Here's another long discussion camouflaged as a book review. The book itself was quite informative, and it had some awesome artwork (as seen below), but what it spurred me to discuss at the greatest length was the comfort humans can obtain, or not, from their belief system. What psychological benefits do atheists receive from
not being able to tell themselves, "this is all part of God's plan" when some disaster strikes? And how does this question relate to a book about Satanic cults and mass hysteria throughout human history? Read on and find out.
Remember the "
Satanic Panic" of the 1980s? When seemingly every preschool and daycare worker in the world was accused of being part of a vast Satanic conspiracy, and (literally) unbelievable stories about children being terrorized and abused by the tens of thousands, women being bred and babies being born solely for their future value as bloody sacrifices, animals being tortured and killed to scare the children into silence, secret tunnels and black rituals, and more. The whole thing blew up in just a few years, was aided and abetted by a rash of "recovered memories" in adults coached by credulous psychiatrists, before it all crumbled under the weight of its own nonexistence. It was a modern day witch-hunt, and once you go beyond the tabloid-esque specifics of the events in question, the larger question is about human psychology and cultural dynamics. What causes people to make such accusations and to entertain such absurd allegations? What is the deeper root of this kind of mania? What human needs does it serve?
This subject is examined at length by the unfortunately named David Frankfurter, in his massively-researched title,
Evil Incarnate. His book, the culmination of more than a decade of research, draws from the fields of history, psychology, anthropology, and religious studies, and presents a fascinating overview of witch hunts and societal panics over much of recorded human history. Dozens of such instances are reviewed, and it's startling how familiar they all are. Children, coached by authority figures, make incredible accusations, communities mobilize against the accused (who are always powerless fringe figures, usually nonconforming and/or elderly women), professional prosecutors appear and fan the flames with their "expertise," torture is used to extract confessions which implicate others and confirm the conspiracy theories of the prosecutors, and so on, until some critical mass is reached and the community grows sickened by the excesses and shakes off the collective mania. Whether it's Poland in 1050, or Spain in 1620, or
Manhattan Beach, CA in 1983, the elements are always the same.
I suppose that a person could take this pattern and conclude that there really are hidden cults of Satanists carrying out these grim torments all the time, and that they are only occasionally uncovered. There's always child abuse of some level going on in the world, but I think it more likely, and this is the conclusion Frankfurter draws as well, that the identical nature of these episodes are signs of various weaknesses in human nature, ones that run the same course once fabricated manias come about, taking on a briefly self-perpetuating life of their own. But why?
...where do these images of extreme evil come from? What is the relationship of such extreme images to the popular wish to expel it so violently from our midst? Why are people's larger anxieties and traumas expressed in these particular images, with rituals, perversions, cannibalism, and infant-sacrifices -- how do these kinds of scenarios come to represent evil?"
This book goes a long way towards answering these questions, in modern and historical terms. It probably goes without saying, but the author doesn't give any credence to the allegations made at any point in history. Based on his research, he does not entertain the notion that there might really be Satanic forces, much less demons and witches with magical powers. Of course there has been child abuse all through human history, and sometimes its been organized by a small cell of pedophile perverts, but if any individual witch-hunt actually uncovered and destroyed such a conspiracy, rather than just torturing and murdering dozens or hundreds of innocent people, Frankfurter never uncovered it in his decade of research. To the scores:
Evil incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History, by David Frankfurter, 2006
Concept: 8
Presentation: 6
Writing Quality: 6
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 7
Entertainment Value: 4
Rereadability: 5
Overall: 7
My scores for this one are somewhat constrained by the presentation and tone. This is not a text book, but it's quite scholarly, and is not written on a popular level. It's composed with an advanced vocabulary and quite long sentence/paragraph structure, and was clearly prepared by an academic. The average chapter has 60 or 70 citations and endnotes, giving it the feel of a very thorough and professional, but not especially readable, research paper or dissertation. I doubt I would have gotten through it a few years ago, before my return to college, where I grew accustomed to reading this sort of material, and can now do it for pleasure, as I did with this book, since I was interested in the subject.
If you want more over-arching discussion, check the
Amazon listing for the book, where there are snips from quite a few high level (
NYTimes,
Publisher's Weekly, scholarly journals, etc) editorial reviews. Rather than duplicate them by giving an overview of the book, I'm going to focus on a few things I found most interesting.
Frankfurter's research was extensive, and produces numerous fascinating citations, quite often from the Bible, or various non-canonical scriptures. One from the Gnostic
Testament of Reuben, is cited on page 23. It details the types of suffering and difficulties various demons can inflict upon humans, and where these diseases are located in the body.
The first, that of impurity, is seated in the nature and the senses. The second, the spirit of insatiate desire, in the belly. The third, the sprit of fighting, in the liver and the gall. The fourth, (is) the spirit of flatter and trickery... The fifth is the spirit of arrogance.... The sixth is the spirit of lying in destruction and jealousy... the seventh is the spirit of unrighteousness... for unrighteousness works together with the other spirits through the receiving of bribes. Besides all these, the spirit of sleep, the eighth spirit, it connected with deceit and fantasy.
There's plenty more of this sort of cataloging of diseases and maladies, along with the demons to blame for them. On page 25 Frankfurter lists the demons of the
Testament of Solomon .
...the demon Onoskelis, with female torso and mule's legs, inhibits cliffs, caves, and ravines. A nameless headless demon and another named Obzouth attack newborn babies, knowing the price times that women give birth. Kunopegos ("dog-flow") sinks ships with giant waves, while a variety of demons or illness and strife are linked to the 36 heavenly bodies: for example, Sphandor, who wakens shoulders, numbs hands, and paralyzes limbs.
This sort of thing is seen in the mythologies and religions of every culture, and just goes to show how creative and precise humans can and will be with their quantifying and qualifying, even when what they're just sorting imaginary gremlins.
Another perpetual feature of the supposed cultists is sexual immorality, and it's striking how similar the charges are, in every culture and time. There are always orgies, sexual congress with animals and/or demons of some sort, and sexual fetishism of offal; blood, feces, afterbirth, etc. Basically the worst things people can think of, which always tell more about the suppressed sexual perversion of the accusers and society in general.
...ethnographers have noted especially in modern ideas of witch-cults a fascination with inversion itself: not only what is eaten and who copulates with whom, but every aspect of what witches (or demons, or Satanists) do: Their dances, their music, their singing, their transportation. Everything is turned upside down: They eat what we find disgusting, they mock what we find sacred, they expose what we do in private, they abuse what we protect, they congregate when we stay at home. It is as if the wholesale inversion of cultural norms carries an intrinsic excitement, which compounds both the overall picture of the monstrous and the prurience of contemplating it.
There's always a good bit of titillation and prurience in the spectacles too, especially for the star prosecutors. A prominent aspect of all the historical cases of witch hunting was the torture, examination, and purgation of the accused. Searching for the Devil's Mark was mandatory in the good old days, a process which necessarily entailed stripping accused (women) nude, so that groups of the accusing (men) could thoroughly examine them from head to toe in order to find the incriminating moles or birth marks. If a suitable mark could not be found, it was not uncommon for one to be manufactured by vigorous and cruel pinching, prodding, or probing, and it's impossible not to imagine the sexual connotations of a room full of torturing church or court elders having their judgmental fun with a parade of helpless nude females.
Lest you think the sexualized aspects were only interpersonal and extralegal, Frankfurter includes numerous illustrations and examples from the witch-hunting books and manuals of the time. This picture is only a century old, but it's based on earlier works and comes from a French history of witch hunts and persecutions. Not a great deal of subtlety in the context and implications of that scene, eh?
Not all the witch hunts were brought about by accusing children, of course. Throughout the Middle Ages and even more recently than that, there have been numerous documented cases of possession of adults, usually women, and often nuns, in events that appear to be a sort of mass hysteria. One such incident took place in a nunnery in Loudun in 1634, when the cloistered nuns were disturbed by the presence of a new and unpopular priest.
Feeling irritated, for example, that the new convent priest was offering communion through the grille rather than directly,"...it entered my mind that, to humiliate the father, the demon would have committed some irreverence toward the Very Holy Sacrament. I was so miserable that I did not resist that thought strongly enough. When I went to take communion, the devil seized my head, and after I had received the holy host and half moistened it, the devil threw it into the priest's face. I knew perfectly well that I did not perform that act freely, but I an very sure, to my great embarrassment, that I gave the devil occasion to do it, and that he would not have had this power had I not allied myself with him.
The tangible presence of the demonic becomes not just terrifying, but inspiring: a context for imagining, then embodying, a rush of feelings to transgress or rebel emerge through the adoption of demonic identities: insulting priests and bishops, cursing sacraments and God -- all the "worst things imaginable" become imagined, performed, and at some level, enjoyed.
It's easy to see how being possessed by demons could be quite liberating and freeing, for people forced to live very controlled, orthodox, ascetic lives. Indeed, there are numerous accounts of nuns so "possessed" falling to the ground, tearing at their clothing in sexual ecstasy, shouting every sort of profanity and so forth. Cutting loose all at once, like a bomb going off after their years or decades of stultifying self control. It seems a pretty obvious human pathology, but the fact that this sort of release was forbidden the nuns (and others) meant they had to blame it on something else.
Could it be... Satan?
Frankfurter makes an interesting distinction between the types of "Satanism," all of which exist, but none of which actually match up with the fevered fantasies of the credulous.
Today, for example, one can see distinctions between youth who embrace a "Satanic style" with jewelry, tattoos, and clothing in order to express feelings of deviance, youth who adopt Satanism as a legitimization of violence (often ex post facto and encouraged by parents or advisors in order to gain popular forgiveness), and the often deranged adults who conceal their crimes under the anonymity of "Satanic cult atrocity." All three of these modes of performance have the capacity to prove the reality of a Satanic cult conspiracy for those who believe in it, but in fact they reflect important differences in the actors' motivation.
I think this sort of thing plays into a need of most humans; for explanation and reason in the face of madness. That's essentially what fuels memes like mythologies, religions, conspiracy theories, and so forth. The fact that we are pattern-seeking mammals, who don't like to accept that major events, especially things we find disturbing, can be just luck, or chance, or random and entirely outside of human control. Someone's teenaged son dies drunk driving, gets murdered, dies in a senseless accident, etc, and it's a fair bet the grieving parent will be quoted saying that, "God has a purpose." or "These things happen for a reason." Never mind that there's no evidence of this, and quite a bit evidence going against it; such thoughts provide consolation, which is why every faith, belief system, and religion with any popularity in the world today incorporates them at a structural level.
Almost everyone sees larger causes behind important events; the main difference is in how high up the chain one assigns the blame or credit. Traditionally it went right to the top. God -- or once the concept of dualism was introduced into Christianity with the New Testament, Satan -- is responsible. Good works are inspired, bad things are curses or temptations, and everything lacking a clear causal agent (storms, drought, plagues, etc) must be a sign of God's displeasure, likely caused by some indefinable human actions. Eastern belief systems are similar in their ultimate assignation of causes; although their deities are largely non-interventionist, good things come from positive karma built up in previous lives and bad things are signs of negative karma being worked off.
A slightly more modern view lowers the causation a bit, putting the ultimate causes, be they God or the Universe or whatever, out of the range of direct influence on events. Their proxies are then to praise/blame, so things are caused by individual demons, or spirits, or guardian angels, or kiri (nature spirits in Japanese Zen Buddhism).
A bit lower down the chain the concepts get secularized, and there's no longer a demon or angel or holy spirit controlling things, but it might as well be, since the powers in charge are equally-far out of your reach or control. Humans do evil things, in this world view, but they're doing them as directed by demonic forces. In this view the lone gunman is never to blame for the assassination, since he's just a fall guy. An interesting psychological aspect of this is that bigger conspiracies are better, perhaps because that explains more, and helps to restore a bit more logic and orderliness to a chaotic world. (It's still chaos on the ground level, but the hope is that if you can grasp the higher level forces, it will begin to make more sense. Remember, we're pattern seeking mammals, so this works directly on our psychology and vanity.) So a conspiracy of 19 hijackers on 9/11 isn't sufficient. They must be part of a far larger, worldwide movement of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. Or better yet, it's even bigger than that, and the actual hijackers and their inspirational leaders might think they were acting on their own recognizance, but they were actually just a pawn in the hand of the Jewish world bankers, or the Trilateral Commission, or the New World Order.
The lowest level of causation and order in the universe is the purely naturalistic one, and that's what I aspire to. Shit (and sunshine) happens, and while it's in our nature to try to explain it in larger terms; God, fate, destiny, conspiracies, etc, that's just mental masturbation for people who can't deal with the messy, chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable reality of the universe. Of course there are reasons for things; humans have individual goals and ideas, short and long term, and sometimes these goals are pursued by larger groups; i.e. conspiracies. But Occam's Razor has to be applied judiciously, which rules out most of the wilder theories.
By extension, and here's where it starts to get interesting: people with a naturalistic, non-religions, non-superstitious, non-conspiracy theory viewpoint... are satisfying the human same needs by believing (or not believing). Rationalists aren't special or different in their psychological needs; they're (we're) also using our philosophy of life to make sense of things. It's just less obvious what that sense is. The religious person who says "God has a plan." in answer to misery or triumph, doesn't require any deep analysis. They're wearing their beliefs and needs on their sleeve. But what's getting an atheist, or a rationalist, through trials and tribulations? How does believing (accepting?) that the world isn't governed by some divine or human plan, give a sense of order and reassurance to the mind?
I'm not sure about that one. I've not seen it addressed by any of the leading atheist philosophers, and I don't have a complete answer. I'd say that in part it's slightly narcissistic; knowing that
we know the truth, that we don't need supernatural crutches to face reality, functions as a reinforcement in of itself. When something bad happens, it's cheering to tell myself, "That was just random chance; I can accept that and don't need to blame God, or spirits, or karma." And I feel better for being strong and independent minded and realistic. But that only works so long as most of the rest of the world is still trapped in one superstition or another. What happens when/if everyone is a rationalist? I don't mean just non-religious, since often as people outgrow or throw off that ancient security blanket, they fall into another more modern one. Astrology or numerology or psychics or New Age medicines, etc. But if everyone left those concepts behind, and we were all rationalists and didn't envision magical causes behind daily events, the psychological value of knowing I'm right and special and smarter than most people would be gone. So what then? (Fortunately, there's no chance of that ever happening, so it's purely a psychological exercise.)
It should go without saying that the majority of the world's population, people who believe in various religions or other scientifically-unprovable world views, think very differently than I do, while still arriving at the same conclusion. They think that
they have the unique truth of it, and that everyone else is deluded in one way or another. Interestingly, they can get a double boost, by believing in a supernatural plan, and reveling in the same sort of gloating that a rationalist might indulge in. Their broken ankle, lost job, dead friend, etc, sucks, but 1) it's a lesson of some kind,
and custom tailored by God for their situation, and 2) the fact that they realize this gives them an extra bonus. "Some idiots actually think bad things are just chance and happenstance," they could tell themselves, "and those idiots don't learn the lesson, or enjoy God's blessing that accompanies it!"
Does that sort of "I know best." reassurance actually function in real life? Perhaps not.
Exhibit 1: Not much more than a year ago my relationship with Malaya ended suddenly and painfully. I'd never been in romantic love before her, had never been in an LTR of that nature, and hadn't planned on being out of that one. So, to be on my own again, after living more-or-less happily with her for nearly four years, was quite a change. Especially since the break up entailed me moving to the North Bay (where I knew no one), and establishing a functional household almost from scratch since I'd disposed of most of my furniture, dishes, electronics, etc when I moved up here from San Diego in 2003. Plus I was busy attending school full time in the middle of my high-impact three-semester return to college, juggling part time work and federal loans to cover my tuition and suddenly-increased living expenses, etc.
Now this in no way compares to a truly stressful life experience, like the death of a child or spouse, but it was both difficult and unpleasant. A few paragraphs ago I speculated that rationalists like myself can gain some psychological comfort in times of grief by reminding themselves that they know the truth about the universe, and that they're superior or stronger than religious people who need to appeal to their invisible buddy in the sky (or earth, or sea, or wherever) to get through such ordeals. How often do you suppose that thought occurred to me, and comforted me during the early month(s) of 2007, post breakup, while sleeping alone in a cold apartment in a cold bed, wondering if I'd ever find love and/or happiness again?
Never. I never once had that thought, that I can remember. And I had a lot of thoughts, philosophical and other.
That might not shoot down my whole theory about rationalists gaining reassurance and strength from a narcissistic indulgence in egotism, but it's certainly not support for my theory. I think the support comes more often in everyday life, rather than in times of crisis. Contrary to the popular expression, there are atheists in foxholes, but none of them are whiling away the time indulging in philosophical musings. That said, neither did I ever indulge in the standard platitudes about our breakup being meant to happen, or tell myself that I was being tested, or flatter myself that these events were all part of some divine plan/supernatural event/conspiracy theory. It was what it was; the end result of various interpersonal, experiential, financial, and emotional incompatibilities. That was the truth, and it was neither reassuring nor depressing. It just was, and at the time, and in retrospect, I don't see how romanticizing, or giving a metaphysical spin to things, would have helped.
Frankfurter's book doesn't go into that area at all; it's just my own musing on the subject. He does conclude the book with some good stuff, though:
No forensic or archaeological evidence for Satanic cult atrocities as alleged by SRA experts has ever been found: no bodies, crime sites, burials, or even past pregnancies of those claiming to have been successful "breeders." Research and clinical psychologists alike have shown that patients' memories of abusive Satanic ceremonies upon which the SRA [Satanic Ritual Abuse] conspiracy was based were so contaminated by media, improper and unethical therapy techniques, and SRA subcultures that, whatever psychological or traumatic truths they revealed about the patient, they could never stand as eyewitness or historical documentation of real religious practices. The question then follows, if there is no reliable evidence for SRA, and if indeed simpler explanations for the claims can be found in their social and psychological circumstances, on what basis can we assume that it should exist, especially on the scale alleged by its revealers?
So the modern accounts aren't true (although if you believe them, then the complete absence of evidence is just further proof of how powerful these cults are) why should we believe that any such stories are true? Most historians have take the centuries of persecutions and panics as proof that the people were reacting to
something, but if we consider that all the evidence is of persecution, what does that prove, in light of the comprehensive debunking of the SRA?
On the whole it's an interesting, massively-researched book, and while it presents far more information than insight, or argument, I learned a lot from it. Plus, it's got some really cool illustrations, taken from centuries-old woodcuts. I'll close this installment of Flux's massively overlong, digression-filled book reviews with a photo of a second illustration that's just bursting with juicy details. Click it to view it supersized.
Jan Ziarnko, engraving of witches' Sabbat, to accompany Pierre de Lancre, tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1613). Ithaca, New York. Courtesy of the Division of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Details include: (A) Satan enthroned as a five-horned goat, along with (B) the Queen of the Sabbat and another mistress, to whom a naked witch and a demon present a child for initiation. (C) The Sabbat involves (at lower right D) a banquet of human body parts, hearts of unbaptised babies, and diverse vermin, and is atttended by female witches and their demon-lovers; and it is followed by a backward, naked dance of he women and their demons. (F): "they dance... with the most indecent and dirty movements they can." To the left (H) more women and girls dance, naked and backwards, to the sound of a cacophonous musical ensemble (G): and below them (L) can be seen an elegant masque for the lord and lady-witches. In the center (K) more children arrive with a anked witch on the back of a goat to be dedicated to Satan, while to the lower left (M) the initiated witch-children tend to the toads they have brought to the Sabbat for senior witches (bottom center, I) to mix in a maleficent brew.
Labels: book review, conspiracy theories, psychology
