yet the view of devil worship that organized all the perversities of heathen culture clearly drew upon fantasies of the Domestic culture. It also elaborated the more basic belief, found in smaller societies, that the people “over there” are devil worshipers or dangerous sorcerers. As anyone familiar with American movies will recognize, these themes took root in modern American culture: foreignness preoccupied a nation perpetually encountering “savages” around its borders. Popular Cinema in books for the 1920s through the 1980s repeatedly highlight some savage ritual performed by drum maddened natives. Haiti in particular was made the subject of such depictions, because its multiply ambiguous status as a black Republic within reach of the United States assigned to both African and Catholic cultures were both deeply suspect to Protestant American eyes. When such rituals are imagined to take place on the periphery of civilization, it has horror and allure. As they creep inside, carried perhaps by immigrants from the edges of the earth, they pose a threat–or even a conspiracy.
    • From The Demonology of Satanism, Joel Best, The Satanism Scare, 1992: The term demonology most commonly refers to an institutionalized set of beliefs in evil spirits, or demons; I use it here to mean an ideology of evil, an elaborate body of belief about an evil force that is inexorably undermining society’s most cherished values and institutions. Historical and anthropological studies have shown that such beliefs invariably develop in times of intense, prolonged social anxiety, times when a significant proportion of people who share cultural values have come to feel that they are being let down or ignored by institutions in which they have placed their trust. Demonology provides an explanation for this state of affairs. The demonology usually labels its referents as horribly, unspeakably evil. When it refers to a specific group of people it often dehumanizes them, describing their bestial habits, or declaring their association with certain animals; or by reference to a new interpretation of some old myth, it may declare that these people were execrated by the gods or culture founders themselves. When it refers to supernatural or other-worldly evil it may acknowledge that the human agents have been seduced by the evil and are not entirely to blame, but it explicitly states that their rights as human beings, even their lives, must be forfeit to the necessity of expunging the evil from society. The principal actors in demonologies frequently focus their evil ambitions on children. Children are kidnapped, abused, subjected to obscene torments, sold into slavery, or killed, their blood and parts saved for ritual consumption or sold. Worries about the welfare of children have been central to our social concerns for decades. In the 1960s it was ‘flower children’ and Vietnam war protests that led to campus protests and a generation of disenchanted kids in the 1970s who were vulnerable to alternative religious philosophies and “cults.” In the 1980s concerns focused on missing or kidnapped or runaway (or ‘‘thrown-away’’) children. This has been the breeding ground for the demonology of satanism, and it is revealing to note that it has coalesced around concerns for children. 
    • From Witchcraft Myths and Misconceptions, Professor Diane Purkiss, English Heritage Histories, 2019: Witchcraft is an area of history that most people feel familiar with. The problem is that most of what we think we know is wrong. Myth: Nine million witches died in the years of the witch persecutions. Actually about 30,000–60,000 people were executed in the whole of the main era of witchcraft persecutions. These figures include estimates for cases where no records exist. The total number of people tried for witchcraft in England was no more than 2,000. Myth: Once accused, a witch had no chance of proving her innocence. In reality, only 25 percent of those tried across the period in England were found guilty. Many judges and jurymen were highly sceptical about the existence of magical powers, seeing the whole thing as a con. Myth: The Spanish Inquisition and the Catholic Church instigated the witch trials. The Spanish Inquisition persecuted heretics by the Catholic Church, but witchcraft was largely regarded as a superstition. All four of the major western Christian denominations (the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Anglican churches) persecuted witches to some degree. The Inquisition executed only two witches in total. Myth: Witches were really goddess-worshipping herbalist midwives. No, nobody was goddess-worshipping during the period of the witch-hunts, or if they were, they have left no trace in the historical records. The idea that those accused of witchcraft were midwives or herbalists, and especially that they were midwives possessed of feminine expertise that threatened male authority, is a myth. Midwives were rarely accused and often worked side by side with the courts to help them to identify witch marks. Most accusers of witches were women, and across the continent about 10 to 15 percent of convicted witches were men.
    • From Vampire Burials and Social Order in Postmedieval Poland Tracy K. Betsinger and Amy B. Scott, Cambridge Archaelogical Journal, 2014: Sinners, witches, murderers, suicides, those who were not baptized, those conceived during a holy period, and those who were born out of wedlock were considered at risk for becoming vampires. Outsiders or newcomers to a community or those seen as ‘others’ were also at risk of having discontented souls upon their deaths. Moreover, those who behaved suspiciously or who did not follow proper religious rules were at increased risk. Slavic folklore also suggests that vampires or potential vampires could be identified based on physical appearance, such as a baby having teeth at birth or an individual having a physical disability as well as physical deformity. The belief in a close association between an unclean existence and an unclean soul became the foundation of the belief that vampirism. Vampire burials, or more specifically burials of those who are at risk of becoming a vampire, are identified in the archaeological record based on specific features, including grave goods and mutilations of the corpse, which are considered preventative measures to keep a corpse from becoming reanimated. One of the primary ways in which the vampires of post-medieval Poland were an agential force is providing an impetus or motivation for maintaining social order: The Catholic Church in Poland and throughout Europe was vested in attracting adherents. Far from denying beliefs in vampirism, the Church seemed to make no assertion either way, neither confirming nor denying the existence of vampires when it was the subject of much scholarly research and debate, which reached its climax in the eighteenth century. The Church, it has been argued, may have had a hidden agenda, which required vampires to remain a plausible entity within their communities; it was to the Church’s benefit to contrast the evilness of vampires with the goodness of the Church. It created an effective method by which to encourage people to follow the rules. The vampire became the scapegoat of all things evil and in league with the devil. People did not wish to become such an evil creature; therefore, they were less likely to deviate from the norm or even be accused of suspect behaviours. The Church may have used the general fear of becoming a vampire to dissuade individuals from committing sin. 
    • From I Accuse, Emile Zola, The Aurora, 1898: I am stating simply that Major de Clam, as the officer charged with the preliminary investigation of the Dreyfus case, is the first and the most grievous offender in the ghastly miscarriage of justice that has been committed. He was the one who “invented” Dreyfus the traitor, the one who orchestrated the whole affair and made it his own. No one would ever believe the experiments to which he subjected the unfortunate Dreyfus, the traps he set for him, the wild investigations, the monstrous fantasies, the whole demented torture. Ah, that first trial! What a nightmare it is for all who know it in its true details as the unfortunate Dreyfus was proclaiming his innocence. And this is how the case proceeded, like some fifteenth century chronicle, shrouded in mystery, swamped in all manner of nasty twists and turns, all stemming from one trumped-up charge. This was not only a bit of cheap trickery but also the most outrageous fraud imaginable, for almost all of these notorious secrets turned out in fact to be worthless. I dwell on this, because this is the germ of it all, whence the true crime would emerge, that horrifying miscarriage of justice that has blighted France. Rumors flew of the most horrible acts, the most monstrous deceptions, lies that were an affront to our history. The people clamored for the traitor to be publicly stripped of his rank over nothing but demented fabrications. The fact that someone could have been convicted on this charge is the ultimate iniquity. I defy decent men to read it without a stir of indignation in their hearts and a cry of revulsion, at the thought of the undeserved punishment being meted out there on Devil’s Island. The evidence of Dreyfus’s character, his affluence, the lack of motive and his continued affirmation of innocence combine to show that he is the victim of lurid imaginations and the “dirty Jew” obsession that is the scourge of our time, this human sacrifice of an unfortunate man, that “dirty Jew.” It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance by appealing to that odious antisemitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man. It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to exploit patriotism in the service of hatred, and it is, finally, a crime to ensconce the sword as the modern god, whereas all science is toiling to achieve the coming era of truth and justice.
    • From The Prince of This World, Adam Kotsko, 2017: In his testimony before the grand jury, police officer Darren Wilson claims to be terrified of Michael Brown, the unarmed black man he shot and killed. One particular image from his testimony stands out: “It looks like a demon,” a very literal demonization of his own victim. Again and again we hear that the victims of such shootings were “No Angels.” Now that might be said of all of us, insofar as we are merely human. Yet the context shows us that being No Angels effectively is euphemism for being a demon, a being hardwired for evil. The victim’s records are invariably scoured for any hint of criminal activity, as though a single misdemeanor singles them out for summary execution. What this line of inquiry aims to establish is not simply that the victims have committed a crime but that they ARE criminals. What they do is take it as a symptom of what they are. Black victims are always presumptively criminals in this discourse. Paradoxically, however, this ostensibly inherent inclination towards crime does not free them from moral culpability. As in the case of demons, destined for Eternal damnation despite being unable to do anything except evil, it instead exposes them to a particularly intense form of moral accountability in which they face arbitrary punishments for their actions. The contrast with white Mass Shooters is striking: The sympathetic qualities of the shooter are often highlighted, so as to reassure the public that this Outburst of violence was truly random and unpredictable. The diagnosis is quick and absolutely uniform: the killer was mentally ill, which in sharp contrast to supposedly intrinsic criminality of the black police shooting victim serves to absolve him. The actions of the most privileged demographic must never be allowed to raise the possibility that there is a problem with American society as a whole. This victim blaming logic points back to a long theological Heritage with which modernity  has never fully grappled with. Theology has always been a victim blaming discourse. The example here are the infamous and long-suffering Job, who is told that since he is suffering, he must have sinned somehow. That narrative is the distressing one, consequences that are no less destructive for being unintended.

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• • From The Satanic Bible etc etc you know the rest:  Remain in the area of the altar unless imagery is more easily obtained in another spot, such as in the vicinity of the victim. Producing the image of the victim, proceed to inflict the destruction upon the effigy in the manner of your choice. This can be done in the following ways: the sticking of pins or nails into a doll representing your victim; the doll may be cloth, wax, wood, vegetable matter, etc. The creation of graphic imagery depicting the method of your victim’s destruction; drawings, paintings, etc.. The creation of a vivid literary description of your victim’s ultimate end. A detailed soliloquy directed at the intended victim, describing his torments and annihilation.mutilation, injury, infliction of pain or illness by proxy using any other means or devices desired. Intense, calculated hatred and disdain should accompany this step of the ceremony, and no attempt should be made to stop this step until the expended energy results in a state of relative exhaustion on the part of the magician. If requests are written, they are now read aloud by the priest and then burned in the flames of the appropriate candle. “Shemhamforash!” and “Hail Satan!” is said after each request. If requests are given verbally, participants (one at a time) now tell them to the priest. He then repeats in his own words (those which are most emotionally stimulating to him) the request. “Shemhamforash!” and “Hail Satan!” is said after each request. Appropriate Enochian Key is now read by the priest, as evidence of the participants’ allegiance to the Powers of Darkness. Then the words “SO IT IS DONE” are spoken by the priest. Black candles are used for power and success for the participants of the ritual, and are used to consume the parchments on which blessings requested by the ritual participants are written. The white candle is used for destruction of enemies. Parchments upon which curses are written are burned in the flame of the white candle.
  • • From Satanic Scriptures, Peter Gilmore, 2007: Our rituals are not “spells” which guarantee that some actual change will occur in the real world. Since we are skeptical atheists, we do not believe in anything supernatural. However, there are many aspects of the human experience. ESP suggests that there may be a gateway through the most primitive part of the brain by which thoughts and imagery might be broadcast to other minds when fueled by extreme emotional experiences. We see this as a possible means for magic to impact the world outside of the ritual chamber. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has documented phenomena of the “extended mind” such as people’s pets sensing from a distance the time their owners are deciding to return home, as well as the “feeling” that you are being stared at by someone else, even when you don’t see the person doing the staring. These could be supernatural abilities. Perhaps only a small percentage of our population has these intuitive capabilities. Thus we leave this as an open question that each must answer for himself—does ritual do more than simply give emotional relief? Only you can answer it, based on your personally chosen criteria for validity. The format for our traditional ritual was created as a guideline that may be amended by Satanists to suit their own needs. We’re often asked by interested parties if they must use black candles, or absolutely must have all of the devices for ritual described in The Satanic Bible. The answer is that you really don’t need any of the suggested implements, since the most important tool for ritual is your own imagination. The original prescribed practice was to use at least one black candle on the left and one white candle on the right of your altar. That was dropped fairly quickly; any color candles will do, so long as they “feel proper” to you. 
    • From The Problem With Rupert Sheldrake, Sam Woolfe, 2013: Rupert Sheldrake is an English author and parapsychologist credited with the hypothesis of “morphic resonance” who has argued that dogs have the power of telepathy. The problem with Sheldrake is that his ideas do not really survive critical investigation and remain within the realm of pseudoscience. Despite having a PhD in Biochemistry, Sheldrake has received a great deal of criticism from the scientific community for his work on telepathy. He views this attack as a refusal to look at the evidence he has collected; however, none of his experiments has ever been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, suggesting that there is no compelling evidence in the first place. In his book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake describes how he videotapes the behaviour of dogs and concluded that they knew when their owners set off to home; dogs would apparently wait by the doorway before they could hear the noise of their car approaching, for example. The psychologist Richard Wiseman attempted to duplicate Sheldrake’s experiment using the same ‘psychic’ pet that Sheldrake had used in his own experiments, a dog named Jaytee. Jaytee would wait on the porch for longer periods of time when the owner was closer to arriving home, a phenomenon consistent with Sheldrake’s own results. But Wiseman is not convinced. He argues that the observed patterns could easily be explained by natural waiting behaviour: A dog is more likely to wait on the porch for longer the longer their owner is away. So it should not be surprising that Jaytee is on the porch before the owner comes home. This is evidence of a dog anticipating the arrival of their owner, instead of knowing it through psychic abilities. Another idea that has characterised Sheldrake’s career has been ‘morphic resonance’ and the ‘morphogenetic field’, “the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species.” Through morphic resonance each member of a species draws on a collective memory. Morphogenetic fields are located invisibly in and around organisms, and may account for such hitherto unexplainable phenomena as the regeneration of severed limbs by worms and salamanders, phantom limbs, the holographic properties of memory, telepathy, and the increasing ease with which new skills are learned as greater quantities of a population acquire them. That the morphogenetic field is invisible leads sceptics to argue that the concept is magical and untestable. Supporters could reply by saying that the quantum world is invisible to us, yet that does not mean it is unreal. That’s true, however, evidence points to a quantum world; Sheldrake’s obsession with telepathy does not necessarily point to a world full of invisible fields. https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/07/the-problem-with-rupert-sheldrake.html 
    • From Devil Worshiper Hell-Bent on Controversy, ABC News, 2014: In a small, darkened room, Adam Daniels, the self-proclaimed head of his own satanic church, spat and stomped on the symbolic body of Christ in a ritual devoted to Satan. The smells of incense and smoky dry ice vapors wafted over his small band of followers, who watched him and others perform the so-called “black mass” and destroy bread that was meant to symbolize the Eucharistic. Only about 40 or so people attended Daniels’ demonic service, which was held in the basement of an Oklahoma City civic center in September, but it was enough to draw nearly 2,000 Christians from all over the region, some of which drove in from out of state, for a massive protest against it. Daniels is the co-founder of Dakhma of Angra Mainyu, a dark religion that worships demons, He has written his own “bible” and calls himself  high priest. Daniels has a real day job — he works as a restaurant cook — but he insists he has supernatural powers that are so strong he claims he can give someone a death sentence. “For example, we had an opponent whose mother was dying of cancer and when the destruction ritual was done on him, it put his mother out,” Daniels said. He’s also a man with a dark past — Daniels is a registered sex offender, but he doesn’t believe that conviction interferes with performing his duties. Daniels has 14 believers who worship regularly at his church, which is a converted storage room in his house. They garnered almost no public notice at all until they threatened to desecrate the Holy Sacrament of the Catholic Church, the communion wafer, during a satanic ceremony. The archbishop of Oklahoma City was outraged. “There’s a real danger involved,” said Archbishop Paul Coakley. “Danger, because of the powers that they are invoking are real. This isn’t entertainment. This isn’t a horror movie. This is real. These people are serious. They are invoking satanic powers. The archbishop even went as far as to say the satanic mass was an assault on the soul of humanity. ’The Exorcist’ [the movie] is based upon a true story. Satanic influences are real.” The news of these devil-worshipers’ ceremony spread quickly online, and 100,000 people signed a petition to block it. 
    • From Satanic Bay Area’s Lupercalia Destruction Ritual, Tabitha Slander and Daniel Walker, 2025: If a man can show his hands and prove that they are clean, no wrath of ours shall lurk for him–unscathed he walks through this lifetime. But one like this man, with bloodstained and hidden hands, shall find us there beside him as witness of the truth, and we rise up against him to the last. Hear me, mother Night, who gave birth to us to avenge                                               the living and the dead: This man of false piety dishonours us: Let this song of ours fall upon our victim’s head, our sacrifice, our curse of madness to weigh always on his mind. Remorseless Fate gave us this work to carry on, a destiny spun out to attach ourselves to those haughty with corrupt and foolish power until they go beneath the ground. These rights are ours by birth, even gods may not divert us. We share no feasts with them, no fellowship: their pure white robes are no part of our destiny. We Sing now this enchantment, A song without music, a clamor of furies, A sword in the senses, A storm in the heart, a fire in the brain, a drought in the soul. This task we take, ministers of overthrow, brewing strife for the one who threatens what we hold dear. We are here now, eager to contest the charges and challenges of other god. . There will be no prayers— for their gods despise us, consider us unworthy, refuse to converse with us, and so instead we deal in blood. Those proud opinions people have, who raise themselves so high above us, will melt away when we, in our black robes, beat out our vengeful dance. Dark clouds of defilement hover all around this man. Murky shadows fall, enveloping his home and Rumour spreads a tale of all his sorrow. We have our powers to fulfill, keeping human evil in our minds, and we cannot be appeased by men like this. Dishonoured and despised, we see to our revenge split off from gods, with no light from the sun. We take the path more arduous, and seek always what is ours. What man is not in awe and stands there unafraid to hear me state my rights, those powers allowed by Fate and ratified by all my words, mine to hold forever? No god is enraged on my behalf: So wake, you powers of the underworld, and let my reproaches prick the heart of justice, a spur for those who act with righteousness. Blow your blood-filled breath all over him; let those fires in your bodies shrivel his, and drive him to a fresh pursuit. For happiness will never fall upon this man who cheats justice, this reckless man who goes too far, who piles up riches for himself in any way he can and disregards all justice—I tell you this— In time storming torments will break his ship. He screams for help, but no one listens. In the middle of the seas he fights—but all in vain. Hail Satan.
    • • From How To Perform a Destruction Ritual, Ali Kellogg, Medium, 2017: Rituals are repeated human actions to fulfill, reinforce and maintain a part of the human function and experience. The Destruction Ritual was born from a tradition I have done for many years with friends and loved ones on New Year’s Eve. We would gather around a fire with some scraps of paper, pens, and a few bottles of liquor. We would take turns writing things down, reading them aloud, throwing them into the fire and then taking a shot. As the night progressed, we found ourselves sobbing, hugging, and getting some really sticky shit off our chests. Then one year, we started bringing physical objects to destroy. Things that bore some kind of sentimental value we hung onto, but in reality just sat in a box in a closet somewhere and caused us negative emotions when we remembered they were there. By hanging onto these objects, we were holding onto the hope of a failed relationship or the improvement of someone’s character, or a good memory we would cling to like this object was a life raft. My friend had a box of these creepy ceramic dogs her abusive grandfather gave her every year for her birthday. Another friend had an engagement ring from his ex fiancée. I had an antique children’s tambourine my ex gave me that I couldn’t let go of for some reason. We took turns smashing our objects and throwing the pieces into the fire. Afterwards, I felt a sense of empowerment I had never felt before, and an epiphany. The relationship was done, but I had let it still continue to hurt me; I allowed the toxicity to seep into my every day. We all cried, hugged, and stood around the fire silently watching the shards of our bad memories burn in the fire. The Destruction Ritual serves this very purpose — destroying objects that we have given the power to hurt us. It’s a form of self love, as you are trusting that by destroying these stupid things, you will be stronger and lighter, so to speak, after doing it.
        • The Incantation: These were things that I held in my hands. These were things that belonged to me. These were things that I held in my heart. These were things that have meaning to me. These things are not dead, because they never carried life. But I gave these things life, because they have carried me. I gave these things my memories. My fear. My secrets My tears My blood My devotion My hate My forgiveness My pain My pleasure My love My disdain. I am the creator of life in these things, for without me, they would not be, and people would seek to profit off what I give with no mutual heart given back to me .We emancipate ourselves from this; we liberate ourselves from this endless cycle of voids filled with unnecessary greed. I fill my void with the beauty that surrounds me. Together we raise our arms and unshackle ourselves from the control these things have over us. Together we raise our hammers and daggers, and with them pierce the heart of that control, a power driven by addiction, attachment, consumption, and by a relentless hunger for excess. I do not belong to these things: These things belong to me. Hail Satan.  Have at it, and be well. https://medium.com/@allthebigtrees/how-to-perform-a-satanic-destruction-ritual-4c76baf0ea30 
      • From Satanic Bay Area’s Candlemas Ritual, Tabitha Slander & Daniel Walker, 2024: Some religions are obsessed with destruction. You know the type: “The end is near,” “Rapture incoming,” lots of talk about the Hidden Imam, that kind of thing. In 1988, NASA engineer and Bible kook Edgar Whisehant sold 4.5 million copies of his book, “88 Reasons why the Rapture will happen in 1988”; as you can imagine, sales dipped in 1989. But Edgar kept it up, he wrote another book, explaining that the end would actually come in 1989; then 1993; then again in 1994. Among his original 88 reasons was, and this is true–I mean, it’s not true, but it’s true that he wrote it–since the world was supposedly in the midst of “a population explosion,” Edgar projected that human consumption would render the earth uninhabitable in just a few years, and since “god wants his glory,” god would have to intervene and destroy the world before humans did. I remind you, this man worked at NASA. Edgar of course was not the only one, if you lived in the Bay Area for a long time you probably remember Oakland minister Harold Camping spent $5 million on billboards predicting global destruction in 2011; he died in 2013, so, in a certain sense, perhaps he was only a few years off. By comparison, our deployment of the virtues of destruction is on a decidedly more human scale. The late Christopher Hitchens–whom I will say I was not always the biggest fan of but whom I do have to concede articulated this particular point with sobering clarity–observed that “a large part of modern religion quite clearly wants us all to die, it wants this world to come to an end, you can tell the yearning for things to be over, whenever you read any of its text, or listen to its authentic spokesmen. The eschatological element that is inseparable from Christianity, if you don’t believe there will be a final separation of the sheep and the goats, then you’re not really a Believer. They cannot wait for death and destruction to overtake and overwhelm the World, a hateful idea very much opposed to our daily lives.” And he was right, that is a troubling norm. Instead, we are here tonight to embrace the beauty of flames that are not everlasting but which we mean to last only as long as they have to, and to witness not the destruction of all things but only of these things, and to hope not for End Times, but just for the end of a time in our lives–and that, we think, is a much healthier kind of eschatology. This ritual has also included some quotations from late Satanist poet Baron Jacque Fersen; when Fersen wrote about Satanism he was actually writing about the scandal around his own swinging sex-positive queer lifestyle; he did write because he seemingly wanted to get something off of their chests, but he did not want to confess in the conventional meaning of that word. Confession is bad for the soul; it appropriates the right you have to assess your own life and embezzles it into the account of some god–-we know not who. When we unburden ourselves, it should be with ourselves. Gods do not write the endings of our stories, our lives, or our worlds–that is the privilege that we resolve for our own persons. Hail Satan.
    • From Canyon River Pride Interfaith Service, Satanic Idaho, 2025: Destruction rituals. far from being acts of violence, are deeply symbolic practices that signify transformation, renewal, and the cyclical nature of existence. Destruction rituals are intentional acts of breaking down or dismantling objects, symbols, or even structures. They are not about chaos for its own sake but are deliberate expressions of letting go, clearing the old to make way for the new. These rituals are prevalent across various cultures and religions, each with its unique significance and purpose. It’s roots trace back to the dawn of civilization. Before human kind could farm, we knew we wanted to shed ourselves of trauma and grief. Honored guests, seekers of transformation, and guardians of the sacred flame, Today, we gather not to celebrate creation, but to honor the power inherent in endings, the force that clears the path for new beginnings. We stand on the threshold of a ritual as ancient as time itself, the Rite of Destruction. This is not an act of mindless violence, but a deliberate, sacred process of severance. It is the sacred act of severing ties with that which no longer serves us—be it a toxic relationship, a destructive habit, or an unhealed wound. Through this rite, we reclaim our agency, our sovereignty, and our future. In the ancient world, destruction rituals were performed to obliterate the influence of enemies and to purify the land. The Egyptians crafted execration texts, inscribed curses upon figurines or clay tablets which were then smashed and buried to symbolically annihilate their foes. Similarly, in parts of Asia, statues or objects were submerged in water along with deceased loved ones. They were profound statements of intent, of closure, and of transformation. Today, we invoke this tradition with reverence. We do not seek to harm others, but to liberate ourselves from the chains of the past. We gather our intentions, our will, and our focus, and we channel them into this sacred act. This ritual is consent based. If you do not feel comfortable in participating, there is no requirement or pressure to do anything you do not wish to participate in. What we faith leaders are asking you, to do is step forward and write a name, a phrase, a memory, or an experience that you wish to no longer to carry with you, on one of these pieces of paper. And release it into this bowl of water. This is a space for reflection and for honoring thyself. This moment is yours. Afterwards, myself and other faith leaders will be at the front of the stage and would love to hear your stories if you are in a place of sharing. The hugs are free and so is your future. A future you choose to create on your terms.
    • From A New Rage Room Is Ready For You, Leslie Bridgers, Portland Press Herald, 2025: There’s no question people are worked up about all sorts of things these days, and while some are channeling their anger by gathering in protest or on social media, a new business is offering another option: breaking stuff. The Wreck Room opened in January and every month since, demand has multiplied for its ax throwing, paint splatter, air-gun range and most of all, its rage rooms. Aside from breakups, the current political climate is the most common reason people come in, said owner Brent Gumbs. But despite his impeccable timing, that’s not why he started the business. Growing up in New Hampshire, Gumbs said he saw too many of his peers turn to drugs and “wanted to try to counteract that” by offering less self-destructive activities in the Midcoast, where he had noted a similar lack of things to do, especially in bad weather. The rage rooms are the main attraction, offering a private space for customers to unleash their anger by taking a bat or a hammer to various breakable objects including vases, Mason jars and, for an additional cost, appliances like TVs, toasters and crockpots. Although rage rooms have been around for more than a decade, there aren’t many in Maine, and none in the southern part of the state. Perhaps we had been too peaceable a lot until now. I’ll admit, I wasn’t feeling particularly ragey when I decided to head up to Topsham to give it a try but pretty quickly things got serious. First, there was the waiver, releasing The Wreck Room of any responsibility for whatever I did to myself in there. Then I was given a plastic face shield and what looked like gardening gloves to protect me from the objects I was about to break and those in the pile of previously smashed material on the floor. There was a plastic tub holding 10 items: a pint glass, some Mason jars and vases, a ceramic mug, a pail and a cooking pot lid. There was also an old water heater lying on its side that Gumbs said was for people to beat on or to prop up the items before hitting them into the wall, like some sort of very impractical softball tee. In the corner were several baseball bats, a hammer and a pickax. Truthfully, I didn’t give my inner rage much of a chance. Though I’m no physicist, it seemed that the harder I hit these things, the faster the shards flew back at me. So, rather than swinging for the fences, I went for more of a slap hit followed by a flinch and duck. Although I never fully unleashed my anger, you don’t have to be bitter to enjoy The Wreck Room. You can shoot at glass bottles from a much more comfortable distance in the air-gun range or put on a full-body suit and take spray guns to the walls of the paint splatter room. There’s also a bar serving f specialty cocktails, as well as snacks, with plans to add more food. Gumbs has other ambitions, too. He’s getting a glass pulverizer to turn the broken objects into sand that he wants to donate to help restore the coastline. The day after I was there, he held his first trivia night and later that week, an ax-throwing competition. Those sound like good activities to do any day, but I’ll wait to revisit the rage room. https://www.pressherald.com/2025/04/21/feeling-angry-a-new-rage-room-in-topsham-is-ready-for-you/ 

The post Episode 202: Satanic Destruction Rituals appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• •  
  • Biography of Lord Byron, The Poetry Foundation, 2017: The most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, Byron created the immensely popular namesake Byronic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. Born with a lame leg, he was the son of an impoverished Scots heiress and “Mad Jack” Byron, a fortune-hunting widower. The captain squandered his wife’s inheritance, was absent for the birth of his only son, and eventually decamped for France as an exile from English creditors. Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere colored by her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and pride. With the death in 1798 of his great-uncle, the “Wicked” Lord Byron Fifth, George became the Sixth Baron Byron. He excelled in oratory, verse, and sports. He also formed passionate attachments with other boy, and; there can be little doubt that he had strong bisexual tendencies. Living extravagantly, he began to amass the debts that would bedevil him for years. In March 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords. Though in debt, he gathered resources to allow a tour of the eastern Mediterranean, which reinforced for him the contrast between the glory of ancient Greece and its contemporary disgrace. Between June 1813 and February 1816, Byron completed and had published six extremely popular verse tales, five of them influenced by his travels. His  “Byronic Heroes” descended from Prometheus, Satan, and the sentimental heroes of Rousseau and Goethe. Among their traits are romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, honor, altruism, and pure love. The drawing rooms and salons of Whig society vied for Byron’s presence and lionized him. In 1813 Byron began an affair with his 29-year-old half sister, Augusta. While no legal proof exists, the circumstantial evidence in Byron’s letters strongly suggests an incestuous connection. Throughout his life Byron was a fervent reader of the Bible and a lover of traditional songs and legends. As a champion of freedom, he may have responded instinctively to the oppression suffered by the Jewish people. He married an heiress in 1815 but by 1816 his wife considered him insane and separated, taking their daughter with her. Heavy drinking drove Byron into rages and fits of irrational behavior. 
  • In 1816, Byron sailed for Geneva, where waiting for him were Claire Clairmont (pregnant with his child), Percy Shelley, and Mary Godwin. They passed the time agreeably by boating on Lake Leman and conversing at the Villa; in this environmen,t Mary wrote Frankenstein. In 1819, Byron’s publisher, after some hesitation, cautiously published his “Don Juan.” Typical was the review in Blackwood’s Magazine, which branded Byron as “a cool unconcerned fiend” who derided love, honor, patriotism, and religion in his “filthy and impious poem.” Not all the reviews were negative: Goethe praised Don Juan as “a work of boundless energy.” In October, Byron presented the manuscript of his memoirs, not to be published during his lifetime, containing, among other things, “a detailed account of his marriage and its consequences.” His publisher had the memoirs burned to protect Byron’s reputation. Byron began work on his play “Cain” and challenged accepted religious beliefs in good, evil, death, and immortality, and Robert Southey virulently attacked Byron as the leader of the “Satanic school” of contemporary writers whose works exhibited “a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety.” Shelley proclaimed Cain “apocalyptic— a revelation not before communicated to man.” His was a minority opinion. Resolving that “he who is only a poet has done little for mankind” Byron devoted himself to the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and agreed to loan 4,000 pounds to the Greek fleet. In 1824 he joined the moderate revolutionary leaders on the mainland and was enthusiastically welcomed by shouts, salutes, and salvos, hailed as a “Messiah.” But his constitution deteriorated under the strain and the cold winter rains as well as the frustration of his unrequited love for his handsome 15-year-old page boy. By April he was seriously ill and on the evening of Easter Monday, April 19, 1824, Byron died. In memorial services throughout the country, he was proclaimed a national hero of Greece and his death proved effective in uniting the many Greek factions and eliciting support for their struggle. Byron’s body arrived in England on June 29, and for two days he lay in state in a house in Great George Street. 
  • From The Byronic Hero, Princess Weekes, PBS, 2020: Edward Cullen; Han Solo; Lestat–what do all of these characters have in common besides being heartthrobs? They share a common ancestor: the Byronic Hero. Brooding, sensual, violent, a little too single-minded, the Byronic Hero has been a staple in literature dating back to the 19th century. I see you, Cloud Strife, all sad and angsty with your giant sword. According to Professor Peter L. Thorslev, the characteristic Byronic Hero has borrowed characteristics from the gothic villain in his looks, his mysterious past, and his secret sins, and from the Man Of Feelings archetype  in his tender sensibilities and in his undying fidelity. He is a romantic rebel. He chooses his values in open defiance of the codes of society. That’s right, you defy the codes of society by being sad and hot and with your slightly stalker-like tendencies. The Byronic archetype allowed for more complicated male characters to form, and without him we miss out on the development of the anti-hero. Gothic and romantic fiction writers and readers of the 19th and 20th centuries ate this up: Victor Frankenstein, Captain Ahab, The Phantom of the Opera, The Count of Monte Cristo, Mr. Rochester, Megamind–even James Bond is pretty Byronic. Debate me in the comments. They have a mixture of monstrous yet alluring personalities. Frollo from Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starts off as a good man but is gripped by a lust for a woman he cannot have and tips into madness; Heathcliff is such a compelling romantic lead because the text makes it clear that he was forced into becoming a bitter, hateful man by society, but his deep, toxic love for Catherine draws the reader to him. Rochester has a kindly nature and a deep love for Jane but is still capable of locking his wife in the attic. Byron himself had a huge capacity for love, intelligence, and an appreciation for beauty but was chaotic and emotionally aloof. More recently we see more female characters who possess some Byronic qualities, like Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Regina from Once Upon a Time, and Catra from She-Ra. But those characters are punished more by both the audience and the writers. Sometimes, the alluring aspect of female and non-white Byronic characters is seeing them have the freedom to be more complex as  Byronic heroines take on the characteristics of the rebellious, ambitious, narcissistic, individualistic, and ultimately self-destructive Byronic male. All of the tortured romantic bad boys of literature, film, and television have a little bit of Byron in them. So the next time you get deep in your feels for Kylo Ren, cheer for Prince Zuko, or secretly pop on Twilight for the 200th time, maybe pour one out to Lord Byron, to whom we owe all of this angsty goodness to. Or James Dean, either one will do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4wNZDIH8d8 
  • • Portraits Of Lord Byron In Order Of Lord Byron-ness, Daniel Lavery, The Toast, 2015: 
  • Lord Byron & His Manservant, 1810: At first glance, you might be tempted to think, “Not very Byron,” because there are other people in the picture, and his alabaster brow isn’t the focal point. This is an error. “You there, boy, fetch into this dinghy and sail into yon exhilarating storm while I stand here and clench my fist over this rock. If you drown in the background it will make for a very exciting painting.” He’s wearing like eighteen ascots and they’re all flowing in a tempest, plenty of Byron here.
  • Portrait of Lord Byron, 1813: SOLID POUTY BYRON. He’s got some secret freaky brocade vest on under his cloak, which is probably full of dildos, his brow situation is ferociously organized, his out-of-frame hand is probably jerking off the devil.
  • Byron’s Dream, 1874: Eight out of ten Byrons. Look at his SEXUAL SNEERING. “What is this woman doing in my portrait? is her hair more luxurious than mine? I hope she falls down this hill and dies so I can be alone with my dog. what is she LOOKING at even? why isn’t it me.”
  • Coloured Print of Lord Byron, Date Unknown: Medium Byron, which is perhaps the least amount of Byron you can get. It’s better to be almost no Byron than just regular Byron, so this is actually zero Byrons. He’s almost smiling?? And like, reading letters, like someone with a job would do? Why don’t you just paint KEATS and DIE.
  • Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, 1813: ONE BILLION PERCENT would Byron grow a mustache and demand that everyone notice it. He would never come out and say “What do you think of my mustache?” but he would make it clear in a thousand small ways that you were expected to notice and compliment it, and if you withheld that pleasure from him, you would never be invited to dinner again. 
  • The reception of Lord Byron, 1861: “Hello, are you Greece, I am here to run your army? Don’t worry, I’m a poet.”
  • Lord Byron on His Deathbed, 1826: Obviously the lute and the laurel wreath and the funereal sheet draped like a Roman toga are sick touches, but you can’t even see his death erection, which I feel like would have been really important to him, that even in death people were thinking about his dick.
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  • From The Vampyre, John Polidori, 1819: Hitherto, Aubrey had had no opportunity of studying Lord Ruthven’s character, and now he found that his companion was profuse in his liberality;—the idle, the vagabond, and the beggar, received from his hand more than enough to relieve their immediate wants. But Aubrey could not avoid remarking that it was not upon the virtuous that he bestowed his alms;—these were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers; but when an addict came to ask something to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity. All those upon whom it was bestowed, inevitably found that there was a curse upon it, for they were all either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery. Aubrey was surprised at the apparent eagerness with which his companion sought for the centres of all fashionable vice; he always gambled with success, except where the known sharper was his antagonist, and then he lost even more than he gained; when he encountered the rash youthful novice, or the luckless father of a numerous family, his eyes sparkled with more fire than that of the cat whilst dallying with the half-dead mouse. In every town, he left the formerly affluent youth in the solitude of a dungeon, whilst many a father sat frantic, amidst the speaking looks of mute hungry children, without a single farthing of his late immense wealth. Yet he took no money from the gambling table but immediately lost, to the ruiner of many, the last gilder he had just snatched from the convulsive grasp of the innocent. Aubrey’s guardians insisted upon his immediately leaving his friend, and urged, that his character was dreadfully vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious habits more dangerous to society, and all those females whom he had sought out apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his affair, thrown the mask aside and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze. Aubrey determined upon leaving one, whose character had not yet shown a single bright point on which to rest the eye. He resolved to invent some plausible pretext for abandoning him altogether, purposing, in the mean while, to watch him more closely, and to let no slight circumstances pass by unnoticed. Aubrey determined upon leaving and immediately writing a note, to say, that from that moment he must decline accompanying his Lordship in the remainder of their proposed tour. Ruthven next day merely sent his servant to notify his complete assent to a separation.
  • From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Lord Byron, 1818: Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen, still great! Who now shall lead thy scattered children forth, And long accustomed bondage uncreate? Not such thy sons who whilome did await, The hopeless warriors of a willing doom, In bleak Thermopylae’s sepulchral strait— Oh, who that gallant spirit shall resume, Leap from Eurotas’ banks, and call thee from the tomb? Spirit of Freedom! Not thirty tyrants now enforce the chain, But every carle can lord it o’er thy land; Nor rise thy sons, but idly rail in vain, Trembling beneath the scourge of Turkish hand, From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned. In all save form alone, how changed! and who That marks the fire still sparkling in each eye, Who would but deem their bosom burned anew With thy unquenched beam, lost Liberty! And many dream withal the hour is nigh That gives them back their fathers’ heritage: For foreign arms and aid they fondly sigh, Nor solely dare encounter hostile rage, Or tear their name defiled from Slavery’s mournful page. Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not Who would be free must strike the blow? By their right arms the conquest must be wrought? Will Gaul or Muscovite redress ye?  No! True, they may lay your proud despoilers low, But not for you will Freedom’s altars flame. Shades of the Helots! triumph o’er your foe: Greece! change thy lords, thy state is still the same; Thy glorious day is o’er, but not thy years of shame. But ne’er will Freedom seek this fated soil, But slave succeed to slave through years of endless toil. Though turbans now pollute Sophia’s shrine And Greece her very altars eyes in vain: Gay were her minstrels once, for free her throng, All felt the common joy they now must feign; Nor oft I’ve seen such sight, nor heard such song, As wooed the eye, and thrilled the Bosphorus along. And yet how lovely in thine age of woe, Land of lost gods and godlike men. Thy vales of evergreen, thy hills of snow, Proclaim thee Nature’s varied favourite now; Thy fanes, thy temples to the surface bow, Commingling slowly with heroic earth, Broke by the share of every rustic plough: So perish monuments of mortal birth, So perish all in turn, save well-recorded worth.
  • • From Cain: A Mystery, Lord Byron, 1821: I have a Victor––true; but no superior. Homage he has from all––but none from me: I battle it against him, as I battled In highest Heaven––through all Eternity, And the unfathomable gulfs of Hades, And the interminable realms of space, And the infinity of endless ages–All, all, will I dispute! And world by world, And star by star, and universe by universe, Shall tremble in the balance, till the great Conflict shall cease, if ever it shall cease, Which it ne’er shall, till he or I be quenched! And what can quench our immortality, Or mutual and irrevocable hate? He as a conqueror will call the conquered [one] Evil; but what will be the Good he gives? Were I the victor, his works would be deemed The only evil ones. And you, ye new And scarce–born mortals, what have been his gifts To you already, in your little world? But few; and some of those but bitter. Dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in His everlasting face, and tell him that His evil is not good! He is great–– But, in his greatness, is no happier than We in our conflict! Let him Sit on his vast and solitary throne–– Creating worlds, to make eternity Less burdensome to his immense existence; Let him crowd orb on orb: he is alone, Indefinite, Indissoluble Tyrant; Could he but crush himself, ’twere the best boon He ever granted: but let him reign on! Spirits and Men, at least we sympathise–– And, suffering in concert, make our pangs Innumerable, more endurable. The Maker––Call him Which name thou wilt: he makes but to destroy. He, so wretched in his height, So restless in his wretchedness, must still Create, and re–create––perhaps he’ll make One day a Son unto himself––as he Gave you a father––and if he so doth, Mark me! that Son will be a sacrifice! I have nothing in common with him; I dwell apart, but I am great. I tempt none, Save with the truth: was not the Tree a Tree Of Knowledge? and was not the Tree of Life Still fruitful? Did I bid her pluck them not? Did I plant things prohibited within The reach of beings innocent, and curious By their innocence? I would have made ye Gods; and He who thrust ye forth because “ye should not eat the fruits of life, And become gods”–were those his words? Then who was the Demon–He Who would not let ye live, or he who would Have made ye live forever, in the joy And power of Knowledge? 
  • From The Devil’s Drive, Lord Byron, 1813: “And what shall I ride in,” quoth Lucifer then? “If I followed my taste indeed, I should mount in a wagon of wounded men, and smile to see them bleed. But these will be furnished again and again, and at present my purpose is speed; To see of My manor as much as I may, And watch that no souls shall be poached away. I have a state-coach at Carlton House, A chariot in Seymour place; But they’re lent to two friends. Then up to the earth sprung he, And making a jump from Moscow to France, He stepped across the Sea, And rested his hoof on a Turnpike road– No very great way from a Bishop’s abode. The Devil has reached our cliffs so white, And what did he see there, I pray? If his eyes were good, he but saw by night What we see every day. Satan hired a horse and gig With promises of pay; And he pawned his horns for a spruce new wig, To redeem as he came away: And he whistled some tune, a waltz or a jig, And drove off at the close of day. The first place he stopped he heard the Psalm that rung from a Methodist Chapel: “‘Tis the best sound I’ve heard,” quoth he, “since my palm Presented Eve with her apple! When Faith is all, tis an excellent sign, That the Works and Workmen both are mine.” The Devil got next to Westminster, And he turned to the room of the Commons; But he heard as he purposed to enter in there, That “the Lords” had received a summons; And he thought, as a fallen aristocrat, He might peep at the Peers, though to hear of them were flat; And he walked up the House so like one of his own, That they say that he stood pretty near the throne. He saw the Lord Liverpool seemingly wise, and Jockey of Norfolk—a man of some size—And he saw the tears in Lord Eldon’s eyes, Because the Catholics would not rise, In spite of his prayers and his prophecies; And he heard—which set Satan himself a staring— A certain Chief Justice say something a-swearing. And the Devil was shocked—and quoth he, “I must go, For I find we have much better manners below. If thus he harangues when he passes my border, I shall hint to friend Moloch to call him to order.”
  • • From Romantic Satanism, Peter Schock, 2003: By 1820 Byron’s satanic Aura had lost its glamor and was now almost exclusively the channel through which conservative voices expressed criticism. In 1820, Reginald Heber added a new dimension to the attacks on Byron, writing “By a strange predilection for the worser half of Manichianism, one of the mightiest spirits of the age has apparently devoted himself in his genius to the adornment and extension of evil.” This was saying in Elegant terms that Byron was a Satanist, and that was precisely how he interpreted it. Thus prominent writers for the journals and the Tory Ministry applied to Byron the brand of satanic, grouping him with infidels. It should come as no surprise then that a blaspheming Satanic figure looms so large in “Cain.” Unleashing such a character in a religious drama must have seemed especially opportune as a Counter-Strike, the Fulfillment of Byron’s great threat. Shelley probably encouraged Byron to do this when he visited him in August of 1827, leading Byron to heighten the Satanism of the work by shaping Lucifer into the adverse ideal of Christian mythology. Through his drama Byron struck at the tyrants attempting to trample upon free thought, and his target extended Beyond his assailants in the Quarterly Review to all who contributed to the assault on free thought at his time, from Tory ministers who authored repressive legislation to Crown lawyers who prosecuted infidels. The Eclectic Review speculated that Byron wrote Cain to test for himself the limits of the freedom of the press.A peer of the realm, living in England or Italy, had little reason to fear prosecution. Publishers, not writers, were most at stake.He therefore must have assumed that his play would become part of this controversy and that he would be perceived as an aristocratic provocateur in the struggle over the authority of the Bible. Before writing Cain, Byron had worried frequently about the consequences of publishing irreligion. In 1817; Shelley lost the custody of his children over the anti-christian diatribes he wrote in Queen Mab. This chronic anxiety about court judgments meant Byron probably took some care in writing his play, especially in the construction of its superhuman Infidel. Because biblical myth was contested in the blasphemy controversy, because the brand of satanic had been fixed to all transgressive writers, and because publishing blasphemy carried consequences, to write a biblical drama involving satanic myth was to enter into an ideological conflict.
  • From Little Lucifers of the Satanic School, The Satanic Scholar, 2016: Romantic Satanism was not about Devil worship, but rather identification with Satan the magnificent rebel angel out of Milton and adoption of his mythic/poetic revolt against the absolute authority personified in the Almighty as a sociopolitical countermyth. Romantic Satanists were essentially little Lucifers—Miltonic Satans in miniature. When English clergyman Reginald Heber identified in Byron “a strange predilection for the worser half of manicheism,” this, “being interpreted,” reflected Byron himself, “means that I worship the devil…” Heber would go on to explain that “Lord Byron misunderstood us. He supposed that we accused him of ‘worshipping the Devil.’ We certainly had, at the time, no particular reason for apprehending that he worshipped anything.” Byron’s failure—or refusal, rather—to bend the knee in worship of anything, however, was what made Byron so Satanic, and the same goes for Shelley, the militant atheist who imagined himself very much like the heroically unbowed Satan: “Did I now see god seated in gorgeous & tyrannic majesty as described, upon the throne of infinitude – if I bowed before him, what would virtue say?” Just as “narcissists” are simply individuals who bear the likeness of the mythical Narcissus, Byron and Shelley were “Satanists” not because they worshipped the Devil, but because of their likeness to the arch-rebel—an image they often deliberately donned. Satanism was certainly at the heart of Byronism, the cultural phenomenon that saw Byron hurled haphazardly into the limelight. Byron’s dogged sense of sin was mostly the product of the perverted form of Calvinism literally beat into him as a young boy. Being “Majestic though in ruin” was part and parcel of the Byronic persona, however, and so Byron seized for himself the starring role of fallen angel. Like Satan, Byron wished to experience the feeling of being struck with full force by the vengeance of Heaven.

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  • The Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television
  • Kennedy’s Berlin Address
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  • Memory, Andrew Lloyd Webber
  • Orson Welles’ Frozen Peas Tapes

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  • From The Dead Past, Isaac Asimov, 1956: The Carthaginians, it seemed, worshiped Moloch, in the form of a hollow, brazen idol with a furnace in its belly. At times of national crisis, infants were hurled alive into the flames. They were given sweetmeats just before the crucial moment, in order that the sacrifice not be ruined by displeasing cries of panic. The drums rolled just after the moment to drown out the few seconds of infant shrieking. The parents were present, presumably gratified, for the sacrifice was pleasing to the gods. Potterley frowned at all this: Vicious lies, he told her, on the part of Carthage’s enemies. Such propagandistic lies were not uncommon: According to the Greeks, the ancient Hebrews worshiped an ass’s head; according to the Romans, the primitive Christians sacrificed pagan children in the catacombs. “Then they didn’t do it?” asked Caroline. “I’m sure they didn’t,” he replied. “Human sacrifice is commonplace in primitive cultures, but Carthage in her great days was not a primitive culture. The Greeks and Romans might have mistaken some Carthaginian symbolism for the full rite, either out of ignorance or out of malice. Could people fight so for a city and a way of life as bad as the ancient writers painted it? Hannibal was a better general than any Roman, and his soldiers were absolutely faithful to him. Even his bitterest enemies praised him. They talk of Moloch, a twenty-five-hundred-year-old canard started by the Greeks and Romans. They had their own slaves, their crucifixions and torture, their gladiatorial contests. They weren’t holy. The Moloch story is war propaganda, the big lie. I can prove it was a lie. I can prove it and, by Heaven, I will. 
• • From Salammbo, Gustave Flaubert, 1862: The temple of Moloch was built at the foot of a steep defile in a sinister spot. The night was gloomy, a greyish fog seemed to weigh upon the sea, which beat against the cliff with a noise of death-rattles and sobs. As soon as the doorway was crossed one found oneself in a vast quadrangular court. In the centre rose a mass of architecture with eight equal faces surmounted by cupolas thronged around a kind of rotunda, from which sprang a cone with a re-entrant curve and terminating in a ball on the summit. Fires were burning in cylinders of filigree-work fitted upon poles, which men were carrying to and fro. Here and there on the flag-stones huge lions couched like sphinxes, living symbols of the devouring sun. Here it was that the Ancients laid aside their sticks of narwhal horn, for a law which was always observed inflicted the punishment of death upon anyone entering the meeting with any kind of weapon. These men were generally thick-set, with curved noses like those of the Assyrian colossi. In a few, however, the more prominent cheek-bone, the taller figure, and the narrower foot betrayed an African origin and nomad ancestors. Those who lived continually shut up in their counting-houses had pale faces; others showed in theirs the severity of the desert, and strange jewels sparkled on all the fingers of their hands, which were burnt by unknown suns. Part of a wall in the temple of Moloch was thrown down in order to draw out the brazen god without touching the ashes of the altar. Then came all the inferior forms of the Divinity: Baal-Samin, god of celestial space; Baal-Peor, god of the sacred mountains; Baal-Zeboub, god of corruption. Before each tabernacle a man balanced a large vase of smoking incense on his head. Masters of the finances, governors of provinces, sailors, and the numerous horde employed at funerals were making their way towards the tabernacles; out of deference to Moloch they adorned themselves with the most splendid jewels. A fire of aloes, cedar, and laurel was burning. The children ascended slowly, their wrists and ankles tied. The appetite of the god was never appeased: He ever wished for more. The faithful came into the passages, dragging their children, and they beat them in order to make them let go. The instrument-players sometimes stopped through exhaustion; then the cries of the mothers might be heard, and the frizzling of the fat as it fell upon the coals.
• • From The King James Bible, 1611: Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy god. Whosoever he be of the children of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his seed unto Molec, he shall surely be put to death. And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people because he hath given unto Molech to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name. And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not, then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him to commit whoredom with Molech. Solomon did evil in the sight of the lord and built a high place for Chemosh, the abomination, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass through the fire to Molech. For this city hath been to me as a provocation of mine anger and they have turned unto me the back, and not the face, and they set their abominations in the house, which is called by my name, to defile it. Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings, O house of Israel? Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch: and [so] I will carry you away beyond Babylon.
• • • From The Cult of Moloch, Jewish Virtual LIbrary, 2017: Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel is found in the Bible. The laws of the Holiness Code speak about giving or passing children to Moloch Deuteronomy speaks of “passing [one’s] son or daughter through fire,” although Moloch is not named in the Deuteronomy passage. Some scholars interpret the phrase “pass through” as a reference to a divinatory or protective rite in which children were passed through a fire but not physically harmed. However, the same phrase is found in an unmistakable context of burning in Numbers. Psalms speaks of child sacrifice to the unnamed idols of Canaan; prophetic sources like Jeremiah and Ezekiel speak disapprovingly of sacrificing children to Yahweh. Only in Jeremiah 32 is Moloch mentioned by name, and there he is associated with Baal. As the classical sources have it, the sacrifices of children at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia, usually came after a defeat and a great disaster – a religious practice based upon an ancient mythological tradition. The accepted view since Abraham Geiger is that Moloch is a mis-vocalization of the word melekh, for “king.” Since it is unlikely that one particular god who is not especially famous would be singled out for mention while other prominent gods are not mentioned by name in the Torah even once, Molech has been interpreted to mean “lambe” or “vow,” while some scholars understood the term as referring to the human sacrifice itself. The most plausible explanation is, as has already been suggested, that the term means “king of humankind,” and is the epithet of the god to whom the inscription is dedicated. The word “king” was indeed a common attribute of the deities in the Phoenician-Punic sphere.
      • As already indicated above, the sources speak about passing children to Moloch in fire. According to the rabbinic interpretation, this prohibition is against passing children through fire and then delivering them to the pagan priests–an initiation rite.  A similar non-sacrificial tradition, perhaps more ancient, is found in the Book of Jubilees connecting intermarrriage or rather the marrying off of one’s children to pagans with the sin of Moloch. The common denominator of all these traditions is the understanding of Moloch worship as the transfer of Jewish children to paganism either by delivering them directly to pagan priests or by procreation with a pagan woman. This tradition is in keeping with the general rabbinic tendency to make biblical texts relevant to their audiences, who were more likely to be attracted to Greco-Roman cults and pagan women than to the sacrifice of humans to a long-forgotten god. This figurative interpretation was accepted by the fact that Ahaz, who opened the door to Assyrian culture and religion, was the first king to indulge in the worship of Moloch, along with other practices such as the burning of incense on the roofs.  https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-cult-of-moloch 
• • From Moloch, Isidore Singer & Geor, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906: The motive for these sacrifices is not far to seek. Micah says, “Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” In the midst of the disasters which were befalling the nation, men felt that if the favor of Yhwh could be regained it was worth any price. Other tribes worshiped their gods with offerings of children, so in their desperation the Israelites did the same. For some reason, perhaps because not all the priestly and prophetic circles approved of the movement, they made the offerings not in the Temple but at an altar or pyre in the valley of Hinnom. 1 Kings calls Molech the “abomination of the children of Ammon”; it was formerly assumed that this worship was an imitation of an Ammonite cult, but little is known of the Ammonite religion; because child-sacrifice was a prominent feature of the worship of Phoenician gods, Moore seeks to prove that the worship of Moloch was introduced from Phoenicia. Jeremiah declares that Yhwh had not commanded these sacrifices, while Ezekiel says Yhwh polluted the Israelites in their offerings by permitting them to sacrifice their first-born so that through chastisement they might know god’s authority. The fact, therefore, now generally accepted by critical scholars, is that  human sacrifices were offered to Yhwh as King or Counselor of the nation and that the Prophets disapproved of it and denounced it because it was introduced from outside as an imitation of a heathen cult and because of its barbarity. In course of time “Melek” was changed to “Molech” to still further stigmatize the rites. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10937-moloch-molech 
• • From Ancient Carthaginians really did sacrifice their children, Oxford University Press, 2014: A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University, suggests that Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods. The paper argues that well-meaning attempts to interpret the ‘tophets’ – ancient infant burial grounds – simply as child cemeteries are misguided. In the 1970, scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda, but Dr Josephine Quinn of Oxford said: ‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the stories about Carthaginian child sacrifice are true. This is something the Romans and Greeks said the Carthaginians did and it was part of the popular history of Carthage in the 18th and 19th centuries. But in the 20th century, people increasingly took the view that this was racist propaganda against a political enemy and that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander. What we are saying now is that the archaeological, literary, and documentary evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming and that instead of dismissing it out of hand, we should try to understand it.’ The city-state of ancient Carthage was a Phoenician colony located in what is now Tunisia from around 800BC until 146BC, when it was destroyed by the Romans. Children – both male and female, and mostly a few weeks old – were sacrificed by the Carthaginians at locations known as tophets. Dr Quinn said: ‘People have tried to argue that these archaeological sites are cemeteries for children who were stillborn or died young, but quite apart from the fact that a weak, sick or dead child would be a pretty poor offering to a god, and that animal remains are found in the same sites treated in exactly the same way, it’s hard to imagine how the death of a child could count as the answer to a prayer. It’s very difficult for us to recapture people’s motivations for carrying out this practice or why parents would agree to it; perhaps it was out of profound religious piety, or a sense that the good the sacrifice could bring the family or community as a whole outweighed the life of the child. We also have to remember the high level of mortality among children.” The backlash against the notion of Carthaginian child sacrifice began in the second half of the 20th century and was led by scholars from Tunisia and Italy, the very countries in which tophets have been found. Perhaps the very reason the people who established Carthage and its neighbours left their original home of Phoenicia – modern-day Lebanon – was because others there disapproved of their religious practices. Child abandonment was common in the ancient world, but child sacrifice is relatively uncommon. Perhaps the future Carthaginians were like the Pilgrim Fathers leaving from Plymouth, so fervent in their devotion to the gods that they weren’t welcome anymore. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-really-did-sacrifice-their-children 
• • From Child Sacrifice and the Greek Legendary Tradition, John Rundin, Journal of Biblical Literature, 2004: The Athenians, as punishment for their killing of King Minos’s son, periodically sent young men and women to Minos in Crete, where they were turned over to the Minotaur to be devoured. It has long been conjectured that the legend of the Minotaur reflects Semitic child sacrifice. Minos’s story itself connects him with the Phoenicians; legend has him as the son of Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king. Crete, then, might well be a place where such rituals were practiced. Furthermore, the preadult status of the victims sent to the Minotaur recalls the young age of the children sacrificed in those rites. But the connection between the Minotaur and child sacrifice does not end there: The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures speak of Molech or Moloch, who has been erroneously thought to be a god to whom children were sacrificed. Interestingly, medieval and modern sources represent Molech as a calf-headed, human-bodied bronze or copper idol; this tradition has no foundation in extant ancient Jewish or Hebrew sources; Moore traced it back only as far as medieval Jewish commentaries. In his view, this portrayal of Molech derives from classical sources which describe a bronze idol of Cronus at which children were sacrificed in Carthage. Moore suggested that Molech’s calf-head derives from the Minotaur of Greek legend.  
• • In fact, the medieval figure of Molech probably derives from a tradition that intermingles not only Cronus of Carthage and the Minotaur but at least two other source: One is the legend of Talos, a creature made of bronze, [often imagined as a giant] but referenced in at least one source to be a bull. The other obvious tradition that feeds into the image of Molech comes from the Greek city of Acragas in Sicily, which lay close to Punic settlements and where a notoriously cruel tyrant roasted his enemies alive in a bronze bull. The particular association of the Minotaur with child sacrifice gets further support from evidence involving rites on ancient Cyprus in the second and first millennia B.C.E. There, Shawn O’Bryhim has argued, bull-masked priests sacrificed children. It is tempting to speculate why bull imagery might play such a prominent role in child sacrifice. Unfortunately, bull iconography is so common in ancient Near Eastern religion that false hypotheses can easily find support. The Scriptures of the Hebrews call god the Bull of Jacob, and in Exodus Aaron has a golden calf made, while Jeroboam enshrines two golden calves in 1 Kings, identified as the gods who led the Israelites out of Egypt. Could these bulls have been images of Yahweh? These narratives, as we have received them, reflect a hostile tradition that accuses the Israelites of apostasy. That may not be how everyone would have seen these events however, which may reflect a tradition of Yahweh worship that involved images of bulls that later scriptures opposed. 
• • From Howl, Alan Ginsberg, 1955: What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
• • From Moloch Malarky: Does Fox News Know Anything About Fox News? Daniel Walker, 2019: Fox News host and ambulatory combover Todd Starnes nattered about “the pagan god Moloch” and the ye old ritual human sacrifice schtick on Monday and the only ones surprised by this were his employers at Fox News, and when “Moloch” starts trending on Twitter that’s as close to an actual Bat Signal as I’m personally ever going to get, so far be it for me to look a gift bull in the mouth. If you’ve never heard of Todd Starnes before, he’s the author of the 2009 book They Popped My Hood and Found Gravy On the Dipstick. That’s not a joke, that’s the real title. He also blames school shootings on Satan. That’s not a joke either, chiefly because it’s not at all funny. Until very very very very recently Starnes had a Fox News radio show, which until very very very very recently featured Rob Jeffress as a guest. And If you’ve never heard of Rob Jeffress, he’s a Baptist preacher who thinks Catholics are Satanists, which is most of all offensive for giving me something in common with Catholics, in that we both hate Rob Jeffress. He’s also on the White House’s Evangelical Advisory Board, which for some reason is a thing that exists. On Monday, Starnes and Jeffress were yucking it up on the radio about their common interest in marrying their sisters in law and converting modern currency into talents of silver…or whatever, I don’t listen to evangelical radio, I have no idea what they talk about. Then Jeffress succumbed to his compulsions and said of Democrats, “the god they worship is the pagan god of the Old Testament Moloch, who allowed for child sacrifice.” Starnes did not actually agree with this statement in so many words, but neither did he question how long his guest had stared directly into the sun that morning, and since that’s pretty much the only normal thing to say at that juncture Fox decided to fire him. I know what you’re thinking, and yeah, I didn’t know you could actually get fired from Fox News either. Starnes also once got fired from Baptist Press for inventing quotes and claiming the Secretary of Education said them, which I assume is how he qualified for the Fox job. Also surprised: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out that people saying conspiratorial religious bullshit is the only commodity Fox News really has, so why was this supposedly bad? “How was he supposed to know this was below their standards?” she quipped on Twitter. 
• • She’s probably just kicking Starnes’ soft, pale underbelly while it happens to be showing, but the truth is this is a very good question. If you ask me, the firing makes Fox News look incredibly out of touch. Talk about shadowy baby-eating cults and devilish pagan gods is EXTREMELY common with the absolute freaks in their audience. If they don’t realize this, you’ve got to wonder what the “news” part of Fox News even does., #Qanon quacks used to burn up the bytes all night with talk of “elite Satan worshippers [sic] who sacrifice children to Moloch.” As a non-elite Satan worshiper I guess I wouldn’t know; the biggest sacrifice I’ve made this month is eating a single Impossible Burger to combat climate change and also to prove that the burger is paradoxically possible. Dailywire editor Josh Hammer beat Jeffress and Starnes to this verbatim Moloch malarky by nearly a month. But Hammer was just nailing down the impossibly named Erick Erickson’s identical comments, while LifeSite was saying it on the exact same day as Starnes’ broadcast. In 2013, serial blackboard abuser Glenn Beck even wrote a fever-ridden novel about “a shadow war waged by an elite cabal of tyrants” led by a “trillionaire” George Soros stand-in. His title: The Eye of Moloch. Pushing this hustle to the masses, Beck declared, “Soon this will be a history book, and then it won’t be so enjoyable.” In 2014, the apologetics site CARM wrote of supposed Moloch worship, “I can’t help but compare today’s abortion massacre to the sacrifice of children by these ancient pagans.” Why, did women have to drive across three states to see Moloch too? The Wanderer, a Catholic newspaper calls Democrats “the Party of Moloch,” which actually sounds like a hell of a rave. Charisma News, the pity fuck of Christian blogs, says the same thing. So does the US Pastor Council. Bill Mitchell, the conspiracy asshole who looks like a deep fake of Benedict Cumberbatch with David Lynch’s hair, regularly raves on Twitter that “Democrats worship Moloch.” And Catholic anti-abortion group Human Life International was flogging this pony as far back as 2007, which in Trump years was roughly the 17th century ago. If the execs at Fox News are not broiling in the juices of baby-eating religious conspiracies 19 hours a day, they’re going to very shortly become the only ones. https://www.satanicbayarea.com/2019/10/07/fox-news-moloch-starnes/ 
• • From Mark Twain Did Not Sacrifice Babies to Moloch, T. Adler, Urban Fictionary, 2019: In 2000, Alex Jones filmed a documentary titled Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, supposedly revealing the suspicious happenings in The Bohemian Club in California. He claimed he had proof that some of the most powerful men in America were part of a secret cabal of Satanists running a global government. These claims are ridiculous, but the Bohemian Club maintains enough secrecy that it is difficult to disprove. The club was founded in in the 1870s, but soon after, wealthy politicians and businessmen took control of it. Nowadays, the Bohemian Club is almost entirely made up of well-connected, wealthy, primarily white, conservative, Christian men. A new member can only be inducted after a vote by a panel and an induction fee affordable only to the wealthy. The club hosts a two-week retreat once a year, called an “encampment,” where members hike, perform plays, and give presentations called “Lakeside Talks.” Members have included Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Mark Twain, and Walter Cronkite. It begins with an opening ceremony called the “Cremation of Care” in front of the camp’s totem, a large cement owl. The Cremation of Care is a play written by one of Bohemian Grove’s founding members, James T. Bowman. More reliable sources describe it as an odd play. Jones claims that members sacrifice an effigy of a child to the Biblical child-eating pagan god named “Moloch,” and take part in orgies, and sex trafficking. Members of the club do in fact, burn an effigy, although not of a child. Instead, they burn an effigy of “dull care,” symbolizing that they are releasing their anxieties about the outside world. Mary Moore, lifetime activist and longtime protester of the Bohemian Club, claimed that while the Satanist, baby-murdering conspiracy theories are “all bullshit,” she fears that politicians and business executives use the club to make political decisions and influence public policy without transparency. It seems unusual that a popular conspiracy theory about Republican politicians is advocated by Alex Jones, a leading proponent of conservative causes. Many people see politics today as a war for the heart of the country. They may be less willing to damage the reputation of their own party through conspiracies and more willing to villainize the opposition. Bohemian Grove conspiracy theories might be dying out, but a contemporary version has taken its place, signaling that paranoia of elitist conspiracy is alive and well, in the QAnon conspiracy, where the names have been updated, the opposition has been villainized, and the message is still the same.

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