April 30th is recognized as Hexennacht by The Satanic Temple. This is a day to honour those whose lives have been affected or ended due to Satanic Panic and pseudoscience, and to reflect on the damage the Satanic Panic and pseudoscience has caused. I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the Satanic Panic of the 80s, and the trouble that it caused.

The Satanic Panic

Satanic Panic refers to events caused by moral panic, where people have made very rash judgements based on fears instead of facts. In our recent past,we can look at the events of the 1980s and a book called "Michelle Remembers" by Dr. Lawrence Pazder where he coined the term Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA).

While the book tries to legitimize SRA, and takes it very seriously, the entire concept is based on false allegations and vilification of an entire group of people made by few without any cited sources or proper proof - claims such as things like cannibalism, human sacrifices, child murder/torture, incest, pedophilia, etc. These claims end up being taken as hard fact by many, spread like wildfire, and work to absolutely destroy the innocent people that have been targeted.

In the height of the 1980s, SRA seminars and support groups were being held frequently. These events were often hosted by respected authority figures - police, psychiatrists, church groups, etc. The seminars would be hosted by somebody who would consider themself to be an expert in a field that was only just recently (at the time) created, and only became popular due to a book full of very poor claims. They would be attended by people believing the hysteria. Instead of trying to dispel the Satanic Panic myths, they would instead be used to further instill fear. People would share stories they'd heard as if they were logical and truthful, and as people mixed and mingled through more and more of these gathering, the rumours would spread further and faster. The only problem is, these stories were all unverified and unaccredited. Imagine listening to stories around a campfire but thinking you were hearing truths, then going to other campfires to share these stories you heard (but never really looked into) and hear more stories from other people... all the while mistaking each one as irrefutably true stories.

The hysteria led to many lives being ruined - both adults and children. Many adults faced harsh character defamations and led to innocent people going to jail. Many children were being asked very graphical sexual questions to determine whether or not they'd been abused. Games, music, books, and other media were being banned altogether due to rumours of them being tied to Satanic beliefs and disguised Satanic Rituals.

Michelle Remembers

Michelle Remembers is a book that was published in 1980 by Canadian Psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith. This book could very well be treated as the main Satanic Panic firestarter of recent times. In the book, Pazder claims that he helped his patient recover dark memories from her distant past regarding a terrifying initiation into a secret satanist cult in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada), and the many supposed rituals they held.

The author wrote the book in a very matter-of-fact way to make it sound like irrefutable truth, and went so far as to have the book published as a true story. One of the biggest points his book made was that there is an underground satanic network of people that was making its way into neighbourhoods and communities. Anybody could be one of these "evil" satanists - your doctor, your teacher, the cashier at your grocery store, even your neighbour.

Despite all of the allegations he heard in these sessions - the sexual abuse, the torturing and murdering, the sacrifices... Pazder never notified authorities. Not did he try to corroborate the stories with police records, local news, or try to find any witnesses that could back up the allegations.

The Success of Michelle Remembers

The book was an overnight sensation and both Pazder and Smith earned a very wealthy sum of money from the publishing deal for this book. Pazder and Smith would eventually get married, too.

The book's popularity caused Pazder to become a lead expert in the concept of SRA - again, despite the fact that none of what was documented in his book was ever proven. The success of the book led to an almost instantaneous Satanic Panic hysteria, leading to do many ruined lives. Even people that were proven innocent were still damaged by being accused in the first place.

As this satanic hysteria grew, so did the number of "experts" and the number of books copying the concept of Michelle Remembers. The hysteria essentially became a self-fueling fire, and it was destroying lives and communities faster than ever. All over completely baseless and unproven claims.

The cases all seemed to start the same way - sexual abuse at a daycare. This would lead to authority figures like police officers, teachers, parents, etc. questioning young children about their experiences. The immense pressure put on these kids caused them to create false memories about things like blood rituals, sexual abuse, animal sacrifices, secret tunnels, cannibalism, etc.

These false memories would then be taken as hard fact by the authorities, which would lead to court cases and prison sentences.

In Manhattan, 7 daycare workers were accused of ritually abusing children, and Pazder was sent to be an expert consultant of Satanic Cults. Basing the future of innocent adults solely off of what he had learned from Smith and her false memories.

In a case in Texas, another "expert" was used to convict two daycare workers that were found guilty and spent decades in jail before finally being exonerated.

While all this was happening, the media was keeping these SRA events in the spotlight, and making more and more speculative claims causing more and more hysteria - with seemingly nobody fact checking any of these stories, or questioning the practices being used to pressure kids into remembering things.

The McMartin Preschool Trial

One of the most famous SRA-based legal csses is the McMartin Preschool Trial, in which members of a family-run preschool were charged with multiple acts of sexual abuse of the children in their care. The legal cases lasted for seven years and not a single conviction was made - all charges were dropped by 1990. The cause for all of this damage? A mother of one of the boys attending the school heard her son complain that it hurt when he pooped.

To this day it is the longest and most expensive trial in US History, and it was all started by the mother of one of the children who reported that her son had been sexually abused by Virginia McMartin (the founder of the school) and one of the teachers, as well as her own estranged husband. The claims led to police sending a letter to the parents of the students at the school stating that their children might have been abused (again, because one kid had painful poops, but that was never mentioned) and asked that the parents question their children about graphical sexual acts that they might have seen such as touching, oral sex, etc.

Michelle Debunked

The accuracy of the book was questioned soon after it was released by a few people. One of the first breaking points was where Pazder made claims that the satanic cult was tied to Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. LaVey threatened to sue Pazder for libel, which led to Pazder removing his stance on that point, further showing how little research he had actually done to defend the claims he had made.

In general, there was little to no evidence to back up any of the claims Smith had made during her sessions, nor were there any witnesses to any of the events.

Michelle Smith's father was interviewed by MacLean's magazine. Smith had originally claimed in the book that it was her mother who initiated these Satanic Rituals with her. Smith's father not only denied all of these allegations and stated he could refute every one of them, too.

In the mid 90s, investigators looked into claims Smith made about a car accident she was in. According to the book, this accident was staged in order to cover up one of the rituals she was a part of. The investigators were unable to locate any reports of this accident - neither the police nor newspapers had anything about it. Considering the times, there should have been documented evidence of this crash.

The same investigators looked into the claims of an 81-day ritual that Smith mentioned during her sessions. She had talked about a ceremony that lasted for 81 days non-stop, however it was discovered that she had regularly attended school during this period of time. They were unable to find anybody that could corroborate any of the details in her allegations. Another investigator also noted that it would be nearly impossible for an 81-day non-stop ceremony involving hundreds of people in a massive room to go unnoticed in the city.

Smith had mentioned several of the rituals had occurred in a well known cemetery that is surrounded by residential neighbourhoods on three sides. During one of the sessions, she mentioned that she was screaming in this cemetery, yet none of the rituals held were ever reported.

Furthermore, none of the tormentors were ever identified other than her mother - which her father was willing to refute. One interesting aspect surrounding the tormentors was that they were said to have cut off one of their middle fingers, yet there was no reported cases of an increase in people missing middle fingers. No such people were even found during the investigations.

There's even speculation that the memories that Smith was able to recall were projected from Pazder himself. It's been said that the charges involved seem to be drawn from accounts of West African secret societies from the 1950s, and Dr Pazder had lived and worked in South Africa during a period in his life.

Unfortunately, it doesn't end there.

Despite Michelle Remembers being debunked, and the entire "threat" of the Satanic Panic that shook the 80s being dismissed as hysteria, there are sadly still people who believe that the secret satanist cabal is real and these groups continue to use the same ideas that were pushed in Pazder's book with more modern conspiracies. In the case of QAnon, they simply just replaced the daycare centres with political figures. The rest of the allegations still sound incredibly familiar - including the lack of sound proof, and the lackadaisical claims being thrown around without any desire to provide concise proof. But one must ask themself why bother taking the time to do proper research when so many people are ready to accept anything as truth without taking the time to use any critical thinking themself.

So what is a Satanic Ritual?

Not sure where to fit this in, but I thought it would be important to mention more about actual Satanic rituals, not the hoopla "rituals" that Pazder and many others think a ritual is.

Rituals can be found in all religions. Do you eat a communion wafer? Have you been baptized/Christianed? Do you pray to you god?

Satanic rituals are similar. They're just practices that we can do to help ourselves. Things like reminding ourself of our worth, or using coping methods to help get out of a bad mood.

The goat sacrificing, demon summoning rituals made famous by TV and Pazder are nothing more than theatrics. I mean, who would want to even sacrifice an animal for something like this? It's a waste of meat, and who's gonna clean up that mess?! 😂

sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plEImKEIRm8
https://youtube.com/watch?v=d5eIY_2Od4E
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VP7ANs8i25M