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• 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.

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• • • 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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SHOW LINKS

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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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• • ZOMBIE GRRLZ!
  • From Anthropology & Sacrifice, Phillips Stevens Jr, Diversity of Sacrifice, 2016: Perhaps the oldest interpretation of sacrifice is as economic exchange, modeled directly on human society; just as human social relationships are both established and maintained by economic means, so too are human-supernatural relationships, and EB Tylor explained religious sacrifice in terms of economic motives. From classical times to the present, the economic cost of sacrifice has been an issue; it would seem that the wealthy have an edge on supernatural favor. Hesiod had stated that “one must sacrifice according to one’s means,” and this issue leads to discussions on sacred morality and the tolerance of the gods for substitutes and their appreciation of intention over substance, etc. Frazer’s fanciful theory of sacrifice posited that the earliest sacrifices were human beings, specifically priests, because they were closest to the gods; then animals replaced people, and as agriculture spread, plant products became the dominant sacrificial material. These observations were topics of discussion among several of the twentieth-century European scholars. Many supernatural beings are conceptualized as either kin or broadly ancestral to the people, and the most important of all kinship obligations, sharing, may be a primary motive for sacrifice. Perhaps the most common explanation is atonement for some transgression; this explanation is widely applicable, as many supernatural recipients of offerings are regarded as supervisors and monitors of human social behavior. The sacrifice is often something of which the recipient is known to be particularly fond, and sometimes, through the magical principle of similarity, it is meant to link directly to some aspect of the nature of its recipient—ie, a black bull for the god of night or the underworld. The concentration of power at the exact point of sacrifice on the altar is like that experienced by Moses after his personal meeting with God, and around the world people construct shrine objects imbued with power the sole purpose to enhance the power of the altar. Burkert had famously said that sacrifice “is the basic experience of the sacred,” and that experience happens on an altar. 
  • No matter what it is, the fullest meaning of the sacrifice is symboli,  and there is nothing more deeply symbolic than blood. We cannot overstate the universal power and ritual significance of blood as the essence of life. A full appreciation of the cross-cultural meaning of blood is essential for the fullest understanding of sacrifice; blood is often regarded as the property of the divine, whereas flesh is shared among the supplicants Blood is the all-purpose sacrificial liquid, satisfying to all supernatural agencies in all imaginable occasions, and it is readily available to individuals in all situations. This is a good place to confront the gorilla in the room, what jumps to most minds when the word “sacrifice” is heard: The sacrifice of a human being represents the ultimate offering to the supernatural, and the idea of it is very probably universal. It dominated early scholarship. Frazer fostered the assumptions of a wide distribution of human sacrifice in the early world; ethnological research, however, has revealed that, like cannibalism, human sacrifice existed mostly as allegation and was far less common than assumed, [although] much has been made of the Aztec case. The fact of sacrifice has been used by itself as diagnostic of many things, especially as part of a European understanding of “savagery” among “primitive” peoples—but really, it is meaningful only within its broader ritual context. It is always part of something much larger, and mustn’t be separated from that whole. Sacrifice represents the human effort to keep the natural cycle going, sending a rush of life energy into the cosmos. Whatever else it is, sacrifice is always a return of life to its source and the resultant regeneration of that source.
  • From When Abraham Murdered Isaac, Haviv Gur, Times of Israel, 2012: When he first came to believe he had discovered how the Biblical forefather Isaac died, Bible scholar Tzemah Yoreh says he went into mourning. “I literally sat shiva for him, for the forefather I had lost,” said Yoreh, who was then just 21. The Biblical story we have inherited is not the original story, Yoreh believes. Using a variation of a well-known approach to Biblical scholarship, he sees hints of a bloodier version of Isaac’s binding that he finds too convincing to ignore. In the earliest layer of the Biblical text, Yoreh believes, Isaac was not rescued by an angel at the last moment, but was in fact murdered by his father, Abraham, as a sacrifice to God. One eye-opening hint at what he believes is the original story lies in Genesis 22:22. Previously, in verse 8, Abraham and Isaac had walked up the mountain together. But in verse 22, only Abraham returns. That strange contradiction, Yoreh says, may be why a few ancient midrash also assumed Isaac had been killed. In one homily quoted by a revered 11th-century French rabbi and commentator, “Isaac’s ashes are said to be suitable for repentance, just like the ashes of an [animal] sacrifice.” “That’s a very weird midrash,” Yoreh says, “since Isaac is clearly alive in the next chapter. But that’s the way midrash works. It analyzes episodes without larger context. That’s why you can have midrash about Isaac dying, because it doesn’t have to notice that he’s alive in the next chapter.” In verse 12, after staying Abraham’s knife-wielding hand in mid-air, the angel of god says, “I now know you fear god because you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” That phrase, “have not withheld your son,” could indicate Abraham was merely willing to sacrifice his son, OR that he actually did so, Yoreh says. One hint that it may have been the latter is contained in the names for god used in the story. The Biblical text calls the god who instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son “Elohim.” Only when the “angel ofgGod” leaps to Isaac’s rescue does God’s name suddenly change to the four-letter YHWH, a name Jews traditionally do not speak out loud. Elohim commands the sacrifice; YHWH stops it. But it is once again Elohim who approves of Abraham for having “not withheld your son from me.” These sorts of variations, rampant throughout the Bible, have led scholars to conclude that different names for god are used by different editors. Indeed, Isaac is never again mentioned in an Elohim verse. If you only read the parts that use the name Elohim, you don’t have to be a Bible scholar to see the story as one in which Isaac is killed in the sacrifice and disappears completely from the story. “Not that the YHWH portions make much of an effort to bring him back either,” Yoreh notes. Indeed, Isaac seems to fade into the background, with his life story recycled from Abraham’s life. In the earliest Biblical narrative, Yoreh believes Isaac died on the mountain. Far from setting an example in which god intervenes to end human sacrifice, Abraham is revealed as a man who can walk his own son to the altar and even wield the blade himself. 
  • From The Devil & The Jews, Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg, 1943: What would seem to be the earliest instances of the blood libel charge occurs in a story that in 1096, a monk was abducted from a monastery and sold to jews who “crucified him in celebration of the Passover.” However, this report comes from a 13th century account. The first “ritual murder” [myths] had nothing to do with Passover, or indeed with any Jewish festival. Let us listen to a contemporary chronicler describing the fate of the very first boy martyr, William of Norwich, who disappeared in 1144: “The Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter and tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our lord was tortured, and on Long Friday hanged him on a rood in hatred of our lord, and afterwards buried him.” Not a very plausible story, but it was based on the statement of a Jewish convert, one Theobald of Canterbury, who obligingly came forward with the explanation that the Jews were required to sacrifice a Christian child annually at Easter; the choice of place was made, according to him, by a yearly conference of rabbis. His tale evidently did not command much credence at the time, for no Jews were tried or punished for the alleged crime, and indeed, there was no evidence that a murder had been committed. Yet the mere statement of this convert led to the bringing of identical charges in 1168; and similar charges were made at Blois in 1171, at Bury St. Edmonds in 1181, at Saragossa in 1182, and at Winchester in 1192. Theobald’s fable of the Easter sacrifice did not hold up for long, but his story of the annual rabbinical conference enjoyed a much hardier career. It struck a responsive chord in the public fancy, for it spread rapidly through Europe and was often repeated in connection with supposed Jewish crimes of this sort. In time it was expanded to make room for a secret Jewish society whose function it was to kidnap and kill Christian children and distribute the blood to the major Jewish communities, at the bidding of the Council, whose permanent meeting place was ultimately fixed in Spain. All sorts of traitorous criminal acts were laid at the door of this mythical body. 
  • Sixteenth-century sources preserve a quite different plot based on the blood motif. “Nowadays,” runs the statement, “when the Jews, for fear of Christian justice, can no longer sacrifice humans, they have nevertheless found another way of offering up human blood, which they secure from surgeons; when they have put this in a glass vessel, and set it on burning coals, they conjure up by means of it demons, who do their bidding and answer all questions that are put to them, so long as the blood is kept boiling.” This became a typical bit of witch lore, and a woodcut published in 1575 depicts a Jew producing the devil from a vessel of blood obtained from a crucified child’s body. Sacrilegious usages were laid at the door of Jewish sorcerers as well as of heretics at the moment when the medieval heresies made their first open bid for popular support, and still more evidence of the similarity between the “demonic” Jew and the sorcerer/heretic/witch might be offered that in virtually every respect the “demonic” Jew whom we have in this book described was hardly distinguishable in the medieval mind from these Satanic and heretical enemies of Christendom; they are creatures of the devil, with whom they conclude secret pacts and whom they worship with obscene rites; offer sacrifices to demons; conduct secret meetings where they plot foul deeds against Christian society; and practice blasphemous ceremonies; they mock and despise the Christian faith and profane its sacred objects; they often wear a goat’s beard, and at their conventicles disguise themselves with goats’ head masks; their heads are adorned with horns, and their wives trail tails behind them; they suffer from secret ailments and deformities; they are cruel and rapacious; they buy or kidnap children and slaughter them in homage to Satan; they consume human flesh and blood; and they believe that the sacrifice of an innocent life will prolong their own lives.
  • From BLACK RELIGION AND `BLACK MAGIC’: PREJUDICE AND PROJECTION IN IMAGES OF AFRICAN-DERIVED RELIGIONS, Joseph M. Murphy, Journal of Religion, 1990: Writers and filmmakers who have little direct experience of black religions have portrayed them as `black magic’, wild and violent expressions of human malevolence. The very name `voodoo’ in the popular mind is a kind of generic term for `black magic’ and all of us in the field wage a barely successful struggle for our students to see voodoo as religion. Nearly every description of `savage’ communities encountered by Europeans into the nineteenth century included reports of incest, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. I do not mean to say that these things never happen but rather ask why people wish to see these acts as characteristic only of other “kinds” of people? These elements of `voodoography’ are crystallized nearly one hundred years later in the work of English diplomat Spenser St John, who in 1889 devoted over 70 pages of his 390-page portrait of Haiti to the subject of ‘Voodoo Worship and Cannibalism.’ . He writes of the adoration of serpents, and details a story told by a French priest at a dinner party in which the priest attended a ceremony with a sacrifice of a “goat without horns.” This is a human sacrifice, and St John divides the voodoo community into those who are satisfied with only the flesh and blood of animals and those that require the offering of the human “scapegoat.” To corroborate the French priest’s account, St John relies on an anonymous American journalist who also witnessed “hideous practices” and human sacrifice: Terrified, they fled from the scene, alive to tell their account in the New York World. The 1987 film The Believers  represents Voodoo and Santeria as an African cult of human sacrifice secretly permeating New York City, which has just imported the most potent high priest directly from Africa to empower its schemes. “Good” santeros practice what the movie portrays as well-meaning but ineffectual rites of protection. In movies like “Angel Heart,” black magic triumphs, while in films like “The Believers” the struggle must go on; in each case the hero is white and his security and very self-identity are threatened by black religion, black magic, and black identity.
  • From Red Nails, Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales, 1936: Conan glared down at the man on the iron rack. “What the devil are you doing on that thing?” Incoherent sounds issued from behind the gag and Conan tore it away, evoking a bellow of fear from the captive; “Be careful, for Set’s sake!” begged Olmec. “What for?” demanded Conan. “Do you think I care what happens to you? But I’m in a hurry. Where’s Valeria?” “Loose me!” urged Olmec, “I will tell you all! Tascela took her from me. I’ve never been anything but a puppet in Tascela’s hands. It’s worse than you think. Tascela is old—centuries old. She renews her life and her youth by the sacrifice of beautiful young women. That’s one thing that has reduced the clan to its present state. She will draw the essence of Valeria’s life into her own body, and bloom with fresh vigor and beauty.” “Are the doors locked?” asked Conan, thumbing his sword edge. “Aye! But I know a way to get in. Only Tascela and I know, and she thinks me helpless and you slain. Free me and I swear I will help you rescue Valeria. Without my help you cannot win. But when we have slain that witch, you and Valeria shall go free without harm.” Conan stooped and cut the ropes that held the prince, and Olmec rose, shaking his head like a bull and muttering imprecations. Standing shoulder to shoulder the two men presented a formidable picture of primitive power. “Lead on,” demanded Conan. “And keep ahead of me. I don’t trust you any farther than I can throw a bull by the tail.” Olmec hurried down one of the several stairs that wound down from the tower, and when they had descended a few feet, this stair changed into a narrow corridor that wound on for some distance. It ceased at a steep flight of steps leading downward. There Olmec paused. Up from below, muffled, but unmistakable, welled a woman’s scream, edged with fright, fury and shame. And Conan recognized Valeria’s voice!
  • […] Conan rose, blinking blood and dust out of his eyes. He was in the great throne room. A curious black altar stood before the throne-dais. Ranged about it, seven black candles sent up oozing spirals of thick green smoke, disturbingly scented. On the altar lay Valeria, stark naked, her white flesh gleaming in shocking contrast to the glistening ebon stone. She lay at full length, her arms stretched out above her head to their fullest extent. On the ivory throne, Tascela lolled. Bronze bowls of incense rolled their spirals about her; the wisps of smoke curled about her naked limbs. All eyes were glued on the altar and the white figure there; the crash of a thunderbolt could hardly have broken the spell, yet it was only a low cry that shattered the fixity of the scene and brought all whirling about—a low cry, yet one to make the hair stand up stiffly on the scalp. Framed in the door was a man with a tangle of white hair and a matted white beard. His skin was not like that of a normal human: There was a suggestion of scaliness about it, as if the owner had dwelt long under conditions almost antithetical to those under which human life ordinarily thrives. And there was nothing at all human about the eyes that blazed from the tangle of white hair. “Tolkemec!” whispered Tascela, livid, while the others crouched in speechless horror. “No myth, then! You have dwelt for twelve years in darkness among the bones of the dead! I see now why [the others] did not return from the catacombs—and never will return. But why have you waited so long to strike? Were you seeking something in the pits? Some secret weapon you knew was hidden there? And have you found it at last?” Hideous laughter was Tolkemec’s only reply, as he bounded into the room, for in the lean hand of Tolkemec now waved a curious jade-hued wand, on the end of which glowed a knob of crimson shaped like a pomegranate, and a beam of crimson fire lanced from it. Valeria rolled from the altar on the other side and started for the opposite wall on all fours, for hell had burst loose in the throneroom. Tolkemec was coming forward, his weird eyes ablaze, but he hesitated at the gleam of the knife in Conan’s hand. Back and forth they weaved, and the red flames leaped, searing Conan’s flank even as he hurled the knife. Old Tolkemec went down, truly slain at last. Tascela sprang—not toward Conan, but toward the wand where it shimmered like a live thing on the floor. But as she leaped, so did Valeria, with a dagger snatched from a dead man, and the blade impaled the princess between her breasts. Tascela screamed once and fell dead, and Valeria spurned the body with her heel as it fell. “I had to do that much, for my own self-respect!” panted Valeria.
  • From Human Sacrifice and Propaganda in Popular Media: Jason Tatlock, Journal of Popular Culture & Pedagogy, 2019: Human sacrifice has long fascinated audiences and spectators, many of whom have been enticed by morbid curiosity to become peripheral participants. A pro-colonial and pro-Christian view is propagated by Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto, in which the main character, Jaguar Paw, is captured early in the film and taken to a Mayan city where a sacrificial scene occurs that is very reminiscent of the Aztec human sacrifices performed to rejuvenate the sun. Jaguar Paw escapes the sacrificial and blood-thirsty Mayans and is pursued back to his home, where his salvation comes at a beach upon which Europeans are coming ashore and the Mayans are too shocked to continue pursuing their prey. So because of the interference of the Europeans. The film represents Mayan culture as particularly bloodthirsty, with the implication that such brutality was a significant factor leading to the civilization’s end. In The Wicker Man, a police officer named Sergeant Howie has a faith infused with colonial aspirations for the Scottish island to which he is assigned to fall under mainland authority. When Howie is sacrificed by the islanders, he spends his final moments preaching, singing, and praying The victim’s adherence to a high-church-like Christianity can be regarded as strengthening the view that the film purposefully presents parallels between the islanders’ mystical understanding of Howie’s body and blood as a sacrifice on their behalf, and his faith in Jesus’ atoning death”. 2013’s The Purge demonstrates cultural divides and propagandistic aims reflected in popular expressions of human sacrifice, but in ways dissimilar to the other films, a story about maintaining law and order through social hostilities. Sacrificial imagery is steeped in ethnocentric conceptualizations that characterize the “other” as complicit in immoral, irreligious, or brutal, and for imperialistic enterprises, human sacrifice inhabits the category of practices that deserve foreign intervention and validate conquest. From the standpoint of propaganda, human sacrifice can be used to advance political goals, as well as to promote ethnocentric ideals and to further religious agendas.
  •  From Satanic Panic, Jeffrey Victor, 1993: In the spring of 1988, rumors about a dangerous Satanic cult spread throughout the rural areas of western New York, northwestern Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio. The rumor stories made claims about secret ritual meetings, the killing of cats, dogs, and other animals, and the drinking of animal blood, and they predicted the imminent kidnapping and sacrifice of a blond, blue-eyed virgin. The stories focussed upon specific, local circumstances from town to town, yet they carried remarkably similar symbolic content. Many parents held their children home from school out of fear that they might be kidnapped by “‘the cult,” as they called the threat. Absences from elementary school were three to four times greater than average, according to school attendance records. Over one hundred cars showed up at a wooded park, rumored to be a Satanic cult ritual meeting site, where they were stopped by police barricades awaiting them. Some of the cars had weapons in them, such as guns, knives, and clubs. At another location rumored to be a “cult” meeting site, an unused factory warehouse, about $4,000 damage was done to the musical equipment belonging to bands which practiced there and to the interior walls of the building. Several teenagers rumored to be members of the supposed “cult,” perhaps because of their countercultural appearance, were victims of anonymous death threats and other types of telephone harassment. Groups with baseball bats were seen wandering around in the downtown area during the evening hours. 
  • Many of the kidnapping stories take the form of predictions, but others claim that such crimes have already taken place secretly and have been concealed from public knowledge by the police and newspapers. Interestingly, about 40 percent of these kidnapping stories specifically mention blond, blue-eyed children or virgins. Why do these particular kidnapping stories feature a blond, blue-eyed virgin, rather than, for example, a dark-haired, dark-eyed victim, or perhaps a sexually promiscuous girl? The answer lies in the symbolism: In European cultures, the blond virgin has been a symbol of innocence, purity, and rare beauty in folklore stories and in folk ballads. At a deeper level, the blond virgin is a symbol for people’s cherished ideals. Stories about the kidnapping and murder of a blond virgin are metaphors for attacks upon our most cherished traditional values. Such attacks arise only from the opposite of innocence and purity, from that which is most “‘evil.”’ These rumors are parables about evil forces in our society. The rumor metaphor bespeaks this collective complaint: “Our most cherished values are in danger from mysterious forces of evil.” Now it can be understood why the Satanic cult rumors were meaningful and relevant to so many people. Their hidden meaning coveys the complaint that the moral order of our society is being threatened, and we are losing faith in our institutions and authorities to deal with the threat. it seems to me that these stories about Satanism, which circulate in rumors, claims, and allegations, are no trivial matter. I believe that they are “omens” of deep-seated problems in American society. Much like nightmares, they have something important to tell us.
  • From The Church of Satan, Michael Aquino, 2013: Satanists of the Dennis Wheatley type are presumed to have a penchant for Human Sacrifice, so Anton addressed the notion of sacrifice in general and of human sacrifice in particular. At its most elemental level, sacrifice implies the giving up of something precious to oneself in return for some other benefit. Humans being selfish creatures, it’s always been preferable to give something precious to others in order to obtain the expected benefit instead. In the past this may have taken the form of ritual murder, but civilization has succeeded in refining it to the scale of modern international wars with little trouble. And so Anton’s first prescription was simply that one should not destroy an animal or human being to avenge or appease self-generated insecurities. If a sacrifice is deemed necessary for a magical ritual, sacrifice should be a true one involving the magician himself. Less to be thought that he was advocating suicide, anton Houston to point out that a true Satanist, no subconscious hatred toward himself, would have no reason to seek self-destruction. What about the destruction of others, per the law of the Jungle? After all, the Satanic Bible seems to say that Vengeance was not only acceptable but admirable. For the fledgling Satanist, he recommended a ritual exercise in the passing of divine judgment by the symbolic destruction of individuals determined to deserve it. The idea was that the magician, forced to confront a mock reality of his wishes, would become increasingly more objective and attain a truly Divine perspective of judging the conduct of others. Again and again a Satanist begins their magical careers reciting long lists of curse victims but gradually decides they were being rather excessive in their condemnations. Finally they would become extremely discriminating in wishing any harm at all on others, realizing that clashes between human beings occur for many reasons besides unwarranted personal hatred. The most advanced Satanist included almost no curses at all. This is a law of the Jungle in its higher sense, as perhaps Kipling meant to express when he wrote his Jungle Books.
  • From Satanic Temple threatens to sue Netflix over goat god statue, CBC Radio, 2018: The Satanic Temple is threatening legal action against Netflix for the use of a Baphomet statue strikingly similar to theirs in the new series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The Temple’s co-founder and spokesperson Lucien Greaves tweeted Sunday that their monument design is copyrighted and that the show “appropriated” it. The new show, which premiered this month and stars Kiernan Shipka as a young Sabrina the Teenage Witch, has been well-received by audiences and critics so far, beyond this dispute. When a Twitter user suggested that the show’s use of the icon could be considered free publicity, Greaves replied, “Having one’s central icon associated with human sacrifice in an evil patriarchal cult is hardly good exposure and hardly a frivolous complaint. The show’s creators did not utilize a generic Sabbatic goat that is commonly used in many occult circles, such as the image created by Eliphas Levi, but instead created one easily identifiable with  TST’s statue,” Greaves tells Rolling Stone. Given the show’s utilization of the Baphomet statue to represent an evil cannibalistic cult, TST would have denied its use to the show creators, he says. The Satanic Temple has been at the center of high profile legal battles and controversies in the past, such as creating After School Satan Clubs to protest the presence of Evangelical afterschool programs at public schools. The Satanic Temple is not to be confused with the Church of Satan, founded in 1966; the two organizations have publicly feuded and denounced each other. Sources at Netflix declined to comment on their use of the Baphomet image, noting that no official claim has been filed as of this time. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/satanic-temple-suing-netflix-sabrina-statue-design-750868/ 
  • From Rosemary’s Baby: The Satanic Temple and Abortion, Heidi Beedle, Colorado Times Recorder, 2023: While conservative Christians have been quick to label many things “Satanic” or “demonic” — LGBTQ people, furries, rock and roll music, dungeons and dragons — they have consistently accused abortion advocates of working under the influence of the devil. For example, during his run for the Republican nomination for a Colorado congressional seat last year, Tim Reichert came under scrutiny for his past statements comparing abortion to human sacrifice. “Every abortion is a human sacrifice,” Reichert said in a 2021 acceptance speech for an award from Catholic Charities of Denver. “Every abortion feeds the demonic and thereby contributes directly to the demise of the church, the demise of America, and the demise of the West.” During a 2022, presentation at Colorado Christian University, anti-abortion activist Seth Gruber invoked the story Moloch, a Canaanite deity associated in biblical sources with the practice of child sacrifice, during a presentation that also compared transgender people to the Christian heresy of gnosticism. Last Thursday, the Satanic Temple announced the launch of a Satanic Abortion Clinic to provide medical abortion medication through the mail. The conservative response has been predictable: “The fact that the Satanic Temple plans to set up a n abortion clinic in New Mexico speaks volumes about who is really behind the abortion agenda,” Elisa Martinez, founder of New Mexico Alliance for Life, told LifeNews, an anti-abortion news blog. “Their willingness to flaunt the practice of ending innocent human life as a ritualistic sacrifice shows how New Mexico public officials have cooperated with this evil. Former members of TST’s St. Louis congregation note TST’s legal advocacy is not always effective, and others have criticized TST’s fundraising around abortion-related causes, especially in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision. Despite the controversy, TST will continue to engage in advocacy. “All we can really do is affirm who we are and who we aren’t,” says spokesperson Chalice Blythe. “Our actions are a reflection of our deeply held values. Those values do not include things like child sacrifice or anything like that. We understand people’s fears, but that fear and that discomfort cannot stop us from seeking justice.” https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2023/02/rosemarys-baby-the-satanic-temple-and-abortion/51771/ 

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The post Episode 195 – Satanic Sacrifices appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

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• Queenofheartsdesserts.com: I’m a Bay Area born & raised pastry chef who’s been working in bakeries, fine dining, and catering for over 20 years. I attended California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, and have had the privilege of working in some of the Bay’s finest eateries, in both sweet & savory capacities and cuisines of all types. Food has been my passion from a very young age, along with guiding principles of ecological sustainability & social justice – that is why Queen of Hearts is committed to using organic & local ingredients whenever possible, supporting our regional grain economy, turning no one away for lack of funds, and sharing my favorite flavors from around the world.
• From Matthew 26, King James Version: Now on the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the passover? And he said, Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I will keep the passover at thy house with my disciples.  And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover. Now when the evening was come, he sat down with the twelve. And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I? And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me. The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born. Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.
• From Bible Reference, Anonymous, 2002: Why did Judas ask Jesus if he was the traitor? Perhaps he was trying to cover his guilt by joining in with the others. Perhaps he wanted to see if Jesus already knew he was the guilty one. Or this might be a sarcastic or resigned statement of someone who knows he’s caught. In either case, Jesus acknowledges that He knows the truth. John adds details to the story: Jesus gives a morsel of bread to Judas after dipping it in the bowl that He has mentioned. At that moment, Satan enters fully into Judas. Jesus tells him to do what he is going to do quickly. Judas immediately leaves. The other disciples think Jesus has sent him on an errand, not realizing Judas is the betrayer. In the middle of the meal, Jesus picks up a loaf or cake of bread. He blesses it: This might have been the customary prayer of thanks for bread. Next, Jesus breaks the bread, also according to the custom of the day. Jesus then gives a command to eat, noting that the bread is His body. The disciples likely had no idea what Jesus meant by this statement. It would only become clear after His death. The requirements for the Passover meal included drinking four cups of wine: Jesus was using this moment in the Passover meal to introduce something new to the disciples and, through them, to the church that would soon be born. Jesus associates that cup, representing god’s gift to Israel, with his own blood. He commands the disciples to drink it, with that specific command in mind. The Passover meal was observed by nearly every Jewish person as a way of remembering and celebrating god’s rescue of Israel through the blood of the lamb on their doorposts. Jesus’ words have a connection to a powerful moment between god and the people of Israel, when the blood of animal sacrifices was used to seal an agreement between god and the people. The disciples, then, would have grown up knowing that a covenant between God and His people was sealed with the blood of a sacrifice. 
  • From Summary of Theology, Thomas Aquinas, 13th Century: I answer that, The presence of Christ’s true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone, which rests upon Divine authority. It was necessary that the consummation New Law instituted by Christ should contain Christ Himself crucified, not merely in signification or figure, but also in very truth. This belongs to Christ’s love, because he promises us his bodily [company] and does not deprive us of his bodily presence but unites us with himself, saying “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.” Since faith is of things unseen, Christ shows us his [godliness] invisibly, so also in this sacrament He shows us his flesh in an invisible manner. Some men accordingly, not paying heed to these things, have contended that Christ’s body and blood are not in this sacrament except as [a metaphor], but this is to be rejected as heretical. Christ’s body is not in this sacrament in the same way as a body is in a place, but in a special manner which is proper to this sacrament. Hence we say that Christ’s body is upon many altars. And this is done by Divine power in this sacrament; for the whole substance of the bread is changed into the whole substance of Christ’s body, and the whole substance of the wine into the whole substance of Christ’s blood. Hence this is not a natural [change] but, with a name of its own, it can be called “transubstantiation.”
  • From Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church on the body, blood of Christ, Gregory A. Smith, Pew Research, 2019:  Transubstantiation – the idea that during Mass, the bread and wine used for Communion become the body and blood of Jesus Christ – is central to the Catholic faith. But a new Pew Research Center survey finds that most self-described Catholics don’t believe this core teaching. In fact, nearly seven-in-ten Catholics (69%) say they personally believe that during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine used in Communion “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” Just one-third of U.S. Catholics (31%) say they believe that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.” Most Catholics who believe that the bread and wine are symbolic do not know that the church holds that transubstantiation occurs. Overall, 43% of Catholics believe that the bread and wine are symbolic AND that this reflects the position of the church, while one-in-five Catholics (22%) reject the idea of transubstantiation,even though they know it’s the church’s teaching. A small share of Catholics (3%) profess to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist despite not knowing the church’s teaching on transubstantiation. The survey also finds that belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is most common among older Catholics, though majorities in every age group (including 61% of those age 60 and over) believe that the bread and wine are symbols, not the actual body and blood of Christ. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/ 
  • • From The Black Arts, Richard Cavendish, 1967: As early as the second century A.D., St. Irenaeus accused the Gnostic teacher Marcus of perversions of the Mass, pretending to consecrate cups of wine. In 1307 the Order of Knights Templar were tried on charges of worshipping the Devil in the form of a cat, and it was also said that they did not believe in the Eucharist and that the Order’s priests omitted the phrase “’This is my body” from the Mass. Early in the following century it was said that Bohemia was infested with thousands of Luciferianss who abused the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, and took the Devil as their lord. Later descriptions of the witch’s sabbath in confessions tell of the meeting by night, the Devil’s appearance as man, cat, dog or goat, the obscene kiss, the renunciation of Christianity, and the witches also shared with the earlier sects a particular hatred for the Eucharist, which was originally rooted in a denial of the Church’s claim to be the channel between man and God. The words spoken by the priest in the Mass transformed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and in eating the body the worshipper became one with Christ, but heretics believed themselves to be in direct touch with God, without needing the intervention of the Church, the priest and the consecrated host. Disrespect for the Eucharist – expressed, for example, by heretics who said that the host tasted to them like dung – turned in Satanism to positive hatred for the body and blood of the detested Christian Saviour. At Easter they would go to Mass, keep the consecrated hosts in their mouths and spit them out into a cesspool to show their contempt for Christ. There were tales of Masses said with black hosts and black chalices, of mocking screams of ‘Beelzebub!’ at the consecration; the host was triangular or hexagonal, generally black but sometimes blood-red. Hosts were burned and the consecrated wine poured contemptuously on the floor. A small crucifix was brought in at one meeting, hosts were nailed to the figure of Christ and the congregation stabbed at the hosts with knives.
    • From the Devil and the Jews, Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg, 1943: A strange case is that of a converted Jew executed in 1514 or 1515, reported to have confessed stealing an “imprisoned devil” from a priest with which he performed much magic before he finally sold it. He had also gone in for poisoning on a large scale, stole several consecrated hosts, and kidnapped two children. A Jewish surgeon there [supposedly] revealed that several Jews in a town in the south of France had compounded a poison out of Christians’ hearts, spiders, frogs, lizards, human flesh, and sacred hosts, and had distributed the resultant powder to be deposited in wells and streams which supplied Christians with water. This tale, in one form or other, spread on the heels of the plague and was eagerly seized upon by the terror-stricken populace. The Jews, as suppose master magicians, could not but have been suspected of desiring to utilize the wafer in their own infamous sorceries. True, there is no direct charge to this effect but it is implicit in the background of the entire host-desecration complex. “It may well be,” remarks Schudt, after describing several unorthodox uses to which the host was put by Christians, “that the Jews at times intended to misuse such hosts for their base magic,” a suspicion which must have occurred to many more than himself and which occasionally did find a measure of expression. We have already noted the alleged Jewish inclusion of “the body of Jesus Christ” in a poison calculated to spread death over a continent. From Mainz comes another significant piece of evidence: Some time between 1384 and 1387, while Peter of Luxembourg occupied the bishopric, the servants of a rich widow reported that they had heard the sound of a child’s crying coming from a box and upon opening the box had discovered there a toad, and a host bleeding profusely from the toad’s bites. He immediately ordered an investigation, which produced this story: the widow owned a large stock of grain, and to make sure of getting a good price for it she went to a Jew for help. The Jew instructed her to get him a host, which she did on the pretext that she was ill and required the last sacrament. He placed the host and toad in the box, with the promise that this would bring her the profit she desired. The significant feature of the story is the toad, which, as everyone knew, represented the devil. To offer a host to the devil was the blackest sort of black, [albeit] of a peculiarly Christian variety.
  • From COTTON MATHER’S COSMOLOGY AND THE 1692 SALEM WITCH TRIALS, DAVID WAYNE PRICE, University of North London, 2001: The Devil’s sabbath would also include two important sacraments: baptism and the eucharist. For the Puritan clergy, these imitations of Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and the Book of Life were the tangible and devilish counterparts to the Covenant of salvation. In 1694, Massachusetts’ minister Joshua Scotto  identified the second of these counterfeit sacraments, the Devil’s eucharist, describing it as `A Damned Crew of Devils feasting on Red Bread and Wine, in derision of our Lord’s Body and Blood’. Scottow’s disgust for this inversion of the eucharist was well founded in the 1692 Salem witch examinations. Abigail Williams testified against Sarah Cloyce that not only had some forty Salem witches met in the woods near Samuel Parris’s house, but that `Goody Cloyse and Goody Good were their Deacons ‘. In terms reflecting Roman Catholic transubstantiation, another witness to this witch’s meeting stated that the Devil’s priest `administered the sacrament unto them … with Red Bread, and Red Wine like Blood’. With respect to this testimony Gildrie comments, `Among the orthodox, and particularly in the preaching of Samuel Parris, the Salem village pastor, Catholic ritual was a form of witchcraft in any case’.The imitations of the Lord’s Supper and the Book of Life were the tangible and horrible counterparts to the Covenant of salvation so ardently believed in by the Puritans. In the mind of Cotton Mather and the rest of the New England clergy, this was the ultimate expression of sin. Nothing could be more treacherous, for the witch shunned God’s grace and mocked the covenant, In the framework of Puritan theology, it was the equivalent of committing treason.”
  • • From La-Bas, JK Huysman, 1891: At the end of the fifteenth century Satanism had assumed the proportions that you know. One case is not too well known for me to cite here: that of the priest Benedictus who cohabited with a she-devil and consecrated the hosts holding them upside down. For twenty-five years, at Agen, a Satanistic association regularly celebrated black masses and committed murder and polluted three thousand three hundred and twenty hosts! And the Bishop, who was a good and ardent prelate, never dared deny the monstrosities committed in his diocese. These priests, in their baseness, often go so far as to celebrate the mass with great hosts which then they cut through the middle and afterwards glue to a parchment, similarly cloven, and use abominably to satisfy their passions in an act of divine sodomy, you might say. A canon here in Paris keeps white mice in cages, and he takes them along when he travel: He feeds them on consecrated hosts and on pastes impregnated with poisons skilfully dosed. When these unhappy beasts are saturated, he takes them, holds them over a chalice, and with a very sharp instrument he pricks them here and there. The blood flows into the vase and he uses it, in a way which I shall explain in a moment, to strike his enemies with death.
  • The canon rose, and erect, with arms outstretched, vociferated in a ringing voice of hate: “And thou, thou whom, in my quality of priest, I force, whether thou wilt or no, to descend into this host, to incarnate thyself in this bread, Jesus, Artisan of Hoaxes, Bandit of Homage, Robber of Affection, hear! Since the day when thou didst issue from the complaisant bowels of a Virgin, thou hast failed all thine engagements, belied all thy promises. Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, enamoured vassal of Banks! Thou hast seen the weak crushed beneath the press of profit; thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid, paralyzed by famine, and thou hast caused thy Popes to answer by excuses and evasive promises, sacred shyster, huckster god! We would drive deeper the nails into thy hands, press down the crown of thorns upon thy brow, and that we can and will do by violating the quietude of thy body, Profaner of ample vices, Abstractor of stupid purities, cursed Nazarene, do-nothing King, coward God!” “Amen!” trilled the soprano voices of the choir boys. Durtal listened in amazement to this torrent of blasphemies and insults. The foulness of the priest stupefied him. The women fell to the carpet and writhed. The canon made a few passes and the host sailed, tainted and soiled, over the steps and women rushed upon the Eucharist and, grovelling in front of the altar, clawed from the bread while the canon, frothing with rage, was chewing up sacramental wafers, taking them out of his mouth, wiping himself with them, and distributing them to the women, who ground them underfoot, howling, or fell over each other struggling to get violate them. 
  • From Satanic Rituals, Anton LaVey, 1972: History has produced entire sects and monastic orders that fell into iconoclasm. Think about it; you personally may have known of a priest or minister who wasn’t quite what he should have been! The seventeenth century priests who celebrated the Black Mass need not have been intrinsically evil: heretical, most certainly; perverse, definitely; but harmfully evil, probably not. The exploits of La Voisin, which have been recounted in such a sensational manner, if simplified reveal her as a beautician, midwife, lady pharmacist, abortionist, who had a flair for theatrics. Nevertheless, La Voisin gave the Church what it needed: a real honest-to-Satan Black Mass. She put the Black Mass on the map. Depending on individual predilection, those who received inspiration from the likes of La Voisin could either effect a therapeutically valid form of rebellion or fill the ranks of the “Christian Satanists” -miscreants who adopt Christian standards of Satanism. The Black Mass which follows is the version performed by the Society of Luciferians in late nineteenth and early twentieth century France. Obviously taken from prior Black Masses, it also derives from the texts of the Holy Bible, the work of Charles Baudelaire and Huysmans. It is the most consistently Satanic version this author has encountered. While it maintains the degree of blasphemy necessary to make it effective psychodrama, it does not dwell on inversion purely for the sake of blasphemy, but elevates the concepts of Satanism to a noble and rational degree. Perhaps the most potent sentence in the entire mass follows the desecration of the Host: “Vanish into the void of thy empty Heaven, for thou wert never, nor shall thou ever be.” 
  • All implements standard to Satanic ritual are employed: bell, chalice, phallus, sword, etc.  The chalice containing wine or liquor is placed between the altar’s thighs, and on it is a paten holding a round wafer of turnip or of coarse black bread. The chalice and paten should be shrouded with a square black veil. The chalice and paten, on which rests the wafer of turnip or coarse black bread, are uncovered by the celebrant. He takes the paten into both hands, and raises it to about breast level in an attitude of offering, and recites: “Come, O Mighty Lord of Darkness, and look favorably on this sacrifice which we have prepared in thy name. And this we can and will do by violating the quietude of thy body, profaner of the ample vices, abstractor of stupid purities, cursed Nazarene, impotent king, fugitive god! Behold, great Satan, this symbol of the flesh of him who would purge the Earth of pleasure and who, in the name of Christian justice has caused the death of millions. We curse him and defile his name. O Infernal Majesty, condemn him to the Pit, evermore to suffer in perpetual anguish. Bring Thy wrath upon him, O Prince of Darkness, and rend him that he may know the extent of Thy anger. Call forth Thy legions that they may witness what we do in Thy name. Send forth thy messengers to proclaim this deed, and send the Christian minions staggering to their doom. Smite him anew, O Lord of Light, that his angels, cherubim, and seraphim may cower and tremble with fear, prostrating themselves before Thee in respect of Thy power. Send crashing down the gates of Heaven, that the murders of our ancestors may be avenged!” Then he raises the thurible three times to the Baphomet or to the inverted cross and bows again, and the celebrant inserts the wafer into the vagina of the altar.
  • • From Oklahoma Catholics Drop Lawsuit After Satanists Return Wafer, Denver Nicks, Time Magazine, 2014: The Catholic Archbishop of Oklahoma City has dropped a lawsuit against a Satanic group after it agreed to turn over a communion wafer it hoped to use in a “Black Mass” scheduled to take place in September. “I am relieved that we have been able to secure the return of the sacred Host, and that we have prevented its desecration as part of a planned satanic ritual,” Coakley said in a statement issued by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Coakley sued the Satanic group, the Church of Ahriman, on the grounds that it stole the communion wafer, which Catholics hold to be a sacred part of the Mass ritual. “I remain concerned about the dark powers that this satanic worship invites into our community and the spiritual danger that this poses to all who are involved in it, directly or indirectly,” Coakley said in a statement. Adam Daniel, the Satan worshipper set to lead next month’s Black Mass, said fighting the lawsuit wasn’t worth the trouble. “I don’t feel like wasting thousands of dollars over a cookie,” he said. https://time.com/3160504/oklahoma-catholics-satan-wafer/ 
      • From Oklahoma Christians counter Satanic mockery of Virgin Mary, Catholic News Agency, 2018: Another planned black mass and an additional satanic ritual in Oklahoma City is timed to desecrate an image of the Virgin Mary. In reaction, the local Catholic archbishop and Christians from all backgrounds will join in prayer. Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City explained the need for prayer and called on Catholics to join the Unity Prayer Service “in response to this blasphemous event, and the many other acts of hatred and violence happening in our world in recent weeks. I also ask that we pray for the conversion of this man and for all who have not yet come to know the lord of life. As the local government has refused to interfere with this abhorrent blasphemous worship that is being publicly sanctioned in our community, we will reaffirm commitment to protect the religious liberty of Christians and other believers as well,” Archbishop Coakley said. A group called the Church of Ahriman has scheduled a ticketed event at the Oklahoma City Civic Center Music Hall, which is run by the city government. The event involves the attempted corruption of a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary using sulfur, menstrual blood, and the ashes of desecrated and burned pages of the Koran. It involves the consumption of a pig’s heart and the “entrapment” of the Virgin Mary in a ritual triangle, in an attempted parody of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The statue will be smashed. “ “We’re trying to show people how chaotic we are in nature and how chaotic our religion is. It’s all based on chaos,” Adam Daniels, a leader in the group, told the Oklahoma Gazette. Daniels said the abuse of the Virgin Mary statue aims to illustrate black magic and his religion’s teachings. The Black Mass often involves the desecration of the Eucharist, generally by stealing a consecrated host from a Catholic Church and using it in a profane sexual ritual. Daniels said that the event is legal. “We’re not doing anything against the law,” Daniels said. “Against canon law, sure. But the United States’ law? No. We’re not doing anything wrong.” Oklahoma City’s News 9, citing court records, in 2010 reported that Daniels was a registered sex offender. Daniels claimed the Catholic Church was attempting to infringe on his religious liberty by blocking his rituals. “They’re the one who started this fight; I’m just bringing it to them,” he told the Gazette. An official with the Oklahoma City music hall told CNA it has a policy of neutrality. “We do not discriminate against any group based on the content of their message as long as it was not hosting something specifically illegal in nature, or that during the production they were taking part in illegal activities.”
  • From Satanic Bible Anniversary Edition, Michael Aquino, 2019: Once the Church of Satan got started Anton LaVey began to be pestered for a YouKnowWhat despite the fact that he didn’t harbor any particular passions against Catholicism. But there was one Satanic Priest who did: Wayne F. West, a defrocked Catholic priest in Detroit. Wayne’s hatred of Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, approached the pathological, and he was only too happy to take the Catholic High Mass and rework it into a version that left la-Bas’ in the dust. The only mishap was my overenthusiastic use of incendiary flashpowder, which set the living altar on fire, eliciting a yowl from her and a burst of laughter from the assemblage. The purpose of any Black Mass is to purge preconditioned superstitions. Within Western cultures, in which Christianity remains the prevalent religious preconditioning, resistance to and rejection of these chains occasionally requires the Black Mass. Once one has seen his sacred cows trampled upon with impunity, he will never again feel the same fear of them, such as in ”1984,” wherein the magician O’Brien forces his subject Winston Smith to “trample upon the sacred cow” of his love for Julia. Although Winston recognizes that unendurable psychological terror was used on him, he nonetheless finds himself unable to recapture his original illusion of self sacrificial love for her. Julia, put through a similar “Black Mass” incorporating differently-personalized elements of emotional impasse, experiences the same disruption of her illusions. Hence a Black Mass for a Mormon would be quite different from that for a Muslim or Buddhist. The Black Mass principle was brought forward into the “mind-control brainwashing” of Cold War conspiracy theory by John Frankenheimer’s “Manchurian Candidate”, in which a Korean War soldier has been “brainwashed” to obey commands upon seeing the Queen of Diamonds playing card until another officer says, “We’ll see what they can do: 52 red queens and I are telling you it’s over. The links, the beautifully conditioned links, are smashed as of now because we say so. We’re busting up the joint, we’re tearing out all the wires. We’re busting it up so good all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men will never put old Raymond back together again. You don’t work any more. That’s an order. Anybody invites you to a game of solitaire, you tell them sorry, buster, the ball game is over.” It is important to note that a Black Mass in no way seeks to re-indoctrinate its subject with any other belief-system; it is a chain-breaking experience only.

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The post Episode 193 – Desecrating The Host appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• • • • From A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels Davidson, Gustav Davidson, 1967: Abezi-Thibod, meaning “father devoid of counsel.” In early Jewish lore, Abezi-Thibod is another name for Samael, Mastema, and other chief devils. He is a powerful spirit who fought Moses in Egypt, hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and assisted Pharaoh’s magicians. He was drowned in the Red Sea. With Rahab, he shares the princedom over Egypt. In The Testament of Solomon, he is the son of Beelzeboul and the demon of the Red Sea: “descendant of the archangel,” he declares.
        • From Testament of Solomon, Anonymous, 1000 CE(??): And I outwitted these spirits and then I sealed them in with my ring.. And I, Solomon, questioned the spirit which came up from the depth of the Red Sea: “Who art thou, and what calls thee? And what is thy business? For I hear many things about thee.” And the demon answered: “I, O King Solomon, am called Abezithibod. I am a descendant of the archangel. Once as I sat in the first heaven, a fierce spirit and winged, plotting against every spirit under heaven. I was present when Moses went in before Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and I hardened his heart.. I am he who fought against Moses with wonders with signs.” I said therefore to him: “How wast thou found in the Red Sea?” And he answered: “In the exodus of the sons of Israel I hardened the heart of Pharaoh. And I excited his heart and that of his ministers. And I caused them to pursue after the children of Israel. And Pharaoh followed with (me) and all the Egyptians. Then I was present there, and we followed together. And we all came up upon the Red Sea. And it came to pass when the children of Israel had crossed over, the water returned and hid all the host of the Egyptians and all their might. And I remained in the sea, being kept under this pillar.” I, therefore, Solomon, having heard this, adjured the demons not to disobey me, but to remain supporting the pillar. And they both swore, saying: “We will not let go this pillar until the world’s end. But on whatever day this stone fall, then shall be the end of the world.”

• Ahriman: 

• From Encyclopedia Iranica: God’s adversary in the Zoroastrian religion seems to have been an original conception of Zoroaster. But the notion of Ahriman did not remain unchanged through the centuries: In the Gathas, Angra Mainyu, [the angry or destructive spirit] is the direct opposite of [the bounteous spirit] Spənta Mainyu; both spirits are essentially actors in the primeval choice, a great drama dominating the life of man and the destiny of the world. Later, Ahriman serves as the negative counterpart not of the other spirit but of [the creator] god Ormazd. The name Angra Mainyu appears only once in the Gathas, when the “most bounteous of the spirits” declares his absolute antithesis to the “evil one” in all things. These are the twin spirits who made the great choice [between good and evil at the beginning of the universe]. It can be deduced that there must have existed in Iranian belief, before Zoroaster, gods and demons, notably demons of death; there existed also tales, if not myths, of the birth of wonderful twins. Zoroaster propounded belief in one supreme god, yet wanted to explain the existence of evil (a fact of life) as a consequence of free choice. The myth of the Twin Spirits is a model he set for the choice every person is called upon to make.

• It cannot be doubted that both are sons of the creator god, since they are explicitly said to be twins. In the beginning, neither of them was wicked, so there is therefore nothing shocking in Angra Mainyu’s being a son of the true god, and there is no need to resort to the improbable solution that Zoroaster was speaking figuratively. (That Ormazd and Ahriman’s brotherhood was later considered a heresy is a different matter.) Although demons are said to to be the offspring not of Angra Mainyu but of another evil spirit, Akəm Manah (whose names means “evil thinking”). The abode of the wicked in the hereafter is said to be the abode of this same “worst thinking,” not of Angra Mainyu; one would have expected the latter to reign in hell, since he had created death. Ahriman is evil by choice: “It is not,” he says, “that I can not create anything good, but that I will not.” That there existed Ahriman worshippers is attested by Plutarch and in Dēnkard. The former says that Zoroaster taught the Persians to sacrifice“offerings for averting ill, they invoke Hades and darkness; then having mingled it with the blood of a slaughtered wolf, they bear it forth into a sunless place and cast it away.” Iranian influence, especially during and after the exile of the Jews in Babylonia, may very well have helped in bringing about the conception of Satan.  https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ahriman 

• Uzza:

• • • • • From A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels Davidson, Gustav Davidson, 1967: In their hurried exodus from Egypt, and in their encounter with Pharaoh’s horsemen at the Red Sea, the Hebrews were helped by “the angel of God, which went before … and behind them . . . ina pillar of fire and cloud”. Here the identity of the angel of God poses no problem: he was Michael or Metatron, guardian of Israel. However, Michael or Metatron did not fight alone: he had the aid of a swarm of “ministering angels who began hurling arrows, great hailstones, fire, and brimstone. On the enemy side, harrying the Hebrews, was the guardian angel of Egypt, once holy but now corrupt. It appears though that Egypt had more than one guardian angel—four in fact, and that they all showed up, armed to the teeth. Various sources identify them as Uzza, Rahab, Mastema, and Duma. The fate of Rahab we know: he was drowned, along with the Egyptian horsemen. Mastema and Duma went back to Hell, where they had unfinished business to attend to. As for Uzza, some authorities say he was actually Semyaza, grandfather of Og, a leader of the fallen angels, [the Watchers]; Semyaza may be summoned ttby the pronouncement of any of a string of variations on his name—Samiaza, Shemhazai, Amezyarak, Azael, Azaziel, or Uzza. In the Book of Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Mastema is the angel of adversity, it was Mastema who tried to kill Moses and who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but according to the Midrash, Uzza did this. Also in the Midrash, God is reminded that “the angels Uzza and Azael came down from Heaven and were corrupted through cohabiting with the daughters of men. In legend, Uzza is tempted by the maiden Ishtahar to reveal to her the Explicit Name of God. It is said that he now hangs between heaven and earth, head down, and is the constellation Orion.

• Odin: 

• • • • • From The Witch, Ronald Hutton, 2016: There is, however, one very striking form in which a definite element of Norse paganism survived into the early modern period, and that was in ceremonial magic. Just as magic preserved the names of Egyptian deities as powerful spirits, so Scandinavian gods continued to be associated with magical workings, although as devils. It seemed that in the north the Christian tactic of demonizing the divinities of older religions had worked with particular effect: Those divinities certainly remained known throughout the Christian period; as demons, however, they, and especially their leader, Odin, retained a supposedly ‘real’ presence. A late fourteenth-century Norse rune stick invokes Odin as ‘greatest among devils.’ In 1484 a man tried for theft in Stockholm confessed to having “served Odin” for seven years. Nine years later another thief was executed for having dedicated himself in a cemetery to ‘the devil Odin” to get rich, and a text from the late 1530s stated that people who suddenly became mysteriously wealthy were suspected of having made a pact with Odin. Another Swedish case, from 1632, involved advice to find wealth by going to a crossroads at night to make exactly such a pact with Odin. A trial in 1693 said that he came to those who invited him with black servants, dogs and coach horses, the latter having flaming eyes.” From Iceland comes a seventeenth-century book of magic which contains a curse in the names of Lord God the Creator, Christ, Odinn, Thor, Frey, Freya, Satan, Beelzebub and spirits with unknown names: the powers of heaven and hell are thus indiscriminately enlisted. All this provides a spectacular example of how ancient gods could be fully assimilated into Christian mythology, though they do not seem to feature in the witch trials themselves.

• Lucifer: 

• • • • From KJV, Isaiah 14: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. 15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit. 16 They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms; 17 That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners? 18 All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house. 19 But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcase trodden under feet.”

• From Against Marcion, Tertullian, 208 BCE: At any rate, if there is a God of this world, He blinds the heart of the unbelievers of this world, because they have not of their own accord recognised His Christ, who ought to be understood from His Scriptures. Content with my advantage, I can willingly refrain from noticing to any greater length this point of ambiguous punctuation, so as not to give my adversary any advantage, indeed, I might have wholly omitted the discussion. A simpler answer I shall find ready to hand in interpreting the god of this world of the devil, who once said, as the prophet describes him: I will be like the Most High; I will exalt my throne in the clouds. The whole superstition, indeed, of this world has got into his hands, so that he blinds effectually the hearts of unbelievers, and of none more than the apostate Marcion’s. Undoubtedly he who has raised up children of disobedience against the Creator Himself ever since he took possession of that  air of His; even as the prophet makes him say: I will set my throne above the stars;… I will go up above the clouds; I will be like the Most High. This must mean the devil, whom in another passage (since such will they there have the apostle’s meaning to be) we shall recognize in the appellation the god of this world. For he has filled the whole world with the lying pretence of his own divinity.

• From Commentary On Ezekiel, Origen, 238 CE…ish: Adam, you see, was in Paradise, but the serpent saw to it that he was cast out. The serpent is the Enemy who is opposed to the truth. He was not created that way from the beginning; just as Adam and Eve did not sin immediately after they were made, so also the serpent at one time was not a serpent—when he was abiding in the Paradise of delights. For the prophet says, “Lucifer, who used to rise early, has fallen from heaven; he has been dashed to pieces upon the ground.” Jesus says, “I saw Satan falling from heaven like lightning.” In what respect does it differ to speak of lightning and Lucifer “careening from heaven?” What is relevant in this context is the full agreement regarding the falling. Through the freedom of the will some have ascended to the heights of goodness, while others have plunged into the depths of wickedness. But you, O mortal, why do you not wish to be abandoned to your free will? Why can you scarcely bear to strive, to labor, to exert yourself, and by means of good works to become yourself the cause of your own salvation? Do you not wish righteousness, wisdom, and chastity to become your work? Do you not wish fortitude and the other virtues to be your work?

• Beelzebub: 

• From the KJV, 2 Kings 1: Ahaziah [King of Irsael] was sick, and he sent messengers, and said unto them, Go, inquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron [city of the Philistines] whether I shall recover. But the angel of the lord said to Elijah [the prophet], Arise, go up to meet the messengers and say unto them, Is it not because there is not a god in Israel, that you go to enquire of Baalzebub?

•  From Matthew 12: Then was brought unto [Jesus] one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, and all the people were amazed. But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow casts out devils by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.” And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:  And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand? And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?” 

• From the Jewish Encyclopedia, 1901: The name “Beelzebub,” written also “Beelzebul,” which occurs nowhere else in Jewish literature, is a variant form of “Baal Zebub,” the god of Eḳron, whose oracle King Ahaziah consulted during his illness, provoking thereby the wrath of God. Plagues being often ascribed to the influence of flies, the god who dispelled flies  probably retained his popularity long after he had ceased to be an object of worship. In fact, the fly was regarded by the Jews in particular as more or less impure and demonic. with reference to “the flies of death” in Ecclesiastes. The devil in German folk-lore also appears in the shape of a fly Geiger hinks that Baal Zebub, in his capacity as god of the hated Philistines, became the representative of the heathen power and consequently the arch-enemy Satan, the foe par excellence, and therefore the name “Baal Debaba” (“debaba” being the Aramaic form corresponding to Hebrew “Zebub”) acquired the meaning of “hostility,” the verb  with the sense of “hostile action” being derived from it. But neither this opinion nor a similar one expressed by Storr, and revived in Riehm  seems acceptable, as “Beel Debaba” is the ordinary Aramean word for “calumniator.”

• Mastema:

• From Jubilees: And they made for themselves molten images, and they worshipped each the idol, the molten image which they had made for themselves, and they began to make graven images and unclean simulacra, and malignant spirits assisted and seduced (them) into committing transgression and uncleanness, and the prince Mastéma exerted himself to do all this, and he sent forth other spirits, those which were put under his hand, to do all manner of wrong and sin, and all manner of trans- gression, to corrupt and destroy, and to shed blood upon the earth. And the prince of Mastéma sent ravens and birds to devour the seed which was sown in the land, in order to destroy the land, and rob the children of men of their labours. Before they could plough in the seed, the ravens picked (it) from the surface of the ground. And on the fourteenth day and on the fifteenth and on the sixteenth and on the seven- teenth and on the eighteenth the prince of the Mastéma was bound and imprisoned behind the children of Israel, that he might not accuse them.

• From Notes on Jubilees, RH Charles, 1902: Over against the angelic kingdom stands a demonic or satanic kingdom governed by “ the prince of the Mastéma,” where Mastema is in derivation and meaning the equivalent of Satan. His demons are the spirits which went forth from the bodies of the [giants], slain children of the Watchers and the daughters of  men. By means of these demons the prince of the satans is able to compass his evils, the seduction and destruction of men. Satan and Mastema represent all manner of disease. In Ethiopic texts the name is wrongly given as “Prince Mastema,” but “Prince of Mastema” is correct. Like the Chronicler, the author of Jubilees takes offence at the frequent mention of men being tempted or slain by god in Genesis and Exodus, so he represents the temptation of Abraham to offer Isaac as due to Mastéma ,and the attempt on Moses’s life as made by the same evil agent, instead of by god; likewise the hardening of the hearts of the Egyptians and the slaying of the first born he ascribes to Mastéma and his angels. 

• From Angels and Demons in the Book of Jubilees, Jacques Van Ruiten, University of Groningen, 2007: Mastema is possibly not a demon himself. He seems to be a bad angel. It is impossible, however, that he be one of the Watchers, since they are tied up in the depths of the earth by the good angels, awaiting their judgment. The context o implies that Mastema is identified with Satan. The demons do everything Mastema tells them, so that he is able to exercise the authority of his will among mankind; in Jubilees 49, for example, demons seem to assist Mastema in killing the firstborn of Egypt. When Noah’s sons complain about the attacks of the demons on their children, God grants Noah’s intercession by commanding the good angels to bind all demons. Mastema protests against this plan: “Lord, creator, leave some of them for me, because if none of them is left I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among mankind. For they are meant for the purpose of destruction and misleading, because the evil of mankind is great.” God grants Mastema’s protest, and leaves ten percent of the evil spirits; this implies that Mastema has a function in the divine order, and God seems to approve. 

• In the Bible, there is no demonology: In Genesis, one cannot read anything about evil spirits. Demons sees to be part of the wider influence of material originating from Enoch. Why did the author of Jubilees think it appropriate to incorporate the myth of the demons in his rewriting of Genesis? The evil spirits play a part in the rewritten narrative of the period between the flood and the story of Abraham. The shedding and consumption of blood is an important characteristic of the demons in Jubilees, just as the shedding and eating of blood is an important theme in Genesis. Moreover, in this period, the earth is repopulated after the flood and divided among the three sons of Noah. Different family lines emerge in different nations, and tensions between the different nations announce themselves, for example, the curse of Canaan. Jubilees seems to take up several elements of Genesis and relate them to the demons, and the development of the nations is under the demons’ control. The incorporation of the demons shows that the author of Jubilees brought the passages on the division of the earth and the separation of the nations from the chosen people into association with other biblical passages,

• Asmodeus

• • • • From the Book of Tobit: It came to pass the same day that Sara was also reproached by her father’s maids, because that she had been married to seven husbands, whom Asmodeus the evil spirit had killed before they had lain with her. Dost thou not know, said they, that thou hast strangled thine husbands? thou hast had already seven husbands, neither wast thou named after any of them. Let us never see of thee either son or daughter. When she heard these things she was very sorrowful, so that she thought to have strangled herself; and she said, I am the only daughter of my father, and if I do this, it shall be a reproach unto him, and I shall bring his old age with sorrow unto the grave. Then she prayed toward the window, and the prayers were heard before the majesty of the great god, and the angel Raphael was sent to give Sara to Tobias the son of Tobit and to bind Asmodeus, because she belonged to Tobias.

• From THE FIGURE OF THE DEMON IN THE BOOK OF TOBIT, Ida Fröhlich Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 2016: Tobiah is familiar with Sarah’s story, “that she has already been given in marriage seven times, and each man has died in the bridal chamber” being killed by a demon. Also he knows the demon does not harm Sarah “because he loves her.”. Raphael repeats emphatically that Tobiah should not be afraid, “for Sarah was destined for him before the world existed, and it is Tobiah who will rescue her, and Asmodeus fled to Egypt, a land distant from Media. Nothing is told here about the demon’s nature, his origin, and habitat, and there is no information about his relation to Sarah. Some sources report that the demon gets divorced from his victim by the angel Raphael. In virtue of the remark “because he loves her,” Ego thinks that both concepts are linked to the idea that Asmodeus is in love with Sarah; she labels the demon Asmodeus as an incubus, a demon who desires sexual relationship with his victim, while Sarah represents the type of the killer-wife who means a danger for her husband. Any sexual contact with such a wife can prove deadly. Worse still: a killer wife is viewed as being directly responsible for the death of her husbands . The killer wife is an international folk motif, known also as the narrative motif in catalogues of international folklore as “The Monster in the Bridal Chamber”. However, the enigmatic comment “because he loves her: does not necessarily refer to sexual desire between the demon and the girl: The Greek verb means “to like, be fond of, cherish” and  has a multiple meaning, including (1) human love for human object (including sexual relation), (2) appetite for food, drink for object, food, etc., and (3) love for God. Group two includes a very special meaning “to be mindful of, to attend to, to care about”.

• Belial:

• • • From Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906: Belial is a term occurring often in the Old Testament and applied, as would seem from the context to anyone opposing the established authority. The Talmud regards it as a compound word, made up of “beli” and “‘ol” (without a yoke). Gesenius finds the derivation in “beli” and “yo’il” (without advantage; i.e., worthless). Ibn Ezra contents himself with the remark that “Belial” is a noun, and quotes the opinion of someone else that it is a verb with a precative force, “May he have no rising.” Cheyne (“Expository Times,” 1897, pp. 423 et seq.) seeks to identify Belial with the Babylonian goddess Belili; Hebrew writers, according to this view, took up “Belili” and scornfully converted it into “Belial” in order to suggest “worthlessness.” Hommel agrees with the equation Belial = Belili, but argues that the Babylonians borrowed from the western Semites and not vice versa. In the apocalyptic literature where all angelologic and demonologic lore was faithfully preserved, Belial held a very prominent position, being identified altogether with Satan. The uncircumcised heathen are “the sons of Belial,” and in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Belial is the archfiend from whom emanate the seven spirits of seduction that enter man at his birth . He will, like Azazel in Enoch, be opposed and bound by the Messiah. In the Ascension, Belial is identified with Samael and called “the angel of lawlessness”—”the ruler of this world, whose name is Matanbuchus.” In Sibyllines, which partly is of Christian origin, Belial descends from heaven as Antichrist and appears as Nero, and Belial is the seducer who, as the pseudo Messiah, will appear among the Samaritans, leading many into error by his miraculous powers, .
    • From SOME PHILOLOGICAL NOTES ON THE SONS OF BELIAL, ANDRÉS PIQUER OTERO, University of Madrid, 2011: Though the meaning of the word seems more or less clear as an attribute which reflects impiety or some other sort of generic negative quality, an exact explanation and etymology have baffled experts and given rise to a considerable speculation. “Belial” appears 27 times in the Hebrew Bible. All in all, the word, either singly or in the nominal construction detailed above, defines a negative concept or quality, though its interpretation —and hence its translation, both in ancient versions and in modern works— may differ. A small but remarkable number of cases  chooses to render the word as oppression or oppressor, but the general definition “badness” is often given. “Death” would be, at first sight, closer to the Hebrew term. The tendency to personification is well attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where Belial is clearly presented as a personal negative entity in a large number of instances, leader of the forces of darkness agains the Sons of Light. There are also references to the evil spirits of Belial, which are the source of humans’ sinful actions. These ideas are remarkable given the continuity they establish with the Greek Pseudoepigrapha, especially the relationship between Belial and his spirits and the evil or sinful disposition among humans. There is a continuity between some of the Dead Sea Scrolls referencing “the traps of Belial.” It is then between two main lines of interpretation, either a common noun which creates a negative attribution or a supernatural being associated with evil and hence negative behavior, that one has to attempt the placement of a translation. 

• • • Sammael: 
      • From THE DEVIL IN LEGEND AND LITERATURE ALLEN H. GODBEY, 1931: In the case of Sammael, Rudwin contents himself with a bare reference to a very late Jewish tangling of Sammael with Lilith, and his being chief of the fallen angels, and never replaced by Satan. An Assyriologist must come to the rescue, incidentally asking why he writes Samael instead of Sammael. Sammael is well known in cuneiform lore, thousands of years before late Judaism has made of the facts. Sammael is Sammu-ilu, “divine plant”: wormwood. Exhilarating in small quantities, its deadly absynthian powers made it an ordeal-plant where evidence was insufficient. Old Babylonian reliefs show an accused person led before a god or chief priest who holds out the deadly cup—Here the Samniu-ilu is resorted to by the accuser or prosecutor: “the satan.” The rabbinical lore that makes Sammael an angel of Death, an angel of the Lord, killing with a drop of wormwood when the man’s time is come, is fundamentally correct. 
      • From Lilith and Eve, Wives of Adam, Marlene E Mondriaan, Old Testament Essays, 2005: Rabbinic legend refers to the longhaired, winged Lilith as queen of the demons. She was one of Sammael’s 18 wives, and from this communion the demons came. These were responsible for illnesses and any ailment that caused suffering. With her wild and passionate nature, Lilith decided to abandon Sammael and join Adam, who insisted that she obey him. Lilith refused. Certain aspects of this legend correspond with that recorded in the Alphabet of Ben Sira. Lilith was generally regarded as grandmother of the devil or the devil herself, as well as progenitor of witches and witchcraft. Talmudic tradition denotes Lilith as daughter of Ahriman. Sammael or Satan was a created being, the personification of evil, created to test man’s moral strength. He was the supreme ruler of demons, evil spirits and fallen angels. Lilith, Sammael and Satan are the most important demons. Ashmodai, also associated with Sammael, and at times with the serpent of the Garden of Eden, commanded Lilith. As consort of Satan and mother of the demons, Lilith was regarded as a symbol of sensuality and sexual seduction.

• Mephistopheles

• From Faust: A Commentary, Denton Snider, 1886: Much discussion has been spent itself over the derivation of the word Mephistopheles, which seems a corrupted Greek compound. The Greek particle of negation (Me) and the Greek word for love (Philos) seem to be suggested by the first and last terms, but the middle term is more doubtful. Three meanings may here be noticed: 1) Not loving light? 2) Not loving Faust, or Phosto, the old form of the name being “Me-Phosto-Pheles”, and 3) Allied to “Mephitic” the term which designates poisonouv vapors arising from the earth in certain places–pools, caverns, springs–destructive of human life.

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The post Episode 189 – Names of the Devil III appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

SHOW LINKS

• From Genesis 2-3, King James Version: And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree; the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And the Lord God commanded, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. tNow the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid. And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, The woman whom thou gavest me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. Unto the woman he said, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. Unto Adam he said, In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. And the Lord God said, man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and live forever. So he drove out the man, and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

• The Bible and the ancient Near East, Gordon & rendsburg, revised 1998 Ed: Man is intelligent because he ate magic fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, gaining knowledge that up to that time had been a monopoly of divinity. It is interesting to note that the knowledge imparted by the fruit of this tree is the “knowledge of good and evil,” a much misunderstood phrase. The antonyms “good and evil” represent “everything.” The same expression in inverted order occurs in Egyptian, where “evil-good” means everything, and from Greek literature we may cite the words of Telemachus, “I know all things, the good and the evil”. The only reason that readers of the Bible have failed to grasp the proper understanding of “the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil” is that the traditional interpretation is so deeply entrenched. Thus man obtained universal knowledge and to that extent shares with god a divine prerogative. Mankind was driven out of paradise because God saw that man could not be trusted to obey His will and to refrain from eating the fruit of another tree in the Garden of Eden that would give man immortality. God decided that man should not obtain immortality lest he become like the gods. Accordingly, if we examine the story in Genesis objectively, we see that, while many elements go into making up the whole picture, it is not so much an account of the “Fall of Man” but rather of the rise of man halfway to divinity. He obtained one of the two prerogatives or characteristics of the gods: intelligence; but he was checked by God from obtaining immortality, which would have made him quite divine. 

• From The Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Knowledge, Nathan French: A range of commentators suggest that the primary interpretation should be toward a contextualized meaning of “beneficial” and the “harmful.” I will demonstrate that the principle of divine retribution, in relation to ‘some’ experiences of ‘good and bad/evil,’ assumes the divine agency of reward and punishment through blessing and cursing. Additionally, it will be shown that these texts reveal an interplay between human and divine retribution as indication of divinely sanctioned retribution through ‘blessing and cursing.’ Thus, the words that generally mean “knowledge of good and evil” in their target languages often appear within these literary contexts signifying the whole of the retributive process, from discrimination to response, the fruit of the knowledge of reward & punishment. It is the knowledge for administering reward and punishment that empowers humans to become judges with ultimate power, like Yahweh himself. The divine knowledge is forbidden since it is ultimate power for retribution. In this way, Yahweh’s reward and punishment serve as his tools for establishing a particular political and social order, a body politic. Knowledge of good and evil represents the advancement from childlike innocence to moral decision.

• From Loss of Immortality, Konrad Schmid, University of Teubingen, 2008: Especially within the Christian tradition, there is a widespread notion that the first human beings were created to be immortal, making physical death the bitter consequence of human sin. However, there are also some newer approaches that see death as a natural part of creation, while death only becomes a frightening and threatening element under the influence of sin. At first glance, the traditional notion of an original immortality which was lost after the fall would fit perfectly into the Paradise story: This would be just another element contrasting the situations before the fall and after. In addition, God’s threat “you shall surely die” would be narratively fulfilled. Humankind, after its fall, has to die. But upon further review, there are far too many problems for such a thesis. First, Gen 2:7 states: “YHWH God formed man from the dust of the ground.” “Dust” in the Hebrew Bible functions clearly as a metaphor for transience, for being mortal. Secondly, in the punishment sentences in Gen 3:14-19, there is only one instance where the topic of death is brought up. This verse does not claim that humankind from now on has to die in contrast to the situation before. Death is not mentioned among the elements of punishment themselves. In Gen 3:22 God says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of lif, and eat, and live forever. “‘ This sentence apparently does not reckon with the possibility that the human beings could again become immortal after having lost their original immortality a short while earlier. Rather, the prohibition of the tree of life is now mandatory, because after the humans have gained knowledge, immortality is the main element which still very clearly distinguishes God and humans.

• The prevalent Christian interpretation which sees the primitive status of humankind as immortals is the result of an apocalyptic perspective on the paradise story which was historically alien to it. Genesis 3 is probably one of the most non-eschatological texts of the Bible, as is evident especially from its final verse: “[The Lord God] drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.” The angels with their sword stand for the conviction that paradise is lost forever. The Paradise story tries to explain how the present conditions of human life outside the paradise came about. lt is not interested in painting out  a model for eschatological expectations. The common Christian interpretation has thoroughly transformed this, as can be seen for example from a famous German hymn by Nicolaus Hermann which ends with the words: “Today, Christ unlocks the door to the beautiful paradise, the cherub no longer stands in front of it.” But in Genesis, there is no way back, never ever. The Bible obviously sees no problems in determining human life – as it was designed by the creator – as substantially limited. Genesis 2-3 seems to present the wish to become immortal as a real wish only for fallen humanity. Immortality as such does not seem to be theologically important.

• From Adam & Eve & The Serpent, Elaine Pagels: In their arguments from Scripture, Jewish teachers often avoided speaking directly about sexual practices but engaged in heated discussions about Adam, Eve, and the serpent, and in this metaphorical way revealed what they thought about sexuality and about human nature in general. The Book of Jubilees, for example, written about 150 years before Jesus’ birth by a Palestinian Jew, retells the story of Adam and Eve to prove, among other things, that Jewish customs concerning childbirth and nakedness were not arbitrary or trivial but actually built into human nature from the beginning. As this author tells it, Adam entered Eden during the first week of creation, but Eve entered the garden only during the second week; this explains why a woman who gives birth to a male child remains ritually impure for one week, while she who bears a female remains impure for two weeks. The author goes on to recall that God made garments for Adam and Eve, and clothed them before expelling them from Paradise; this shows that Jews must “cover their shame, and not go naked, as the Gentiles do,” in public places like the baths and the gymnasia. Throughout subsequent generations, what Jews and Christians read into the creation accounts of Genesis came, for better and worse, to shape what later came to be called tradition. Meanwhile certain radical gnostics, railed against marriage and procreation and against the God who had created such impurities. This radical teacher dared to tell the story of Paradise from the serpent’s point of view, and depicted the serpent as a teacher of divine wisdom: ‘For the serpent was wiser than any of the animals that were in Paradise. . . . But the creator cursed the serpent, and called him devil. And he said, “Behold, Adam has become like one of us, knowing evil and good.’ What kind of God is this? First, he envied Adam that he should eat from the tree of knowledge. . . . And secondly he said, ‘Adam, where are you?’ So God does not have foreknowledge, since he did not know this from the beginning. And afterwards, he said, ‘Let us cast him [out] of this place lest he eat of the tree of life and live forever.’ Surely he has shown himself to be a malicious envier. And what kind of God is this? Great is the blindness of those who read, and they did not know it.’” What church leader would not bridle at a critic who turned the Genesis account upside down?

• From Justin Martyr, Dialogues, Second Century: Then what is next said in the Psalm —’For trouble is near, for there is none to help me. Many calves have compassed me; fat bulls have beset me round. All my bones are poured out and dispersed like water,’— was likewise a prediction of the events which happened to Christ. For on that night when some of your [Roman] nation, who had been sent by the Pharisees and Scribes, and teachers, came upon Him from the Mount of Olives, surrounded Him. And the expression, ‘Fat bulls have beset me round,’ He spoke beforehand of those who acted similarly to the calves, when He was led before your teachers. And the expression, ‘For there is none to help,’ is also indicative of what took place. For there was not even a single man to assist Him as an innocent person. ‘They opened their mouth upon me like a roaring lion,’ designates him who was then king of the Jews, and was called Herod, a successor of the Herod who, when Christ was born, slew all the infants in Bethlehem born about the same time, because he imagined that among them He would assuredly be of whom the Magi from Arabia had spoken; Or He meant the devil by the lion roaring against Hi,: whom Moses calls the serpent, but in Job and Zechariah he is called Satan, and by Jesus is addressed as devil, showing that a compounded name was acquired by him from the deeds which he performed. For ‘Sata’ in the Jewish and Syrian tongue means apostate; and ‘Nas’ is the word from which he is called by interpretation the serpent. We may perceive that the Father wished His Son really to undergo such sufferings for our sakes, and may not say that He, being the Son of God, did not feel what was happening to Him and inflicted on Him. 

• From How the Serpent Became Satan, Shawna Dolansky, Biblical Archaeology Society, 2016: Introduced as “the most clever of all of the beasts of the field that YHWH God had made,” the serpent in the Garden of Eden is portrayed as just that: a serpent. Satan does not make an appearance in Genesis for the simple reason that when the story was written, the concept of the devil had not yet been invented. Explaining the serpent in the Garden of Eden as Satan would have been as foreign a concept to the ancient authors of the text as referring to Ezekiel’s vision as a UFO. In fact, while the word satan appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, it is never a proper name; since there is no devil in ancient Israel’s worldview, there can’t yet have been a proper name for such a creature. After the canon of the Hebrew Bible closed beliefs in angels, demons and a final apocalyptic battle arose in a divided and turbulent Jewish community. In light of this impending end, many turned to a renewed understanding of the beginning, and the Garden of Eden was re-read—and re-written—to reflect the changing ideas of a changed world. Satan became the proper name of the devil, a supernatural power now seen to oppose God as the leader of demons and the forces of evil; and the serpent in the Garden of Eden came to be identified with him. In 1 Enoch, the “angel” who “led Eve astray” and “showed the weapons of death to the children of men” was called Gadriel, not Satan. Around the same time, the Wisdom of Solomon taught that “through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who are on his side suffer it.” Though this may very well be the earliest reference to Eden’s serpent as the devil, in neither text, nor in any document we have until after the New Testament, is satan clearly understood as the serpent.

• Although the author of Revelation describes Satan as “the ancient serpent”, there is no clear link anywhere in the Bible between Satan and the serpent in the garden. The ancient Near Eastern combat myth motif, exemplified in the battle between Marduk and Tiamat, typically depicted the bad guy as a serpent. The characterization of Leviathan in Isaiah reflects such myths nicely: “On that day YHWH will punish With his hard and big and strong sword Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisted serpent, And he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.: So the reference in Revelation to Satan as “the ancient serpent” probably reflects mythical monsters like Leviathan rather than the creature in Eden. In the New Testament, Satan and his demons have the power to enter and possess people; this is what is said to have happened to Judas. When Paul re-tells the story of Adam and Eve, he places the blame on the humans and not on fallen angels or on the serpent or Satan; still, the conflation begged to be made, and it will seem natural for later Christian authors—Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus and Augustine, for example—to assume Satan’s association with Eden’s snake. Most famously, in the 17th century, John Milton elaborates Satan’s role in the Garden poetically, in great detail in Paradise Lost. But this connection is still not forged anywhere in the Bible.

• • From Commentary on the Bible, Matthew Henry, 1706: It is certain it was the devil that beguiled Eve. The devil and Satan is the old serpent, a malignant spirit, by creation an angel of light and an immediate attendant upon God’s throne, but by sin become an apostate from his first state and a rebel against God’s crown and dignity. Observe here: He does not discover his design at first, but puts a question which seemed innocent: “I hear a piece of news, pray is it true? has God forbidden you to eat of this tree?” Thus he would begin a discourse, and draw Eve into a parley. Those that would be safe have need to be suspicious, and shy of talking with the tempter. He quotes the command fallaciously, as if it were a prohibition, not only of that tree, but of all. God had said, Of every tree you may eat, except one. He, by aggravating the exception, endeavours to invalidate the concession: Hath God said, You shall not eat of every tree? The divine law cannot be reproached unless it be first misrepresented. He seems to speak it tauntingly, upbraiding the woman with her shyness of meddling with that tree; as if he had said, “You are so nice and cautious, and so very precise, because God has said, ‘You shall not eat.’ The devil, as he is a liar, so he is a scoffer, from the beginning: and the scoffers of the last days are his children. That which he aimed at in the first onset was to take off her sense of the obligation of the command. “Surely you are mistaken, it cannot be that God should tie you out from this tree; he would not do so unreasonable a thing.” See here, That it is the subtlety of Satan to blemish the reputation of the divine law as uncertain or unreasonable, and so to draw people to sin; and that it is therefore our wisdom to keep up a firm belief of, and a high respect for, the command of God. In answer to this question the woman gives him a plain and full account of the law they were under. It was her weakness to enter into discourse with the serpent. She might have perceived by his question that he had no good design.. But her curiosity, and perhaps her surprise, to hear a serpent speak, led her into further talk with him. Note, It is a dangerous thing to treat with a temptation, which ought at first to be rejected with disdain and abhorrence. The garrison that sounds a parley is not far from being surrendered. “You shall not die,” he says, so the word is, in direct contradiction to what God had said. Thus Satan endeavours to shake that which he cannot overthrow.
  • From the Book of Adam & Eve, Anonymous, Sixth Century: Then Adam said unto God, “Lord, Thou didst create us, and make us [fit] to be in the garden; and before I transgressed, Thou madest all beasts come to me, that I should name them. Thy grace was then on me; and I named every one according to Thy mind; and Thou madest them all subject unto me. But now, Lord God, that I have transgressed Thy commandment, all beasts will rise against me and will devour me, and Eve Thy handmaid; and will cut off our life from the face of the earth. I therefore beseech Thee, God, that, since Thou hast made us come out of the garden, and hast made us be in a strange land, Thou wilt not let the beasts hurt us.” When the Lord heard these words from Adam, He had pity on him, and felt that he had truly said that the beasts [of the field] would rise and devour him and Eve, because He, the Lord, was angry with them [two] on account of their transgression. Then God commanded the beasts, and the birds, and all that moves upon the earth, to come to Adam and to be familiar with him,† and not to trouble him and Eve; nor yet any of the good and righteous among their posterity. Then the beasts did obeisance to Adam, according to the commandment of God; except the serpent, against which God was wroth. It did not come to Adam. Then Adam and Eve came out at the mouth of the cave, and went towards the garden. But as they drew near to it, before the western gate, from which Satan came when he deceived Adam and Eve, they found the serpent that became Satan coming at the gate. And whereas aforetime [the serpent] was the most exalted of all beasts, now it was changed and become slippery, and the meanest of them all, and it crept on its breast and went on its belly. 

• When the accursed serpent saw Adam and Eve, it swelled its head, stood on its tail, and with eyes blood-red, did as if it would kill them. It made straight for Eve, and ran after her; while Adam standing by, wept because he had no stick in his hand wherewith to smite the serpent, and knew not how to put to death. But with a heart burning for Eve, Adam approached the serpent, and held it by the tail; when it turned towards him and said unto him:– “Adam, because of thee and of Eve, I am slippery, and go upon my belly.” Then by reason of its great strength, it threw down Adam and Eve and pressed upon them, as if it would kill them. But God sent an angel who threw the serpent away from them, and raised them up. Then the Word of God came to the serpent, and said unto it, “In the first instance I made thee glib, and made thee to go upon thy belly; but I did not deprive thee of speech. “Now, however, be thou dumb ; and speak no more, thou and thy race31 because in the first place, has the ruin My creatures happened through thee, and now thou wishest to kill them.”* Then the serpent was struck dumb, and spake no more. And a wind came to blow from heaven by command of God, that carried away the serpent from Adam and Eve, threw it on the sea shore, and it landed in India.

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The post Episode 188 – Satanists Read the Bible III (Year of the Serpent) appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

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• From rosemary’s Baby, Film Site, 2018: Rosemary’s Baby is Polish director Roman Polanski’s first American feature film and his second horror film “Repulsion” in 1965, about a mentally-unstable, sexually-terrified woman left alone in her apartment. Polanski served as the scriptwriter and based the darkly atmospheric “Rosemary” upon Ira Levin’s best-selling novel of the same name. The film was produced by Paramount Studios and veteran, low-budget horror film maker William Castle, best known for gimmicky films such as House on Haunted Hill (1959), and Mr. Sardonicus (1961). A young newlywed move into a rambling old apartment building in Central Park West and become friendly with the next-door neighbors, an overly-solicitous and intrusive elderly couple, and soon the struggling husband’s acting career improves. But after a nightmarish dream of making love to a horned Beast, the paranoid, haunted, and hysterical Rosemary believes herself impregnated so that her baby could be used in the elderly New Yorkers’ evil cult rituals. She consults with a longtime friend who sends her a book about witchcraft, with suggestions that their neighbor was the son of a famous witch. After the birth of a baby boy, she ventures into the Castevet’s apartment and observes a coven celebrating the birth of the Antichrist. The creepy film ends with the devil’s flesh-and-blood baby being cared for by the new mother. The big-budget horror film grossed about $33.4 million on a budget of $2.3 million and received an Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Ruth Gordon won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as one of the “everyday” NYC neighbors. Quite a few of the smaller supporting roles were played by venerable actors, such as Ralph Bellamy as Rosemary’s doctor, Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet, and Tony Curtis, who makes a cameo as only a voice on the phone. It has been said that the film was one of the first horror films to be widely accepted by the public. This critically-acclaimed and commercially successful film was followed by an inferior, made-for-TV movie sequel in 1976 entitled Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, aka Rosemary’s Baby II, with Ruth Gordon reprising her role. https://www.filmsite.org/rosem4.html 

• From Afterword To rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin, 2003: Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror, I was struck one day by the thought (while not listening to a lecture) that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine! I tried to figure out exactly what that fetus was growing into. I could imagine only two possibilities: my unfortunate heroine had to be impregnated either by an extraterrestrial or the Devil. E.T.s had already fathered children in The Midwich Cuckoos, a novel by John Wyndham, so I was stuck with Satan, in whom I believed not at all. But I had no other intriguing ideas and a family to support. I read up on witchcraft, and late in 1965 set to work. I anchored my unbelievable story in the reality of Manhattan in that season — as much to make myself believe it as to win the belief of readers. I saved the daily newspapers, checking back through them on the transit strike, the incoming shows, the mayoral election, writing always a few months ahead of Rosemary and Guy’s calendar. I wasn’t at all sure how the book would be received: I was well aware that what I was doing was standing the story of Mary and Jesus on its head, and I feared that editors and publishers might run me out of town. When I checked back through the newspapers for the events of the optimal date for the baby’s conception — so he would arrive exactly half the year ’round from Christmas — I found, on October 4, 1965, Pope Paul’s visit to New York City and the Mass he celebrated at Yankee Stadium that night. I took it as a sign — though I don’t, of course, believe in signs — and kept writing. Sure enough my editor loved the new Baby. He suggested that Rosemary might be hit by a taxi on the way to a hospital and the baby disappear somehow, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. The book was favorably reviewed and became a best seller, thanks in large part to a generous quote from Truman Capote which Random House cannily printed on the front. The movie rights had been sold before publication. The result was possibly the most faithful adaptation ever made. It incorporates whole pages of the book’s dialogue and even uses specific colors mentioned. Rosemary’s Baby attracted some of the hostility I had worried about while writing the book: A woman screamed “Blasphemy!” in the lobby after the first New York preview, and I subsequently received scores of reprimanding letters from Catholic schoolgirls, all worded almost identically. The Legion of Decency condemned the film, but when it became a major hit despite or because of its rating the Legion disbanded. Lately I’ve had a new worry: If I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?

• From The Satanic Screen, Nick Schreck, 2001: Strangeness had long been Alfred Hitchcock’s cup of tea. However, the galleys for this unpublished novel were going too far even for the master of suspense. The unshockable Hitchcock had, after all, been brought up as a good Roman Catholic. William Castle had none of Hitch’s moral misgivings: Castle placed his bet on Beelzebub and purchased the film rights for Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin for $100,000. Although it wasn’t a particularly accomplished work in terms of style, Levin’s book resonated with an undetected shadow zone in the 1960s zeitgeist. The tremendous commercial and artistic success of ROSEMARY’S BABY transformed the film into an unprecedented cultural phenomenon. Thanks to Rosemary’s Luciferian labour pains, housewives and harried hubbies were chatting about Devil worship at suburban cocktail parties. Like all media events that touch the collective unconscious, a mythology of its own was generated, which still has a life of its own. One of the most persistent of these romantic concepts is that Roman Polanski is himself a devotee of the Black Arts, and that his film was constructed as a diabolical manifesto. In fact, possessed of a deep European existentialist pessimism, Polanski has never evidenced the least interest in Satanism or witchcraft; it was the story’s themes of alienation, betrayal and isolation that attracted him. It’s interesting to note that many viewers of the film have reported seeing such traditional Satanic features as cloven hoofs and horns in the final shot of the baby despite the fact that nothing of the kind was actually filmed. Occultists and Christians of different stripes have looked in the film for hidden magical messages and authentic Satanic lore. Rumours have spread that the film-maker must have sought technical advice from “real” Satanists to imbue the film with authenticity. When he was interviewed by police after the Manson murders, Polanski speculated: “It could be some kind of witchcraft.” The pregnant woman menaced by supposed devil worshippers was seen by many as an example of life imitating art. That the true motives for the crime had nothing to do with Satanism did not dissuade these wild theories. 

• From Little Book of Satanism, La Carmina, 2022: The dawn of the age of Satan coincided with the rise of diabolical novels and films. Ira Levin wrote his best-selling rosemary’s Baby in 1967. In the story, Rosemary and her actor husband moved into a New York apartment next door to an eccentric old couple; the plot turns to terror as she discovers that her husband is in league with the neighbors to claim her baby as their Antichrist. Rosemary’s Baby introduces audiences to the plausibility of devil worshipers next door, shouting “Hail Satan!” while weaving the plots to snatch your children. Then came The Exorcist, a novel that became one of the most profitable films of all time. Viewers were shocked by the possessed girl’s antics as she yelled blasphemies, spewed green vomit, and spun her head 360°. In 1975, would come The Omen, along with a growing societal paranoia about Satanism. The film focuses on a child who is in fact the Antichrist prophesied by The Book of Revelation. The Omen popularized the idea the Antichrist could be walking among us. Songs about Satan skyrocketed: Parents of course had long labeled teenage music Satanic: Jazz was the devil’s own orchestra in the Roaring Twenties. The following decade, blues guitarist Robert Johnson allegedly met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul. In the 1950s, the thrusting rock of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis was similarly regarded. In 1966, The Master of Margarita was published for the first time: It followed the devil as he arrived in Moscow with a naked witch and talking black cat and inspired the Rolling Stones’ 1968 song Sympathy for the Devil. Ironically, the fearful public was oblivious to the works actually connected to Satanism: LaVey ​​released several albms and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger created the erotic and demonically charged “Invocation of my Demon Brother” and “Lucifer rising.” Media succeeded in painting a shocking picture of Satanism that became deeply embedded in popular imagination. Over the following decades, heavy metal horror would inspire and be inspired by the culture of organized Satanism and also feed the anxieties that gave rise to the social chaos of the Satanic Panic.

• From The Church of Satan, Michael Aquino, 1989: Rosemary’s Baby appeared at a time when a new topic of conversation was demanded, and now we encounter the legend that Anton LaVey served as advisor for the film and played the role of the Devil in it. In the early days of the Church of Satan this claim was accepted as fact, and because of the movie’s sensational impact was even paraded as one of Anton’s magical coups. Upon close examination, Rosemary’s Baby Producer William Castle devoted three chapters of his autobiography to the filming of that movie and nowhere is LaVey mentioned. In fact, Castle repeatedly stresses director Polanski’s insistence on filming the novel exactly as it was written by Levin, omitting only any sight of the baby on camera. Nor has any other member of the cast or crew ever mentioned any LaVey involvement. In uncut versions of the movie, two “Devil” eyes momentarily appear that were rumored to be Anton’s. When Rosemary’s Baby  was eventually released as a videocassette, it became possible to freeze those frames and examine the eyes closely. They are clearly artificial cat’s eyes. As for the devil suit, I had an opportunity to examine it closely: because of its small size, the six-foot, 200-pound LaVey could not possibly have worn it. Many years later ,Nikolas and Zeena Schreck chanced to meet the father of the actress who played Mia Farrow’s body-double. He recalled that a young, very slender professional dancer had worn the suit. The Schrecks also met Polanski’s close friend Gene Gutowski, who had worked with Polanski on producing the film. Gutowski confirmed that there was no “technical advisor.” None of the ritual scenes reflects practices of the Church of Satan, and the chanting of the coven is not one of the Enochian Keys. Nevertheless the timing of the story – and its highlighting of 1966 as the “Year One” of the reign of the Antichrist – made a lasting impression upon the Church: Long after the motion picture disappeared from theaters, Christopher Komeda’s famous lullaby, sung on the soundtrack by Mia Farrow, would inspire sentimental emotions in the most worldly of Satanists.

• From Rosemary’s Body, Miranda Corcoran, 2018: Inserted into the Irish Constitution in 1983, the 8th Amendment, which supposedly affords equal protection to the right to life of both the mother and the unborn child, ushered in three decades of callous disregard for the lives of women and all those capable of becoming pregnant, as young girls with crisis pregnancies, rape victims, and couples diagnosed with fatal foetal abnormalities were forced to travel abroad for basic reproductive care. Beyond its inherent cruelty, the Irish prohibition against abortion has always been an intrusion of religious agendas onto the individual body. The invasive power of patriarchal authority and Catholic dogma have inhabited and taken root deep within the bodies of women. There was never safety or comfort, never a place of warmth or retreat, to be found in one’s own body: only shame, alienation and a cold, distant law. I mulled over the shifting Irish attitude towards reproductive rights while re-reading Rosemary’s Baby. I have long felt that Ira Levin infuses his work with an overtly feminist rhetoric that rivals anything produced by more contemporary genre-creators. Indeed, based on their initial reading of Levin’s other major contribution to popular culture, The Stepford Wives, many of my students assume the author must be female. So many of Levin’s male characters start out as loving, supportive husbands before transforming into abusers out of a desire for some signifier of conventional masculine dominance. In The Stepford Wives, Walter is entranced by the archetypal subservient ‘50s housewife; in Rosemary’s Baby, Guy relinquishes his wife’s freedom in exchange for a successful career. Constructing the desire for the accoutrements of hegemonic masculinity as inherently corrupting, Levin’s work repeatedly underscores how the demands of patriarchy, and the attendant requirement that men adhere to dominant notions of masculinity, can damage men and women. Rosemary’s autonomy is gradually undermined and eroded, as it becomes increasingly clear that her body is not her own but rather a vessel to be primed, manipulated and constrained: she is drugged by geriatric Satanist Minnie, and when Rosemary refuses the [suspect] dessert, Guy essentially gaslights her; already Rosemary’s ability to trust her own body is undermined. The trivialisation of sexual assault evidenced here and the flippant suggestion that such a violation is a minor infraction on the part of a husband who is, by default, entitled to access his wife’s body at any time reinforces the notion that Rosemary’s body is not her own, that she does not have the power to prevent the transgression of her corporeal boundaries. When Rosemary becomes pregnant, her capacity to exert any form of control over either her body or her life is radically curtailed. The neighbouring Satanists encourage her to stay at home, and her body is constantly scrutinised. When Rosemary opts to get a stylish Vidal Sassoon haircut, aesthetically removed from the lengthy tresses that are generally held up as feminine beauty, her husband berates her. She is forbidden from reading books about pregnancy or speaking to her friends about their experiences. Levin, who was not Catholic and did not believe in the Devil, crafted a deeply unsettling tale out of the darkest facets of Catholic lore. As an Irish woman reading Rosemary’s Baby in the weeks after the referendum on the 8th Amendment, the novel spoke to me afresh. https://amiddleagedwitch.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/rosemarys-body-reproductive-rights-and-diabolical-deeds-in-ira-levins-rosemarys-baby/ 

• From Rosemary’s Baby Was a Jewish Horror Movie, Nathan Abrams, Forward, 2018: Rosemary’s Baby” is laced with references to Catholicism: its protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse, is a lapsed Catholic who dreams of nuns; the Pope’s visit to New York in October 1965 is discussed, as is the Kennedy family. But something in it stirs a sense of Jewish cultural identity as well:

•  Polanski adapted [Jewish novelist] Ira Levin’s 1967 novel of the same name.

• The film starred Mia Farrow, whose famous pixie haircut was provided by British Jewish hairdresser, Vidal Sassoon.

• Jewish actor Tony Curtis voiced the actor Donald Baumgart whose sudden blindness allows Guy to replace him in the play that sets him on the path to success. 

• Guy and Rosemary’s friend tells them about the Bramford and how “World War II filled the house up again,” to suggest that émigrés fleeing Nazism had taken over the apartment building. This group, in seeking to procure a child for Satan, echo age-old Judeophobic canards. 

• The overbearing Castevets resemble nebbishy, loud, pushy, New York Jewish stereotypes. Their lack of decorum contrasts with Rosemary’s politeness and acquiescence. 

• Roman is a wanderer, who has been “everywhere.” He has “piercing eyes,” and we learn that he has changed his name to hide his origins. The fact that he and Polanski have the same name seems too significant to avoid mentioning. 

• In the first draft of the screenplay he describes Minnie as “big-nosed, with a sullen fleshy underlip. She wears pink-rimmed eye glasses on a neckchain that dips down from behind plain pearly earrings.” Minnie cooks and kibitzes, browbeating Guy and Rosemary until they cannot refuse. She nags her henpecked husband: “Just watch the carpet.” At one point, she can be heard through the walls of the apartment shouting at Roman.

• Minnie manifests other stereotypical Jewish tics: Rosemary observes, “She’s the nosiest person I’ve ever seen. You know she actually asked the prices of things.”Gordon would go on to play a series of Jewish women, including a demented, overbearing Jewish mother in “Where’s Poppa?” 

• Rosemary’s obstetrician, Dr. Abraham Sapirstein, is more obviously Jewish. In the novel, Minnie describes him as “A Jewish man who delivers all the Society babies,” while Roman says, “He’s a brilliant man with all the sensitivities of his much-tormented race.” When Guy asks Rosemary if Sapirstein is in the coven, she replies, “No, I don’t think he’s one of them, he’s Jewish.” 

• Minnie introduces Rosemary to a “famous dentist” named Dr. Shand at a New Year’s party; Shand has made the chain for the charm that Minnie gave Rosemary earlier in the film. Both dentistry and jewelry were professions in which Jews enjoyed a significant presence. Phil Leeds, a well-known Jewish comedian, plays Shand. 

• Rosemary’s friends, distraught over her appalling physical appearance during pregnancy, compare her to a concentration camp victim. Polanski layered the film with allusions that are hard not to interpret as autobiographical: He had survived the Holocaust by hiding, and the claustrophobia of this traumatic childhood returns in the film’s images of a victimized woman trapped in an apartment, compelled to be quiet out of grave fear of the neighbors, staying alive or being betrayed because of whom she chooses to trust. The image of a pregnant woman being dragged away by muscular male representatives of authority has echoes in the memory of his mother, who was taken to a camp when he was eight. https://forward.com/culture/398478/why-rosemarys-baby-was-really-a-jewish-horror-movie/ 
• From Awakening to Satanic Conspiracy: Rosemary’s Baby and the Cult Next Door David Frankfurter University of New Hampshire, 2008: In the 1960s, before the “cult” scare, at a time when Christian demonology was still quite marginalized, and set in a city where nobody could expect cultural homogeneity anyway, Rosemary’s plight could almost be read as a sendup of the various weird and conflicting encounters pregnant women will have in urban society. By the late 1980s, however, everybody seemed to know what dangers Satanists next door might pose to the innocent and unsuspecting. A cacophony of media revelations, from Geraldo Rivera to the recovered-memory narrative Michelle Remembers, created a mood in which Satanism and Devil worship became a familiar and modern discourse. Satanism had come to serve, on the one hand, as a “symptom” of a culture in decline, and on the other hand as a cluster-point for perennial social anxieties, like child safety, the nature of the family, and the identification of deviance. In this historical context, Levin’s work, especially his evocation of suspicion and intimate Satanic conspiracy, becomes quite prescient and to a limited degree causal. America, we should recognize, has long had an obsession with themes of conspiracy. As organizations flourish and institutions get more powerful, we have kept an eye perpetually cocked for suggestions of suspicion, deceit, and even counter-institutions behind it all. We might recall not only the appeal of movies like The Manchurian Candidate (1962) but also the popularity of stories of international white-slavery rings and the perpetual rumors of Catholic, Masonic, Mormon, Jewish, and even extraterrestrial conspiracy over American history. In the 1960s, when Levin wrote Rosemary’s Baby, it was traditional institutions—communists, Catholics, corporations—that posed the threats. From at least the early Roman period, the epitome of conspiracy and moral subversion lay in illegitimate, subversive rituals especially when they seemed to function cohesively for some alien group. But by the late 1970s, in the face of a great variety of discomfiting events, Americans began to feel an increasing strain: Despite our austere Puritan legacy, social scientific enlightenment would not allow us to cast Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and David Berkowitz out of the realm of moral comprehensibility. We very much craved a discourse of evil to which we could relegate these most extreme figures. Satanism became the perfect conspiracy. Rosemary’s Baby was ahead of its time in offering such a revelation of Satanic conspiracy; many of the ideas it raises were picked up 20 years later. The revelatory experience it offers the audience—that psychological shift from innocence to “cultic” predation—is one that arose time and time again for television viewers, therapists and their patients, and law enforcement specialists over the 1980s and early 1990s. Conspiracy offers not only terror but also the likelihood that there exists something else beneath the experiences and encounters we have, that randomness is not the way things work, but that another, more powerful realm is at work, controlling things. Maybe it’s a positive realm—God and his angels, or aliens, as many believe—or maybe an inverse, evil realm, but [either way] the excitement comes in peering into it.

• From Vidal Sassoon? I did my pixie cut myself, says Mia Farrow DAILY MAIL STAFF,  2013: It is one of the best-known haircuts of all time: In 1968 British stylist Vidal Sassoon was acclaimed for creating the ‘pixie cut’ for actress Mia Farrow in her career defining role in Rosemary’s Baby. The urchin style look became an instant hit and today is still copied, most recently by Emma Watson. When Sassoon died last year at the age of 84 almost all the obituaries mentioned the role in the 1968 horror film. Now after almost 50 years Farrow says she came up with the boyish look and used a pair of nail scissors to cut her own hair: “I intend no disrespect to Mr Sassoon, but he had nothing to do with my haircut.” She said he was only responsible for trimming her hair as part of a publicity stunt for the film, as his name was mentioned in it. (When asked about the cut, Farrow’s character says, ‘It’s Vidal Sassoon. It’s very in.’) The actress set the record straight after the New York Times newspaper carried a recent article about career changing haircuts. It said Farrow had long, blonde hair until Sassoon gave her the pixie cut for the film.  It also said her husband at the time, Frank Sinatra, was so against the boyish look that he divorced her. After Farrow’s daughter-in-law contacted the paper to ask for a correction, editors on the paper reached out to Farrow. She wrote to the paper to set the record straight and they published her reply. Sassoon never said anything to dispel the myth that he had created the pixie cut for Farrow. He said he was invited to Hollywood to give Farrow a new style for the film. Farrow’s two year marriage to Sinatra ended shortly after the film came out, but she says it was unrelated. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2269357/Vidal-Sassoon-I-did-pixie-cut-says-Mia-Farrow-hairdressers-signature-style.html 

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The post Episode 186: Rosemary’s Baby Too appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

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The post Episode 172: Unbaptisms appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

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The post Episode 169: Satanic Blasphemy appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.