Individuation Through Violence: The Psycho-Historical Underpinnings of Occult Ritual Abuse & Sacrifice
Changing Images of Satan, Part 2
Reading The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief, by Sara Scott.
All artwork by Kim Noble
Audio version for paid subbers at the end of piece.
Carnality & Community Binding
Protestant reformers successfully promoted a version of religion based on commitment to scripture-based beliefs in “reading” religion, displacing the “carnal knowing” which in medieval Christianity took the form of “communities of bodily interaction bound together through ritual eating.” [T]he late 20th century witnessed a retreat from the cognitive and rational and a resurgence of “sensual solidarities.” [French sociologist Michel] Maffesoli’s vision of “postmodern tribes” “keeping warm together,” [emphasizes] the fact that “the need for meaning” can just as easily incorporate envy, violence, and hate. The “warmth” of common identity can be generated through the shared “pleasures” of persecution, gang rape, or the “joy of killing.” “The sacred can be nasty, unpleasant and terrifying as well as glorious and salvational. If life is generally brutish and short then intimations of the totality of that life through the collective effervescence of the sacred are likely to reflect that reality.” . . . Scarry argues that beliefs of a religious sort which have no basis in the material world can borrow from the compelling reality of the sensorily experienced body. For Scarry, well-named, it is part of the “civilizing process” that alternatives have gradually been provided to this bodily form of verification. Human sacrifice is replaced with animal sacrifice, which is in turn replaced with the crucifix as a symbolic representation of sacrifice (Scott, p. 96, emphasis added).
Sara Scott’s book goes further than any I have read into the psycho-historical underpinnings of occult ritual abuse and sacrifice. It describes how a community binds itself together through ritual, and how particularly powerful binding rituals involve carnality. The more embodied the ritual, the more binding, hence ritual eating together (which everyone practices) and ritual sacrifice and violence (which most do not).
Sacrifice is to make sacred. The idea of the sacred in a community, Scott suggests, is that which binds the community together and allows it to experience itself as one organism. By losing a sense of separateness inside community consciousness, the community member becomes one with the body of the community, with life, and with God.
Sacrifice = make sacred by killing.
Insignias of the Regime
Obviously, this relates to the body, and perhaps to the fact that the body is the thing that most palpably does make us separate. Scott continues:
In times of crisis and uncertainty, the body’s role may return, providing, as it does in torture regimes, proof of the power of the regime. For torturers, the vision of suffering is converted into a convincing spectacle of power—the realness of the pain is borrowed and its incontestableness is conferred on the power that brought it into being. The experience and infliction of pain are central to ritual abuse. An experience of torture is the bedrock of belief in survivors’ accounts. [P]ain is an absolute reality and certainty to the sufferer. It leaves spaces for little else. The structure of torture facilitates the leap from the immediate experience of pain to its objectification in the “insignia of the regime,” making the link seem natural and inevitable. [T]he body in pain [is] productive of belief for both torturers and their victims, but in different ways for each. [T]orture is always accompanied by words, interrogation, usually providing an official justification for the practice. For the victim, the pain is hugely real and the questions and statements of belief unreal, while for the torturer the opposite is true (p. 96-97).
A number of Scott’s subjects “believed that they began to be formally taught about an occult belief system in their mid-teens,” but “resisted the teaching, associating such knowledge with an increasingly abusive adult role within the cult” (ibid.).
They perceived a difference between belief produced through the pain of torture, she writes, and “the more systematic cognitive belief system they associated with their abusers—a system substantiated, made flesh, through their suffering” (ibid.).
Soldiers speak of how facing death together in battle creates a kind of bond that is unlike any other. It is easy to see how being part of a ritual with other individuals, committing ritualistic acts of murder, is going to bind those individuals together, for life.
In terms of what’s publicly sanctioned, such a basic way of experiencing ourselves as part of a tribe, and as part of the divine—as more than just our separate mind-selves and our “meat vessels”—has become less and less tangible, less visceral, and less literalized, over time. Millions (billions?) of people go to Catholic Mass to consume the communion wafer and stare at the crucifix. Whether it’s psychedelics or the Eucharist, people do all kinds of things together to lose themselves in a communal experience. But always, the body is central.
To eat together, ingesting the same thing at the same time, is one way of making our bodies more alike. To kill together takes this a few drastic steps further: we’re now tearing apart another body with our own bodies.
If a sense of separation comes with being “in” a body, the using our bodies together, in congruence, to destroy other bodies and consume them, is a way to counteract that. Thus the most “classic”—and lurid—satanic ritual is the killing and the devouring of a baby.
Tortured Narratives
In times of crisis and uncertainty, times of liminality, when the old structures and beliefs are no longer holding up, more intense kinds of rituals are required. The binary opposition—or schismogenesis—that occurs in liminal times can cause the community to destroy itself from within. A scapegoat must be found, and the rituals must become more carnal, more devouring.
While this doesn’t appear to be a prevalent part of modern secular society, what is prevalent is torture. Since 9/11, torture has become a main ingredient of Western popular cultural narratives, so common it’s now taken for granted. Torture is (depicted as) a necessary part of maintaining order.
Torture is presented in popular entertainment, and generally understood, as a means to extract information; Scott’s understanding is that torture in ritual abuse, tellingly, serves the very opposite purpose, and acts as a means to imprint the victim with meaning, and thereby turn them into carriers. It may be that this is true of more “conventional,” state-sanctioned torture also. It is often remarked that torture is unreliable for information-gathering, and that it works significantly better as a means to create “terrorist” and anti-State actors.
As Scott writes, to inflict torture on another body is the ultimate means of asserting a narrative. This is the narrative. This is how real the narrative is, that it can cause you to think about nothing else but the agony being inflicted upon you.
Perversely, this can also be seen as a kind of transcendence, transcendence through pain and suffering. This idea is central to Christian, as well as Native American, rituals. In these cases, transcendence is not for the abuser but for the victim, via the self-sacrifice of submitting to torture, in order to transcend one’s identity.
Sans the transcendence, this is the same thing a ritual abuser is attempting to do to their victims: to torture them, destroy their identity, and replace it with a new one, essentially the abuser’s own identity. (The abused identify with their abusers, as a means to escape the unbearable horror of being tortured.)
This can be justified as a means of transcendence for both: I’m torturing you in order for you to transcend your identity, to “bind together the faith community in a shared experience of transcendence” (Scott, p. 135).
And apparently, in satanic groups, as well as shamanic ones, members sometimes do volunteer to be ritually killed. But even those who are forced into it are often told their sacrifice is meaningful, “for the good of all.”
When not being killed but raped and tortured, allegedly, victims of ritual abuse are sometimes told that the abuse is the means by which Satan takes possession of them: that they’re giving themselves over to Satan (and/or to God), thereby becoming one not just with the community, but with the power that rules over that community.
By subjecting the body to the maximum amount of pain, the consciousness of victim and abuser become fused together into a single point. The goal is to create maximum intensity for the awareness of the organism, in order to transcend the limits of flesh, blood, and identity.
It is here that we find a clear correlation between occultist beliefs and goals and ritual abuse and sacrifice. Not only are the ends the same, but even the means appear to converge at many points.
They might not be literally the same means—not every occultist practices ritual torture and sacrifice or rape, of course—but flooding the awareness out completely through intensity of one form or another, whether to become God-intoxicated and/or Satan possessed, would seem to be an indispensable element in all forms of occultism.
(Over the Paywall: the denial of death, crucial fictions, what is individuation through violence, secret satanic support networks)
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