Ahistorical Legends.
Early narratives of satanic abuse were typically ahistorical; the satanists simply were, with no mention of where or when they came from. The rootlessness of the satanic abuse fable is symptomatic of its religious origins --even today, in Buchanan's unpublished 1994 narrative, the existence of satanists needs no more justification than that they are part of the Devil's plan to conquer the world (ch5 39). (1) More secular satanic believers use historical accounts of sacrificial cannibalism to construct an origin story to support their beliefs, evidently untroubled that the existence of secret groups of subversive cannibals is even less plausible in the past than today.
Types of cannibal legends.
In "The Demonology of Satanism: An Anthropological View," Phillips Stevens states that legends of an inhumanly evil group or ideology "that is inexorably undermining society's most cherished values and institutions" are "universally standard" in human cultures (21-22). From Rhodesian banyama or vampire-men (27) to Hansel and Gretel, he notes that the legends show just how inhumanly evil these imaginary groups are by depicting them as child murdering, human sacrificing cannibals (24). Stevens shows that in addition to appearing in superstitions and folktales about monsters, these legends commonly surface in zenophobic beliefs about enemies and outsiders (28). Indeed, accusations of sacrificial cannibalism "at one time or another [have] been applied by someone to every human group" (28). Yet the commonality of the legends is completely out of proportion to the actual prevalence of such customs. Stevens emphasizes that "human sacrifice is actually very rare" (25, his italics) and that (almost always necrophagic) "cannibalism is extremely rare" (28-29).
The legends Stevens discusses are related to but less extreme than fables of satanic abuse today. Legends of murderous cannibals, whether called satanists, witches, or vampires, are, as Stevens points out, ubiquitous. They differ, however, in the kind of people the legend sees as being murderous cannibals. In the following discussion, I extrapolate from Stevens and from two historians, Gavin Langmuir and Norman Cohn. I call the legendary cannibals Stevens talks about "superstitions," and imaginary satanic abusers "chimeria." In between these two are people made into cannibals through "propaganda." The three types blend into one another, forming a continuum.
Stevens's examples are mostly of superstitions--stories that do not apply to the (real) material world but to an (imaginary) magical one, although the storyteller may be unable to distinguish the two. It would be hard to confuse witches with normal people because witches, (by Stevens' definition), are magical creatures with magical powers and limitations that are unlike the mundane abilities of humans (26); witches float, humans sink. Since no such magical creatures exist, it is hard to accuse a real person of being a witch except through a failure in the accuser's ability to distinguish the real mundane from the imaginary magical.
Stevens argues that superstitious legends become "witch hunts"--that the distinction breaks down--in times of "intolerable social stress" (22), a frustratingly vague and inadequate anthropological term. He implies that during "stress," geographic or social outsiders are accused of being the magical cannibals of legend. Mundane people are confused with (imaginary) magical creatures, and blamed for causing the "stress" through their magical deeds, the evil of which are symbolized by the sacrificial cannibalism of children. Excepting the more rabid religious narratives, this is not what is happening in the satanic abuse fable, where the satanists are imagined to be mundane people, inhuman only in their evil.
Zenophobic superstitions about geographic outsiders can easily become wartime propaganda. In medieval maps, as the known mundane world faded into magical territory, the edges became populated with dragons and sea serpents. Outsiders from the edge of or beyond the known were automatically not human and half magical, like Homer's man-eating cyclopes. Since the wartime "enemy" is by definition monstrous and inhuman, and real atrocities are all too common in war, accusations of sacrifice or cannibalism are a small step. Roman historians spread rumors that Rome's enemy Carthage made burnt offerings of children to their gods (Buttrick 4:154)--and the Carthaginians' rebuttal, along with any objective evidence, was lost when Rome destroyed Carthage and razed it. Cultural outsiders are not immune: the Biblical book of Jeremiah alleges that the Babylonian conquest and exile was in part due to a group of backsliding Israelites who worshipped false gods and offered them their children (Jer 7.30-34). As with Carthage, any rebuttals or independent narratives no longer exist, leaving only an account with little devotion to the truth and much to a political and polemical agenda.
Propagandistic claims of sacrifice or cannibalism differ from superstitions in one vital regard. As with satanic abuse, the accused are mundane humans, inhuman only in their evil, and not magical beings; accusations can appear without a confusion of magical fantasy and mundane reality. However, the satanic abuse chimeria is perpetuated by true believers who seem unaware of the political effect of their claims, while propaganda, by definition, may or may not be believed by its teller and has an overt agenda in mind. In addition, satanic abusers are unreal, literally chimeras, while the subjects of propaganda do exist.
(Mis)interpreting cannibal legends.
The historical naivete of satanic believers allows them to use examples of propagandistic and even superstitious allegations of murder and cannibalism from anthropology and history to theorize about and bolster their belief in satanic abuse. Feldman is typical in her creation of an historical context (and implicitly, a corroboration) for her patient's stories of a twentieth century American family of infant sacrificing cannibals (Lessons in Evil 199-202). Not only does Feldman conflate infanticide with human sacrifice (199), but some of the peoples she names, like the extinct Aztecs, are not a root of or influence on Western European culture. A moderate grounding in history would in addition tell Feldman that Spanish sources on the Aztecs and Biblical ones on the Canaanites, her two detailed examples, were written by enemies or conquerors who saw the people they were describing as subhuman and ungodly, and who had every reason to be biased.
In what is cited as a definitive work on the subject, Norman Cohn sets out the two thousand year process by which specific superstitious and propagandistic allegations evolved into a chimerical "satanism" in Europe's Inner Demons, an in depth work of primary scholarship that examines the genesis of the Renaissance and Reformation era witch hunts and the later evolution of the idea, born of poor and biased scholarship, that those witch hunts had grown out of the genuine existence of covens of devil worshiping "witches." I will discuss these origins at length because they form illuminating parallels with the satanic abuse fable, and because satanic believers base their history on misinterpretations of the same material.
Christian cannibals.
Cohn writes that in the second century CE, a new religion called Christianity, which many Romans viewed with alarm, began to spread in the empire. It advocated what were seen as subversive values--in particular, its followers refused to worship the emperor and the other gods who were thought to protect Rome and ensure Roman order and stability. Such a group of atheists, some Romans thought, must be conspiring to overthrow the government (Cohn 12-13), a view seemingly confirmed by the rituals of the cult.
The central ritual of this apparently subversive cult was the consumption of what the cultists called the body and blood of their founder. To a Roman, the ritual called to mind a stereotype about subversives that had been appearing since Cataline's conspiracy in 63 BCE, that members of a conspiracy against the state sealed their oaths by murdering or sacrificing someone (usually a child) and eating the entrails or drinking the blood (6-7).
Cohn's discussion makes it clear that in Rome, Steven's "universally standard" legend of sacrifice and cannibalism had been so often used for propaganda that it became a stereotypic, automatic, even generic accusation against believed traitors or subversives, perhaps comparable to the label "communist" in cold war America. Christianity might have been attacked as a cannibalistic conspiracy regardless of its rituals, but its central ritual happened to be a domesticated reenactment of the standard legend. The real existence of the Eucharistic ceremony transformed, for Romans, a routine cliche about subversives into a credible statement of fact. Christians wrapped infants in bread dough, then stabbed them to death, drinking the blood and eating the flesh (Cohn 1).
Romans thought that after the grisly feast, Christian rituals ended with an indiscriminate, even incestuous, orgy. Incest and "ritual sex" are essential motifs in satanic abuse fables, but are not present in the standard legend (Stevens). Cohn thinks incest (condemned as unnatural sex between related adults rather than as abuse of children) was added to the Roman stereotype in 186 BCE, when the senate banned the Bacchanalia as a subversive threat. Naturally, Bacchans were later accused of human sacrifice; Cohn quotes Livy claiming that if some Bacchans were "reluctant to commit crimes, they were sacrificed as victims" (Cohn 10). The Bacchanalia was seen as an orgiastic revel that Roman leaders found almost as shocking as the idea of human sacrifice, and so over time "erotic orgies of a more or less perverted kind [came to belong] to the stereotype of a revolutionary conspiracy against the state" (11).
Again, Christian rituals happened to contain elements that turned a cliched accusation into a seemingly real assertion. Christians practiced an agape or love-feast (10), called each other brothers and sisters, and had a motto of brotherly love. The same literal-mindedness that had turned Eucharistic bread into an eaten baby in Roman imagination transformed metaphors of a new, universal religious community into incestuous orgies.
Stevens's abstract "intolerable social stress" is not adequate to explain a centuries-long habit of accusations-- perpetual accusations would require an unlikely perpetual state of "intolerable" social instability. Cohn's suggestion--of a more or less deliberate propaganda campaign, in which Roman writers interpreted Christians as evil, then looked for data that fit Christians into their stereotype of what evil groups were like (Cohn 15)--while likely, cannot explain the Romans' constant recourse to the same tired accusations for each new "subversive" group that appeared. The Roman development of sacrificial cannibals into a stereotype created a mold that gave later Christian allegations a coherency throughout the middle ages--which in turn created such a fixed stereotype that today's satanic abuse fables, from satanic victims on The Geraldo Riviera Show to peer-reviewed case studies, seem to have all come from the same cookie cutter.
Rome's willy-nilly growth from a village ruled by an aristocracy into a militaristic empire ruled by a dictator created profound social changes that rendered traditional arrangements increasingly unworkable. As a result, Romans were constantly nostalgic for an imagined glorious past and concerned by the supposed degenerate state of the present. Romans saw change as such a threat to stability and harmony that Livy's term for revolutionary political change, novare res, literally meant "to make new things." Change was a subversion that could topple civilization--something so unthinkably evil that only allegations of unthinkable acts like infant murder, people eating, and incest were adequate to explain or account for it. Satanic abuse fables are a similar reactionary response to analogous social changes (the increasing visibility of previously hidden differences in class, race, and sex) that are rendering the patriarchal family increasingly unnecessary.
Heretical cannibals.
The original anti-Christian rumors did not survive later Christian censorship very well, but a number of early church apologists wrote detailed refutations of them (Cohn 1-2). Two centuries later, Christianity became the Empire's official religion, and "heresy" became possible. There were attacks on groups that seemed a threat to the established power structure, power struggles between groups, and intense theological disagreements over what was the (presumed one and only) way to achieve heaven. Cohn shows that such struggles became propaganda campaigns that copied even trivial details (such as that lamps were extinguished before the orgy) of the earlier anti-Christian stereotype of sacrifice, cannibalism, and incestuous orgies, and that such propaganda was appearing in the Eastern Empire (which never fell) as late as the eighth century (Cohn 16-19). In the west, Rome's fall precluded an organized church powerful enough to persecute doctrinal difference for several centuries. Through the ninth century, Western Christianity was Catholic in name only, as each ethnic group (Franks, Germans, etc.) adopted a theology that did not conflict too greatly with their old traditions (Langmuir ch4).
By the eleventh century, however, Catholicism--a sect that saw the Pope as the supreme spiritual leader of all Christians, above the power of local kings--was trying to realize its previously theoretical power. Along with declaring the first Crusade at the end of the century, the Papacy convened a Church council in 1049, which declared that "heresy was rampant throughout Gaul" (Langmuir 90). In addition, for the first time in the west for 700 years, a group of "heretics" at Orleans were burned at the stake in 1022 (Langmuir 117). Their trial contained no accusations of sacrificial cannibalism, but within a few years accounts appeared claiming that the now dead heretics had worshiped the Devil, eaten children, and practiced "every kind of vice"--vices that by the end of the century had grown in the telling into incestuous orgies that were preceded (as in the Eastern and Roman allegations) by extinguishing the lights (Cohn 20-22).
Like sacrificial cannibalism and sex, the Devil, whose personal appearance at heretical ceremonies was taken for granted, quickly became a fixture of antiheretical writing. An anthropomorphic Satan was the ultimate bogeyman for medieval Christians, someone who hid in every shadow and constantly tempted and tormented even the most pious at every moment (Cohn ch4). He was responsible for all attacks on Christianity--for the existence of Islam, the survival outside Europe of paganism, and, of course, heresy. With Satan's constant appearance in antiheretical writings, propaganda and superstition began to blend. In 1233, the propagandists' superstitious truth claims were accepted as true when a Papal bull defined heretics as devil worshiping sacrificial cannibals who practiced "promiscuous, incestuous, often homosexual" orgies (Cohn 29-30)--even though many of the sects so accused in fact subscribed to total chastity (Cohn ch2-3).
Some of those who spread tales of heretical devil worship were fanatics with an idee fixe, others were merely passing on what they had read or heard. A few were cynical manipulators--like Philip the Fair of France, who in 1307 accused the Knights Templar, a wealthy order of military monastics founded during the crusades, of satanism so that he could confiscate their property to finance another war with England (Cohn ch5). By the 1400's, genuine belief in the superstitious propaganda by otherwise sane people was so taken for granted that accused heretics began to be indicted as "murderous, adulterous, incestuous" (Cohn 48), and routinely asked, under torture of course, about their devil worship, baby murdering, and orgiastic ceremonies (Cohn 52).
Medieval superstitions about heretics were slowly developing the motifs found in modern satanic abuse fables. Furthermore, the medieval superstition and the modern fable were developing through similar methods. Today, unusual, trivial, and precise details appearing in early satanic abuse narratives recur in later ones, evidently with no awareness of copying. The literary tradition of satanic abuse narratives is analogous to the medieval literary tradition of antiheretical writing. A group of eighth century Armenian heretics were accused of murdering the infants produced in their orgies by tossing them from hand to hand until they died; the person holding the infant at the moment of its death became the new leader of the group (Cohn 18, 49). A 12th century French writer attributed the same unusual method of baby killing to a different sect in France (49). Later the same method of infanticide and of choosing a leader was applied to yet another group in fifteenth century northern Italy (49, 53). A literary tradition that began as half-believed propaganda was copied and recopied until, its original intent and context forgotten, it was accepted as literally true.
I believe the medieval preoccupation with heretics, like the Roman one with subversion, is analogous to the use today of satanic abuse fables to demonize difference. Heretics were nonconformists, people who refused to obey or give allegiance to the Pope. Eliminating nonconformists was eradicating difference. Dehumanizing heretics by saying they practiced sacrificial cannibalism on infants conceived through "sinful" orgies not only made the need to eradicate them more vivid, it emphasized their total difference and irreconcilable nonconformity. As the Catholic Church increased its hegemony, the definition of nonconformist expanded to include Jews, ritual sorcerers, and finally the chimerical "witches."
Jewish cannibals.
In Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, Gavin Langmuir shows that anti-Jewish propaganda developed separately from anti-heretical propaganda, without stories of sacrificial cannibalism. Heretics were persecuted for turning against the Church, Jews for not being part of the Church. However, as heretics began to be executed by secular and clerical courts, Jews began to be lynched by mobs. Moreover, the first lynching of Jews occurred during the first crusade of 1096--like heretics, they were victims of the Church's campaign to consolidate its power by enforcing conformity. Fifty years after that first lynching, legends of sacrifice, evidently copied from anti-heretical propaganda, began to be attributed to Jews.
In England in 1144, a child was found dead in the woods. Local monks alleged that he had been killed by Jews; one wrote a book claiming that the Jews had crucified him, and that they "annually conspired to crucify a Christian child at Easter or Passover" as an insult to Jesus (Langmuir 240). Twenty years later, in France, the legend had become so "true" that Louis VII's seneschal burnt thirty-one Jews for killing a child, even though no body had been found (Langmuir 241).
Accusations of cannibalism were not far behind; in Germany in 1235, millers returned from Christmas mass to find their mill burnt down and their five sons dead in the ruins. Three days later, thirty-four local Jews were lynched. Supposedly the Jews had killed the boys and drained their blood into waxed bags (264). This propaganda quickly evolved into the legend that Jews used Christian blood and flesh for Passover rituals (Langmuir 266).
Witch hunts.
Another group of nonconformists were educated 13th and 14th century men who tried to summon demons. Devout Christians, these "ritual sorcerers" believed that a faithful person could, through the proper invocations of God's name, enslave and command demons as Jesus supposedly had, both gaining power for themselves and striking a blow against Satan. Belief that humans could overpower the Devil did not sit well with the medieval view of Satan as an evil force perpetually threatening to overrun the world, and the Church quickly attacked ritual magicians for engaging in pacts with Satan (Cohn ch9). In the early 1300's, before the black death, accusations of ritual sorcery became a common weapon in power struggles among literate clergy and aristocracy. At first, however, ritual magicians were not accused of sacrificial cannibalism (Cohn ch10). (2)
The chimeria of "the witch," like the satanic abuse chimeria today, was a complex amalgam of several sources. Today, the propaganda of fundamentalists opposed to difference and convinced of the reality of the devil has combined with a simplistic approach to therapy and mental illness to create belief in a nonexistent group of satanic child abusers. Five centuries ago, belief in "witches" grew out of the elaborate legends among clergy of heretical sacrificial cannibalism and of ritual magic, together with two folk beliefs. Common people and secular law had believed in maleficia--mundane people who used magical incantations to effect evil--since before Christianity. An equally old superstitious legend, not believed by rulers, held that there were magical creatures who lived as mundane women by day, but at night flew through the air: some, servants of Diana, performed good deeds in organized groups, while others, called strigae, drank people's blood and snatched children to eat (Cohn ch11).
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the black death killed a third of Europe's population, an event that must have made Satan seem more vividly threatening than ever. Satan's increased presence in people's minds not only made eliminating nonconformity more important, it also further broke down logical distinctions between the magical and mundane. Clergy began to take folk beliefs in magical flying women seriously, confusing Diana's servants with strigae and seeing both imaginary groups as mundane women empowered by Satan to fly through the air for evil purposes (Cohn 217). People accused of ritual sorcery had previously been literate clergy who would have been able to read and understand a book of sorcery; now, irrationally, they began to be unlearned, possibly illiterate lay people, even women (less likely to be literate than men of the same class), and their sorcerous deeds began to look less like summoning demons and more like maleficium (Cohn 197-205).
Finally, in the 1420s, routine questioning (under torture as usual) of some suspected Alpine heretics about cannibalism elicited folktales of striges. Rather than ignore the stories as superstitious nonsense, inquisitors asked for more details; the resulting "confessions" were a nearly mature version of the witch chimeria, in which the "witch" made a pact with Satan like a ritual sorcerer for the powers of a maleficia, flew like a strigae to sabbats (at first called, significantly, "synagogues"), where she worshiped Satan like a legendary heretic, as usual eating infants and having orgiastic sex with demons (Cohn 225-228).
By the end of the century, hundreds of people had been burnt as sabbat-going witches, and the legend had been codified in Malleus Maleficarum (1486) and other witch-hunting manuals. Unlike heretics or Jews, however, no such group of sabbat-going, devil worshiping witches existed. The idea of "witches" was a chimeria, a completely imaginary nonconformist evil. As such, the legend easily conformed to the witch hunters' personal prejudices. At first, inquisitors wanted to know about men, particularly community leaders, who were "witches" (Cohn 230). By the end of the 1400's, it was women, especially poor women, who were seen as "witches."
The height of the witch hunt occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the Reformation. Luther and Calvin shattered Rome's hegemony; to Catholics, heresy had destroyed the Church at last, while to Protestants, the true church was in perpetual danger of being destroyed again by Popery. The response on the part of all the various sects was a series of vicious religious wars, and also an even greater intolerance for difference--and the imaginary "witches" were difference incarnate. Only with a gradual realization that the heretics were here to stay, and a lessening belief, thanks to the Enlightenment, in the supernatural and magical, did the witch hunts die out.
Catholic cannibals.
But belief in a secret conspiracy of infanticidal cannibals is hard to kill. The religious wars that taught France and Germany a certain degree of tolerance did not touch America, where Catholics were so scarce they were more legends of bogeymen on the edge of the map than a real outgroup. By 1830, however, Irish immigrants had arrived in significant numbers, spawning an anti-Catholic "nativist" movement (the name ignores of course real Native Americans). Ray Billington's The Origins of Nativism states that hatred of Irish Catholics came to be directed against nunneries, and a convent near Boston was burnt down by a mob in 1834. Two years later, Maria Monk wrote The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Convent of Montreal. This propaganda novel was a bestseller among nativists and gave Monk, an unwed mother, respectability otherwise unobtainable.
Monk claimed to be a former nun and wrote that after taking her final vows, she learned, to her "astonishment and horror," that nuns are expected to allow the priests to have sex with them (Monk 56). Children conceived in this way are born, baptized, and then strangled, in order to "secure [their] everlasting happiness" in heaven (Monk 58). Threats of death force the horrified Maria to acquiesce (60).
Monk describes supposed impiety and cruelty, but her main focus is sex. It seems there is a secret underground tunnel from the seminary to the convent (145), allowing the priests access to the nuns without arousing suspicion. Monk tells us the perversions of the priests were unspeakable, for "things were done worse than the entire exposure of the person" to the gaze of others (203-204). Pregnant nuns stay in special sick rooms (ch8), and after they are strangled, infants are thrown in a lime pit in the basement (94-95).
In addition, Monk makes a number of sinister allusions that are simply impenetrable. The room where priests live while on a sex holiday has an "instrument of surgery" in it that "is only used for particular purposes." Immediately before this cryptic statement we are told that while living there, priests diet on "vegetable soups, etc. with but little meat, and that fresh" (169-170). Perhaps we are to think that the priests supplement their diet with the flesh of nuns or infants. Eventually Maria becomes pregnant and escapes rather than see her child strangled.
Revival of the witch legend.
Around the same time in Europe, religious propaganda acted to resurrect belief in a secret society of sabbat- going witches. Karl Ernst Jarcke (in 1828) and Franz Joseph Mone (in 1839), both conservative Catholic historians, thought the witch hunts had been legitimate prosecutions of dangerous heretics. A scary pagan remnant among the sinister lower classes had supposedly taken on aspects of devil-worship (Cohn 103-105), leading to a "thoroughly evil conspiracy against the true . . . Church" (105).
Jarcke and Mone were influential. In late Victorian England, Aleister Crowley, disaffected with traditional Christianity, and assuming that the witch chimeria had been real, experimented with ritual magic and adapted various Asian religions. The result was a huge, contradictory body of mystical, poetic occult writings (Suster). In 1921, Margaret Murray, perhaps similarly disaffected, published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, an extraordinarily influential book: for thirty-nine years (1929-68) the Encyclopedia Britannica article on witchcraft was by Murray, who simply summarized herself (Cohn 107). She saw the witch chimeria as real, a holdover of pre-Christian paganism. In the 1930s, Dennis Wheatley founded his bestselling "black magic" thrillers on a selective reading of Crowley and on Murray's notion that there really were witches (Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out), and later authors and screenwriters followed his lead. The founders of the modern neo-pagan movement based their beliefs on Murray (Cohn 108) and their rituals on Crowley; when Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, he also drew on Crowley and on Murray's idea that there really had been witches (LaVey The Satanic Bible). The popular film and horror novel idea of satanism owes its existence to Murray and Crowley, while histories of satanism put together by believers in satanic abuse typically label Crowley an evil Satanist and draw on Murray or one of her followers in creating their history.
Dubious scholarship.
Feldman's history of Western satanism is typical among satanic believers. She cites popular histories and an essay by two satanic believers (76, 110). (The essay cites Murray's ideas as factual [Hicks In Pursuit of Satan 162-63].) Based on these sources, she claims that monotheism, especially Christianity, violently suppressed but never totally destroyed prehistorical pagan traditions, including witchcraft. Christians denounced these religions as worship of the devil, and over time that denunciation supposedly transformed the pagan and witchcraft remnants into Satanism (76-77), with the result that infant sacrificing satanic masses had been witnessed and described "as early as the fourth century" (111)--that is, the earliest anti-heretical propaganda. Despite her treatment of witches and satanists as synonymous in these pages, later Feldman asserts that the witch hunts were groundless exercises in prejudice and sexism (201).
Feldman's inconsistency is in line with Murray's research. Examining Murray's original sources, Cohn found that she selectively quoted out of context from the witch trial confessions that were the basis of her argument. She used ellipses to leave out a number of supernatural passages, giving the impression that the accused witches were being persecuted for being mundane heretics rather than magical witches (Cohn 110-115). With the magical passages restored, the confessions read not as rational statements of mundane heretics (an oxymoron in the inquisitors' minds), but as delirious attempts of tortured peasants to intuit what their inquisitors wanted to hear. Realizing that their tormentors wanted to hear about magic, the "confessors" babbled whatever local fairy tales came to mind (Cohn 203), from magical horses to the Queen of Fairie (114), which the inquisitors tried to fit into well established scripts of devil worship, orgies, and eating babies.
Popularity of legendary cannibals.
If the chimerical witch legend lives on in satanic abuse fables, antisemitic and nativist versions of the legend are equally enduring. Satanic victims typically claim that satanists include many educated, influential, and wealthy people, the "moneyed power" of society (Hicks "Police Pursuit" 380), a claim that resonates nicely with the imaginary "Jewish banking conspiracy." Nor are the myths of cannibalistic Jews dead. Debbie Nathan cites an Oprah Winfrey talk show in which a Jewish woman, with her Jewish therapist, claimed her parents had satanically abused her, and "added that Jewish families had been sacrificing babies since the 1700's" (Women 166).
Many satanic victims compare satanists to Nazis and themselves to Holocaust victims: this unwarranted equation probably minimizes anti-Semitic allegations. Echoes of nativist anti-Catholicism however, are more common. Pentacostalist Laura Buchanan thinks that her hometown's Catholic church was so completely controlled by satanists that murders were done there in the daytime on Easter, and the basement beneath was permanently set up as a "factory to process the corpses" (44, 47). Talk show satanic victim Cassandra Hoyer sincerely believes that the Roman Catholic orphanage where she grew up was run by satanists, saying that "the priests and nuns practiced Satanism, forcing the children to have sex with other kids and adults" (quoted in Hicks, In Pursuit of Satan 139).
Such explicit allegations against Catholics or Jews rarely appear in satanic abuse fables, however. Most often, satanic abuse narratives have a surface appearance of "political correctness," using feminist language and theory in therapy and in explaining the supposed abusers' motives as a "patriarchal" abuse of power. As a result, belief in satanic abuse has been endorsed by Ms. and by many individual feminists. Beneath the surface, however, satanic abuse is, at an indirect, unstated level, as much about eliminating cultural difference as the witch hunts were explicitly about eliminating doctrinal difference.