SHOW LINKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHOW LINKS

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

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  • From 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.

SHOW LINKS

• Rowan Astra, Satanic Idaho
• Witch Whores of Satan, Demo EP
• Did Idaho’s Attorney General “Defeat Satan”?
• The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Shirley Lindenbaum
• The Misuses of Cannibalism, Richard King
• The Saturnine History of Jews & Witches, Yvonne Owens
• Cannibalism & Witchcraft In Early Modern Europe, Charles Zika
• The Demonology of Satanism, Philips J Stevens
• Raising the Devil, Bill Ellis
• Cannibalism, Blood Drinking High-Adept Satanism, Kerth Barker
• Secret Life of a Satanist, Blanche Barton

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The post Episode 163: The Cannibalism Episode appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

It’s a buyer’s market, but everything must go! Sidney Sin joins us for a who’s who of who sold their soul over the past 1,500 years or so.

SHOW LINKS

• Lawmaker Calls For Removal of Satanic Display
• Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, Sabine Baring-Gould
• The Gentleman’s Magazine, George Lauren Gomme
• Me and the Devil, Holly Everett & Peter Narv
• Big Road Blues, Tradition and Creativity in Folk Blues, David Evans
• A History of Musicians and the Crossroads, Benjamin Allmon
• Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, & Contemporary American Culture, Patricia Schroeder
• Meeting With the Devil at the Crossroads, a Contemporary Legend, Gail de Vos

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The post Episode 158 – Selling Souls appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

We’re making a Halloween house call to the famous haunted home that revived American demonology with our look at the perilous publishing venture behind “The Amityville Horror.”

SHOW LINKS

• Student loses scholarship, sparking outrage
• The Real Amityville Horror, Hezra Martinez
• Encyclopedia of the Bible, Klauck et al
• Digging Up the Indian Burial Ground Trope, Shea Vassar
• Embodiment & Horror Cinema, Laura Dudenhoeffer
• Amityville Horror, Jay Anson
• Amityville Horror II, Jay Anson

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The post Episode 154 – The Amityville Horror appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

For our first Halloween season offering, Atun-Shei Film’s Andrew Raikich talks religion, race, and recreancy in his new Satanic historical thriller “The Sudbury Devil”–a Satanic faith-based film.

SHOW LINKS

• Atun-Shei Films
• Most Satanic Film of All Time Preys On Our Fears
• King Philip’s War, Boston College of History
• Myths & Legends of Our Own Land, Charles Skinner
• Narrative of the Captivity of Mary Rowlandson
• The Rabble & Flower of Essex County, Kyle Zelner
• A True & Exact History of Barbados, Richard Ligon
• James Burroughs: Salem’s Perfect Witch, Emerson Baker

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The post Episode 153 – The Sudbury Devil appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

Satan springs eternal, but where did he spring from? Often we see older gods and religious figures compared to Satan and held up as his supposed origins, but is this accursed ancestry legit?

SHOW LINKS

• Pope’s Racist Comments, Moscow Times
• Russian Church & State, AronRa
• Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt , Volume 3, Umair Mirza, 2001
• Set, God of the Red Land, Morris Lary, History Cooperative, 2022
• Seth the Divine Trickster, Mia Rikala, 2007
• The Book of Coming Forth By Night, Michael Aquino, 1975
• The Cycle of Ba’al, National Museum of Aleppo
• The Old Enemy, Neil Forsyth, 1987
• History of Baal, Father Gregory Elder, Redlands Daily Facts, 2015
• A History of God, Karen Armstrong, 1993
  

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The post Episode 145 – Other Devils (Set & Ba’al Edition) appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

We’re created some monsters — or so they say. Just in time for Halloween, we’re going to decrypt the Satanic legend-making over American cryptids, with the help of Karen and Blake from the long-running skeptics’ podcast, MonsterTalk.

SHOW LINKS

• MonsterTalk: website, Twitter, and Facebook
• The Conversation: The monster festival – a pilgrimage to small town America, Joe Laycock (2018)
• Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program, by James T Lacatski D.Eng., Colm A Kelleher Ph.D., George Knapp (2021)
• Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids, by Daniel Loxton (2012)
• Journal of Mormon History: A Mormon Bigfoot, Matthew Bowman (2007)
• Western Folklore: “New” Legends: Some Perspectives from Anthropology, Phillips Stevens Jr. (1990)
• Aztlan Magazine: Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, William Nericcio (2012)
• What Happens Next: Contemporary Urban Legends & Popular Culture, by Gail de Vos (2012)
• Ten Disturbing Dogman Sightings of the American Midwest, Aaron Fox (2021)
• LA Times: At Remote Forest Lake Monstrous Legends Spawn, Jason Song (2001)
• Jersey Devil: The History of an American Cryptid, Carolyn Cox (2018)
• New York Times: Ministers Plan Their Own Encounters, Matt Richtell (1997)

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The post Episode 130 – Satanic Monsters with MonsterTalk appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.

Steve Hill is a Satanist, a comedian, a veteran, an atheist, an appraiser, and if he has his way, a Congressman, and he’s here to talk about his Satan 4 Congress campaign.

SHOW LINKS

• Buzzfeed: These Women Say An Essential Oil MLM Has Been Taken Over By Satan. Yes, Really.
• Steve Hill’s website, Satan 4 Congress
• Steve Hill’s Twitter and Facebook
• LAist: Meet Steve Hill, The Satanist Running For California Senate (2016)
• Steve Hill on the Dope Dealers podcast
• Steve Hill on The Devil You Don’t Know podcast

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The post Episode 117 – Satan 4 Congress: Steve Hill appeared first on Black Mass Appeal.