Changing Images of Satan
Reading The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief, by Sara Scott, Part 1 of 3
All artwork by Kim Noble
(Audio version at the end of article for paying subscribers; this essay series is adapted from the 2016 podcast.)
Subordinates Vs Superordinates
Sara Scott’s book The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief (Open University 2001) is a scholarly treatment of the subject of ritual abuse, including both direct and indirect personal experiences. (Scott adopted one of the children who is a subject of the book, and became fully convinced of the reality of ritual abuse.) Scott presents a balanced analysis of the data by looking at various testimonies, and it may be the best single work on the subject that I know of.1
This is from the introduction, in which Scott quotes Howard Becker’s Sociological Work:
We provoke the suspicion that we are biased in favor of . . . subordinate parties whenever we tell the story from their point of view . . . when[ever] we assume for the purposes of our research that subordinates have as much right to be heard as superordinates, that they are as likely to be telling the truth as they see it as superordinates. [In other words] we provoke the charge of bias in ourselves and others by refusing to give credence and deference to an established status order in which knowledge of truth and the right to be heard are not equally distributed (p. 4).
Simply stated, official denial of ritual abuse is taken more seriously than unofficial claims of it. Individuals being accused of ritual abuse often represent “the Establishment.” They are superordinates, and the victims testifying to experiences of ritual abuse are subordinates.
It’s easy to see how, if we lend credence to authority figures over non-authority figures, this works in the favor of those who abuse power, and thereby cements the structures of power abuse. Such is the way of “the world.”
(The degree that this has been inverted via both “woke” and “conspiracy consciousness”—in which authority is automatically distrusted, victims automatically believed—seems to represent more of a reflexive pendulum-swing than a true corrective.)
Scott also quotes sociologist Ken Plummer: “The power to tell a story, or indeed to not tell a story, under the conditions of one’s own choosing, is part of the political process” (p. 5, emphasis added).
Political power, the establishment of it, the maintenance of it, the changing of it, all comes down to who creates the dominant narratives, and whose story is going to be believed. One of the things that prevents people from taking ritual abuse seriously is that it’s not “believable.” This is because the narrative around it, though it may be coherent in itself, does not fit with the dominant narrative, hence it seems incoherent in relation to it.
True, these accounts sometimes are incoherent, in and of themselves; but this raises another essential point: traumatization, particularly when caused in a ritualistic fashion (which can deliberately use elements that seem anomalous or “supernatural”), reduces the coherence of the victim’s account, and frequently even impairs their ability to remember what happened.
If the victim cannot make the experience coherent in their own awareness, naturally they cannot turn it into a coherent narrative for others.
Narrative Wars
In his concern with responses to youth culture, Stan Cohen renders morality a property of a middle-aged and middle-class status quo. By contrast, in the indignant crusade against “the ritual abuse moral panic,” one can observe a particular left libertarian morality at work. . . . The difficulty is that while child abuse is said to have identifiable psychological effects, those same “symptoms” can be used as grounds for skepticism about people’s stories of how they got that way (p. 49, 52).
Think of the cliché of the crazy paranoid in the bar. The stories he is telling seem improbable to us, more improbable because he is so obviously paranoid, and appears deranged. And yet, if his stories are true, then he is paranoid with good reason. Nonetheless, the fact remains: the drunk lacks authority, and so he lacks credibility.
To those that have, more will be given; those that have not, shall lose even the little that they have.
Those who have authority, maintain authority via the narratives they create—both to establish and to secure their authority. The narrators of reality define the terms for what is plausible, what is real, and what is rational. They are “the experts.”
Being in a position of authority automatically renders a person more trustworthy. This is based on the idea that you have to be trustworthy to achieve power and status in society. Even if we know, at a conscious level, that this isn’t true, at a deeper, less conscious level, we may still tend to assume, without thinking it through, that high status = authority = trustworthiness = credibility.
This is the “consensus” view of things. There is now an anti-consensus view, as mentioned above, that tends to believe the opposite; yet weirdly, like all negative positions perhaps, it is both reinforced by and props up the original consensus view.
One central problem with accounts of ritual abuse is as follows: for so extreme a narrative to be believed, it has to convincingly rewrite the dominant narrative that it flies in the face of. Mere opposition cannot do this, any more than denying an accusation of guilt can prove our innocence. The original, dominant narrative must be re-examined and shown to be false.
If the stories of ritual abuse survivors are given the opportunity to be considered in terms of their verisimilitude, this may serve to keep the door open to seeking—in particular cases—the cooperative testimony and forensic evidence that will satisfy the “truth-tests” of courts of law (p. 7).
The question of verisimilitude—the veracity of a narrative—hinges on two things: whether a narrative is convincing, and whether its narrator seems reliable. Both questions are highly subjective, but this is perhaps especially so with the question of how trustworthy a person is. Clearly, this can’t be reduced to a science.
At the same time, there are certain elements that we would expect to be present if an account of ritual abuse were true. One element, paradoxically and tragically, is that, if the narrator is the victim of abuse, they are going to be damaged, and this is likely to impair their ability to narrate their experience.
The relationship of superordinate to subordinate is “baked into” the dynamics of ritual abuse: the victims are subordinates, rendered powerless by the abuse, and hence less credible.
The most painful and palpable example of this is the abuse of children. Children’s vulnerability makes them victims, and their victimization makes them vulnerable, on into adulthood—because their development is inevitably arrested by abuse.
If you hijack someone’s ability to tell the difference between real and unreal by traumatizing them, they are going to be less credible as witnesses when it comes to testifying to what was done to them.
Yet ritual abuse describes, in very bold terms, something that’s occurring to all of us, in much subtler, smaller ways. This is why the subject is so fundamental to understanding “the world”; and why it is, of all the areas of criminality, the least understood.
Christians & Satanists: Another False Dichotomy?
The possibility that there may be both unwarranted panic about Satanism or ritual abuse in specific contexts and real experiences of ritual abuse, or even satanic ritual abuse, seems not to have been considered (p. 44).
As discussed in the recent post, “A Blueprint for Social Engineering,” we’re trained to think in binaries, that something is true or false, never both. In many cases, this is of course the case: either the Earth is round or it’s not. There are plenty of statements or interpretations that we can say, “The opposite of this cannot also be true.” But for the majority of cases, things are not so simple.
Do Christians abuse children or do Satanists? Clearly, it’s not either/or. The existence of black cats does not mean that all cats are black or all things black are cats. In the same way, there’s no reason to think that ritual abuse is either real, or the result of “moral panic” (of exaggerated fears or literalized interpretations of subtler things that are occurring). It is almost undeniably both.
Ritual abuse is happening, fact number one. Fact number two is that there’s a moral panic in reaction to it, and that this sometimes causes people investigating to leap to conclusions, even to fabricate evidence. Perhaps they do this in desperation, to prove something they know is real, and so are justified in their own minds. (Think of movies in which a basically honest detective “frames” someone he knows is guilty of a crime.)
From this perspective, the “moral panic” confirms the existence of ritual abuse, rather than disproves it. We would expect people, especially Christians, to panic and react in such ways, if ritual abuse were discovered to be happening.
The “satanic panic” argument, however, is that Christians panic over nothing and fabricate evidence whole-cloth. This leaves unanswered the question of where such behavior comes from. The assumption is that Christians, indoctrinated to fear the devil, invent wild stories without knowing they’re doing it, or that they simply “hallucinate” demons. (See the execrable Ethan Hawke film Regression, if you can stomach it.) Essentially, this view depends on a foregone conclusion: that Christians are crazy, gullible, and unreliable as witnesses.2
In fact, there are unquestioned assumptions on both sides: Christians who believe in Satan, and that satanic groups exist, see some evidence and do not question it because it reinforces beliefs they already have. On the other side of the cultural divide, the same occurs: secular materialist-rationalists, who already think that Christians are half-crazy—and that a belief in Satan is proof of it—have their beliefs confirmed by the idea of a “satanic panic.”
It might be argued that to believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God, with a limited Satan as opponent, is a symptom of a failure in logic, requiring a kind of doublethink that can be crazy-making. I don’t entirely disagree with the secular point of view here, just as I don’t entirely fault Christians’ tendency to presume that satanic ritual abuse is happening, based on only circumstantial evidence, since it does happen all the time.
(Over the Paywall: the much-ignored distinction between child abuse with occult-trappings and occultism that involves child abuse; Crowley, & why the term “pedophile” muddies the water; Satanists as rebelling Christians; the author’s tryst with Lucifer.)
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