Reading The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief, by Sara Scott.
All artwork by Kim Noble
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“The historical development of society is in many ways characterized by the fact that what at an earlier time was manifest, enters the protection of secrecy; and that conversely, what once was secret no longer needs such protection but reveals itself.” —Georg Simmel
Satan’s Masterpiece
Throughout this book I describe ritual abuse as occurring in opposition to, but also inside and continuous with, the societies of late modernity. Understanding this is crucial to making sense of survivors’ lives. The illegal international markets in pornography, drugs and child abuse with which ritual abusers are involved are 20th century creations. In addition, it can be argued that the very machinery of modernity—the increased mobility, anonymity and privacy of the individual, the separation of work, family and leisure (at least for a large number of middle-class men), the hiding away of death and violence from everyday life—may all enable abusive and secretive groups to thrive. At the same time, those practicing ritual abuse form rigid hierarchical patriarchal secret societies which are violently opposed to many aspects of late modernity—most particularly of course to any advances towards the emancipation of women and children (Scott, p. 137).
The above distinction strikes me as a key—not least because it may be causing confusion about whether “liberal-progressive ideologies” (“woke,” for short) and Satanism really are compatible, in terms of true (non-secular) Satanism.
On the surface, it seems as though they cannot be, and that “woke” can only be properly understood as a more (post-)modern means to an ancient end. That “anti-Patriarchal” ideologies, such as secular Satanism often seems to belong to, are but the latest machinations of (dark-side) Patriarchy.
Or: Big Mother is Satan in drag.
So then, are the supercultural shadow communities that are practicing barbaric rituals in secret trying to reconnect to—or keep alive—an archaic tradition? A primordial, predatory way of life that is savage and animalistic?
The philosophy of the Marquis de Sade included the idea that, since “everything is permitted” to animals, why not to human beings?
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. [C]ruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice (Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1795, Third Dialogue).
Satan represents the primal (in de Sade’s view = “natural”) self, the lusts of the flesh, and is symbolized by a goat. (As a frustrated goatherd, I can testify that the symbolism is correct.)
In stark contrast, Scott writes:
In almost a reversal of “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak;” it is the body which may be described as finally balking at the requirement to hurt or harm another as if morality were somehow rooted in the body (p. 138).
That true morality is in the body is a possibility that would have appalled de Sade. It is the body’s natural ability to be in tune with life, to respond to it spontaneously and truly, that constitutes morality, and (therefore) that ritual abuse—giving into the primal lusts—is designed to destroy.
The deSadian goal of primal Satanic sects is, like all things devilish, divided in itself: it is to return to a “purely” organic, physical expression; yet since its means are to traumatize the body, it actually prevents this from ever happening.
(Lust is a sin of the mind, not the body.)
The potential of these sorts of depraved ritualistic practices, however, is to become conscious of something that is buried deep within the unconscious, and one could say this is the only goal there is, spiritually speaking.
Hence, there is a kernel of logic, however distorted, inside of deSade’s philosophy of cruelty; but only insofar as it is possible to commit wrongs in order to become conscious of one’s unconscious drives to do so.
William Blake may have been pointing to this dangerous method with his “Proverbs of Hell,” which included “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” (Also, “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.”)1
This is the so-called left-hand path of transgression. Genuine spiritual individuation may entail elements of this process at a less extreme level. After all, if it were possible simply to take the (so-called) right-hand path of absolute moral adherence to spiritual truths, then organized religion would surely not have become the travesty (and mockery) that it has become.
Or invoked the dark shadow of patriarchal abuses.
Put more succinctly, if—as John de Ruiter once wrote in a sign outside his cobbler’s shop—“Christianity is Satan’s masterpiece,” then Satanism is Christianity’s guilty conscience.2
Making Sense of the Senseless
A human sacrifice is, I think by definition, something that can make little or no sense in secular or mundane terms. The closest terms might be those of a Mexican drug cartel, but even here the overlap with black magic rituals is still apparent.
A combination of being hard to stomach and hard to comprehend makes it all-too-easy for people to dismiss ritual abuse and human sacrifice to the realms of horror fiction or paranoid Christian fantasy. But what if the reason we can’t understand it is because we’ve also dismissed the ancient edifice of ideological tradition that makes sense of it, that requires human sacrifice to begin with?
(This is what makes Rene Girard’s conventional view of society and history so frustrating: if anyone could have understood satanic ritual abuse in the 20th and the 21st centuries, if would have been Girard.)
Viewing such activities through a wholly secular lens leads to the unavoidable conclusion that anyone practicing such things must be barking mad. This is obviously an inadequate explanation, however, because—outside of their satanic practices, in their “above-ground” ordinary lives—these people do not appear insane in any obvious way (just as Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy did not appear insane).
In any event, the debunkers of ritual abuse are not saying that it is being perpetrated by insane people; they’re saying it’s not happening at all, and that the people who think it is are the crazy ones. To these doubters, not only does it not make sense for people to be doing such things; it doesn’t make sense that people could believe it happens at all.
Dismissal of organized ritual abuse as “satanic panic” is a bit like the denial of the unconscious: if you’re not conscious of it, it’s not there, and what evidence there is of it, is unreal (dreams, fantasies). If all we are is what we think we are, what we say we are, and what we can remember doing, then anything that doesn’t support that “narrative” must be unreal.
By definition, our conscious identity is made up of the parts that are accessible to us, as memories and beliefs. We can hypothesize the existence of the unconscious—we have to, if we look at the evidence—but we continue to act as if it were not actually real.
In a certain sense, this is true: “the unconscious” cannot exist for us, because, the moment we become conscious of it (something in it), it is no longer “the unconscious.” (A bit like using “UFO” as a form of identification.)
Logically, to believe that anything we don’t remember didn’t happen is absurd. We don’t remember everything that happened throughout human history either —in fact, hardly anything—and thus history only exists for most people as either a source of nostalgia or a cautionary tale: “This is how crazy and fucked up human beings once were. We could go back to that! Beware!”
This is very different from actually remembering our history, our ancestry, which would entail remembering it as a lived reality, not just as some primitive, atavistic belief, or regressive practice. And when the past isn’t real to us, any residue of it found in the present can only be a hallucination: a throwback.
From such a “forward-thinking” perspective, human sacrifice can only be understood—in terms of the present—as a fantasy-fiction.
(Over the Paywall: Misunderstanding D.I.D., The Unthinkability of Evil, The Community of the Psyche: An Internal Rashomon Effect)
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