-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and
Multiple Personality Disorder
Craig Lockwood©1993
CompCare Publishers
3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100
Minneapolis, MN 55441
612.559.4800/800.328.3330
ISBN 0-89638-363-6
255+pps — out-of-print/one edition.
-----
A very interesting and excellent book.
Om
K
--[14]--
Part III
Slouching Toward
The Millennium
"More important than science is the decent, secular, democratic social
structure that underlies it and makes science possible. The real danger is
that this could be undone by a millenarian movement which in effect organizes
a political alliance between the occult minority, some disadvantaged classes,
and some ambitious elites. It has happened before."
-D. L. O'Keefe, 1982
=====
Chapter 15
Reassembling The Adversary: Establishing The Occult
"Unorthodox ideas are powerful forces to move men: indeed
Particularly powerful the more unorthodox they are.
-James Webb, 1976
England and Scotland repealed witchcraft statutes in 1736. le Seen as
superstition, belief in witches became obsolete against a background of the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution's scientific, social, and
economic progress.
Progress, however, meant paying a price. Reason and its companion, science,
idealized as the ultimate answer to humanity's problems, had superseded
religion.
Swift changes in Western society, according to James Webb's two-volume
scholarly study, The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment,
engendered fear in those social classes that might profit-as well as in those
liable to lose-by such far-reaching economic and societal alterations.
Sir Isaac Newton's physics radically altered the course of late seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century European culture. Demonstrable mechanistic
relationships between chemicals, energy, and matter could be shown in
experiment time after time. Objectivity could be quantified.[1]
Standardized scientific methodologies and systems of classification and
measurement allowed for wider access to information. With the invention of
the chronometer, latitude and longitude could be precisely calculated,
assuring life; and timesaving refinements in navigation.
Science, in a few decades, had introduced a level of practical certainty that
made magic and religion seem far less important to the Western mind.
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1860, not only restructured
biological scientific thinking and discourse, but provided Establishment
intellectuals with a method of formulating new social concepts as well.
Social Darwinists justified Europe's imperial economic policies by invoking
"survival of the fittest," and not without some reason. Compared to the
wonders of Western technology, industry, medicine, psychology, and scientific
scholarship, the rest of the world seemed little more than a collection of
mud huts, flies, and savages.
To late nineteenth-century Europeans, preliterate societies appeared as
living proof that "social evolution" could now be considered a scientific
fact.
During this time, a curious cultural dichotomy occurred. While believing in
witches meant being branded a superstitious rustic, people in the elite
circles of Vienna, Paris, London, Rome, and New York considered belief in
"the occult" fashion, able. Attending Spiritualist seances or becoming a
Theosophist were marks of an enlightened upper- middle-class intellect. Being
superstitious and fearing the supernatural were marks of unevolved
primitivism in the "lower races" and classes.
Establishing the Occult
Our human spiritual impulse, once a strong component of Western societies,
had been cast adrift. Replacing Christian orthodoxy was a "modern orthodoxy"
that firmly separated the metaphysical from everyday life.
Eliminating all mystical/spiritual elements from Western rationalist belief,
however, left a spiritual vacuum. A number of "irrational belief systems,"
based on what the historian James Webb terms "rejected knowledge," raced in
to fill the void.
Certain influential intellectual circles saw reason as the weapon of a
society based on individualism, capitalism, and pursuit of profit. In this
heady milieu, reformers and intellectuals of an idealistic social bent mixed
with scholarly occultists, exchanging ideas and forming a "Progressive
Underground."
Esoteric concepts such as "spiritual development" for individuals could be
extrapolated by the quasi-Darwinian social theorists either to a particular
race, or to humanity in general. These concepts would flourish in the
twentieth century as components of Revolutionary Socialism, Communism,
Fascism, and Nazism.
Most curious was the concurrence between occult belief systems, with
all-embracing world views typical of religious faith, and those Webb defines
as "demanded by totalitarian politics." Intense zeal and fervor, bordering on
the religious, mark the personalities and behaviors of "true believers" drawn
to radical ideologies.
In the social idealist's pantheon, the supreme evil deity responsible for
mankind's ills, woes, and wars was capitalism, not Satan. To counter
capitalism, socially idealized systems replaced a supreme authoritarian God
with a supreme authoritarian state.
Values and morality had for centuries been seen as emanating from God. Within
the first fifty years of the twentieth century, morals and values would
emanate from Josef Stalin and the Communist Party, or Adolf Hitler and his
National Socialist Party, or Chairman Mao, or a dozen other dictators and
tyrants, in the form of "illuminated politics."
Following World War I, in Germany and France, Establishment values were
challenged by a selection of apocalyptic idealisms-absolutist traditions of
thought that had earlier been rejected from European and American mainstream
thinking. Webb calls this "illuminated knowledge," a strong component of an
"underground of rejected knowledge."
Here, according to Webb, could be found heretical religious positions,
defeated social schemes, abandoned sciences, neglected modes of speculation,
and a "varied collection of doctrines that can be combined in a bewildering
variety of ways." Webb groups all this under the heading of occult.
Note that this is an historian's technical definition of the Occult, and not
the one commonly used.
These elements had arrayed themselves intellectually and socially against the
Establishment during the 1880s. After World War I they began gaining
influence and adherents. Among a handful of these disparate doctrines are the
belief systems that contributed to contemporary forms of ritual abuse.
Some were obviously quite old. Close inspection showed they had gestated
during the Inquisition.
La Messe Noire
Reports of Satan-worship and practices similar to those ascribed to
contemporary satanic groups can be found in Inquisition documents. Most
relate to the nocturnal rituals of the Luciferans, a supposedly heretical but
historically questionable subset of the Cathars.
What's an Inquisitor to do when he runs out of Sabbats? After all, how many
witches could he bum when the priests were still perverting choirboys and
perturbing the populace?
Without Satan, the Inquisition in their role as spiritual Gestapo would have
had to conjure up something like him, and draft him into service. But once
the monster is invented, he has to do enough damage to bring out the
villagers with their torches and pitchforks—or no movie.
Leave it to pathological humanity's spiritual nature to invent something to
which even the most deviant of sociopaths could lend religious endorsement:
La Messe Noire, the Black Mass.
Making the distinction between what a Black Mass was intended to do, and the
intentions of a Sabbat, is important. Those historians who document the
Sabbat point out that it was a religious act of rebellion based on folkloric
traditions. Black Masses were intended as worship of Satan as a deity.
Sorcery was aimed at controlling Satan or demons.
How many "satanic" cults existed will never be known. Inquisitors who
believed in them often cited each other's reports, without conducting
independent investigations. Since the Church was riddled by simony—the
practice of selling benefices and Masses to gain God's favor—anything was
possible.
Ireland provides the first mention of something like a Black Mass, held
during a Sabbat. Accounts of Lady Alice Keyteler's trial in 1324 mention the
defiling of Christian symbols, sacrificing animals, and possessing a
communion wafer on which Jesus' name had been replaced by that of the devil.
Several authors have described this as a case of "ritual rebellion." Parody,
though fatal, rather than perfidy.
England's Bishop of Coventry was indicted in 1343—for honoring the devil. He
does not stand alone over the next three centuries.
In Out of Darkness, Martin Katchin points out that such priests were in "a
position of cognitive dissonance." In this situation a person can either
modify dissonant behavior or change the conflicting cognitive beliefs.
Easy access to many sources of classical belief could well have produced
prelates motivated to invert the Mass, making it good bad, and "bad" good.
These elements are echoed in the trial in Aix, France, of Madeline de
Demandoix, who confessed to king communion at a deviant Mass celebrated by a
priest.
France's first secular witchcraft trial was held in Paris in 1390. Jehane de
Brigue was accused of curing a man near death. Under torture she confessed
that the man's wife had hired her to make him ill, because she wanted to have
an affair with the local prelate. Satanic demons were blamed. Both women were
convicted and burned. The priest walked.
Gilles de Rais, a marshal of France who fought alongside Joan of Arc at
Orleans, was tried before the Bishop of Nantes in 1440 for the appalling
pedophilic ritual sacrifices of numerous children—one source cites 140.
De Rais kidnapped or purchased the children, sacrificed them in his chapel
under an inverted cross, sodomized them, disemboweled them, masturbated on
their intestines, and kept copper vats filled with their blood.
Deviancy surfaced often within the ranks of the Inquisition. Inquisitors were
often stimulated both by the torture they witnessed and by the frankly sexual
nature of the confessions they demanded. Those prompted to imagine sadistic
sexual fantasies found they had the power to create them and act them out.
Charles W. Heckethorn's The Secret Societies, written in 1874, concisely
documents the Inquisition's terrible power and even more rapacious and
bloodthirsty abuses. During the mid-1800s, Heckethorn visited several of the
still-standing castles of the Inquisition and observed first-hand the
dungeons and machinery of torture.
Heckethorn believed that the Inquisition was itself a cult of terror and
torture the likes of which the world had never seen. Within it, several
secret societies, including the Garduna, a criminal cult "established on a
business-like footing," operated with the hidden support of the Church.
Cologne's chief witch-hunter, Franz Buirmann, used his position to gain
sexual access to women he had accused of witchcraft. In one case in 1630, he
arrested Frau Peller, wife of the local court assessor, who had rebuffed his
advances.
Within hours, according to Colin Wilson in The Occult, it the hairs were all
shaved off her body and head, and the torturer's assistant was allowed to
rape her while he did this."
Inquisitor Buirmann, angered by the woman's agony and humiliation, stuffed a
filthy rag in her mouth to mute her screams. When the brutal rape/torture
ended, she was thrown naked into a straw-filled hut and burned alive.
Buirmann, in the name of God and his Archbishop, would repeat such acts.
Katchin notes that even the Protestant Reformation didn't substantially
decrease satanic worship. Paraphiliacs still looked for a deviant belief
system to justify their perversions. Women still sought discreet methods of
eliminating unwanted babies.
Basic to Roman Catholic observance is the Mass. Considered divine in origin,
it enjoys a long tradition of sanctity. Because of this, the Mass has been
copied and modified in the liturgy of many religions.
Writers on the occult generally acknowledge the Mass as a "ritual of great
power." In his Outline of Modern Occultism, Cyril Scott states that the Mass
is a "form of ceremonial magic" that has an "effect on the inner planes."
So potent was the Mass in medieval times that the Council of Toledo in 694
had to restrict its use by priests who were substituting the names of living
persons for those of the dead. The intent was to make the Mass a death
ritual—for a small fee, of course. But the restriction had little effect, and
the practice continued.
Elements of the Mass—the host, wine, chalice, and other sacred vessels—were
primary elements in sorcery. Ritual items were kept locked for fear of theft
by the unholy. Even today, the theft of hosts is a continual nuisance.
Convents and monasteries were often the sites of blasphemous sacrilege. For
years, Father Pierre David, chaplain of Louviers convent in Normandy,
sexually abused the nuns under his ward.
When he died in 1628, the practice was passed on to Father Picard, who, with
his assistant, BouIIe, other priests, and outsiders, added elements of
Satanism and the Black Mass. One woman reportedly crucified her own newborn
child, nailing it to a cross.
Picard continued these practices until his death in 1647. The convent's nuns
went into convulsions and exhibited signs of severe hysteria. His corpse and
Boulle, still alive, were burned together.
Between 1673 and 1680, fifty priests were executed and more imprisoned for
similar sacrileges.
France's classic Messe Noire was a ghoulish mating of the sacred and the
secular. Henry Rhodes' The Satanic Mass and Richard Cavendish's The Black
Arts offer slightly differing accounts of the 1679 Chambre Ardente case,
history's first example of a satanic crime solved by careful police
investigative procedure.
When the Duke of Bouillon was discovered poisoned by his wife, King Louis
XIV, fearing for his own safety, authorized his trusted commissioner of
police, Inspecteur Nicholas de la Reymie, to start an investigation.
Backtracking and subtle questioning lead the inspecteur to Madame la
Marchioness de Montespan, Louis' mistress.
Madame's confession implicated her cosmetician, Catherine Deshays, nicknamed
"La Voisin," "the neighbor," a Parisian demi-mondaine who practiced Satanism
for her aristocratic clientele. Deshays was aided spiritually by the efforts
of the sanctimonious Abbe Guibourg.
De la Reymie, who searched Deshays' house, uncovered a satanic chapel draped
in black. In a furnace were burned remains later identified as recently
sacrificed children.
What de la Reymie had uncovered was a criminal conspiracy complex enough to
make any cult-cop choke. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to tales of
contemporary ritual abuse, La Voisin's cult ran an abortion/infanticide
racket, with a lucrative contract-poisoning sideline. Messes Noire, however,
were reserved for French society's elite.
Using her own nude body as an altar, Madame lay with a cross on her breasts
and chalice on her belly. Consecrating the child as a sacrament to Satan, the
hideous Abbe held the helpless infant over her and slashed its throat. Warm
blood splattered over Madame's genitals into the chalice.
"As often as the priest was to kiss the altar," La Voisin's daughter
admitted, "he kissed the body, and consecrated the host above the genitals,
into which he inserted a small piece of the host. At the end of the Mass, the
priest went into the woman and, dipping his hands in the chalice, washed her
genitals."
Flour was mixed with the child's gore to form a magical wafer. Madame slipped
it to the king, and studied his reaction. Louis' desire for the
thirty-eight-year-old Madame did not rekindle. Disappointed, she returned to
La Voisin, demanding they try again.
Six times infants were sacrificed, but all appeals to Satan's demons of lust
and love failed. King Louis' eyes began to wander and the jealous Marchioness
tried poison.
De la Reymie rounded up more than 360 people. Many were Catholic priests.
Fearing negative public reaction, King Louis quashed the investigation,
imprisoning only seventy-four cult members. Madame was sentenced to life in
her own chateau. Abbe Guibourg died in misery several years later in a
dungeon in the Castle Besancon, chained to a wall. La Voisin was burned at
the stake.
Though there are only Inquisition sources to examine in considering
survivors' claims that ritual abuse is an old habit, existing documentation
points toward frequent Church-linked kinds of abuse. Direct accusations were
made against popes, cardinals, bishops, canons, abbes and abbesses, and any
number of priests and friars.
Hell-bent for Hellfire
In The Black Arts, Richard Cavendish notes that during the eighteenth
century, elements of the Black Mass resurfaced, first appearing in Ireland,
where satanic orgies were held at a hunting lodge on Mt. Pelier, and then at
a Hellfire Club in Dublin.
Most famous of such clubs was the Brotherhood of Medmenham, which, according
to The Hellfire Club by Daniel Mannix, held Black Masses in the specially
constructed Medmenham Abbey on Sir Francis Dashwood's estate in West Wycomb.
Formed from his circle of gentleman profligates, which included the Earl of
Bute, Prime Minister of England, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the
Admiralty, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the novelist Laurence
Sterne, this Hellfire Club consisted of a group of rakes dubbed the "Unholy
Twelve."
Getting invited to join an evening's perversions was a mark of social
distinction in broad-minded London society, but often it left another kind of
mark. Contemporary accounts suggest that some of Dashwood's Hellfirers paid a
high price for hauling their ashes. Several contracted venereal diseases and
died young. Others were rendered impotent.
No Satanists here, however, certainly not with visitors like Benjamin
Franklin. This was elaborately staged sexual debauchery between "monks" and
"nuns" in red robes, where every sexual perversion short of necrophilia was
practiced in a ritual setting. Great fun for Dashwood's old boys, but as
incest was also a fixture, psychologically devastating to some of the women.
Ordinary Evil
Rituals incorporating occasional elements of the Black Mass are reputed to be
common to satanic worship. Described by survivors, they often seem to be of
the backwoods-sorcery, or ad hoc variety-held in a barn, a garage, or a
basement. The nature of their liturgy is as uncertain as the quality of their
spirituality.
Horror writers typically portray ritual events as taking place in grottoes,
caves, dark forest glades, or abandoned cathedrals on a barren moor, places
invested with a romantic sense of dread and foreboding, illuminated by
sputtering black candles or bonfires.
True-life horror is often mundane.
Nine color slides, accidentally discovered during a booking of two white
females for an unrelated crime, have been widely shown during police training
seminars. They depict in graphic detail what appears to be an animal
sacrifice and blood ritual held in an industrial-park-style building.
Slaughtered and gutted, a large mammal, possibly a sheep or young cow,
provides a bloody channel for the initiate's rebirth.
He is shown in profile, blindfolded with an unidentifiable object stuffed
into his mouth.
Next, the initiate, a dark-haired white male in his late twenties or early
thirties ties face-up within the abdominal cavity of the animal, draped in
bloody intestines, looking dazed.
Another shot shows him facing the camera blindfolded, in a sitting position
gripping two cords around his wrists, arms pulled out horizontally to either
side by two assistants apparently readying him for the next phase.
Supported in an inverted cross position, arms rigidly extended in rigor
mortis, a white female corpse is now carried before the assembled group by
several men. Young, once attractive, now dead approximately three days and
eviscerated, her chest and abdomen gape open from sternum to navel.
In the next slide the gore-caked initiate is shown lying atop on the supine
corpse, performing necrophilial sexual intercourse.
Ordinary faces stare out of the photos. Most are neither young nor old,
neither fashionably nor poorly dressed. Industrialgrade overhead neon
fixtures impart a curious flatness to the scene. Lacking shadow or contrast,
the horror is almost bland.
Even the group's leader is unimpressive. Dressed in a black windbreaker,
right hand slung up and bound ritually to his chest and encased in a heavy
black rubber glove, his right hand clutches what appears to be a ritual
athame. He is forty-something, of indeterminable ethnicity. His dark hair,
combed straight back, reveals a broad forehead and square fleshy face,
distinguished only by a neatly trimmed goatee. Around his neck is a lanyard
attached to an object he holds in his mouth.
Blood has spilled everywhere. What has been saved sits in plastic buckets or
galvanized tubs. While the initiate's eyes appear glazed, the blank
dissociated stare of the group's leader could be that of an SS guard
dispassionately watching the bodies removed from an Auschwitz gas-shower.
This is obviously an important festive affair for this group, complete with
music. To the right, on one side, is a band holding their instruments—a
trumpet's bell is splattered with blood. The musician whose face is most
visible seems vapid, without affect—a musical zombie.
Grainy, in slightly off-register color, these snapshots depict a horror so
banal, an evil so depressingly ordinary that neither the bloody animal, the
young woman's bluish-white corpse, the entrails, nor the containers filled
with blood match the revulsion engendered by the dead looks on the
spectators' faces.
Cult-styles of the Rich and Infamous
Evil, on occasion, may be perpetrated with elaborate staging, costly
implements, and interior design.
Picture a Messe Noire held in a deconsecrated chapel or church by an
authentic apostate priest. On the wall is an inverted cross. Beneath it on a
polished marble tombstone, perhaps bearing a bishop or cardinal's name, is a
young woman, supposedly a virgin and possibly drugged for the occasion, who
serves as an altar. A cross and silver chalice have been placed on her
stomach and breasts. Black candles provide eerie lighting.
Every act by the participants, every part of the ritual is designed to
offend, to insult Christian tradition and liturgy. Sanctity is replaced by
blasphemy, compassion by cruelty, kindness by anger and hatred.
Sonorous chanting fills the room: "Our Father, who wert in heaven," rendered
in dog Latin, or on occasion, Roman Rite Latin-backwards. "Evil" is
substituted for "good," "Satan" for "God." Naked beneath a red robe, a whore,
bought for the occasion, serves as acolyte. A defiled host is placed in the
whore's vagina. Sacrifice is made, and if it is an animal, the blood is
allowed to overflow the chalice onto the "altar's" body. The priest then
mounts and sodomizes the drugged young woman.
Hollywood porno-cult fantasy?
Not according to W. B. Seabrook, the first American to penetrate a Vodoun
cult in Haiti and write about it in depth. Seabrook was an adventurer-skeptic
who studied the occult, spending years in Africa learning African witchcraft
and black magic. During his career he wrote eight nonfiction adventure books
that have been published in twelve languages.
During the 1920s and 1930s, he attended Black Masses in Paris, Lyons, London,
and New York and lived to write about it in his book Witchcraft: Power in the
World Today. Seabrook said these groups worshiped "the fallen Archangel
Lucifer ... their ultimate objective is to restore 'Him' to the throne of the
universe."
Thirty years before Seabrook started witnessing these Messes Noire, a
clandestine chapel was uncovered in a hidden chamber in Rome's Palazzo
Borghese.
With walls draped in deep black and scarlet, the room was appointed in the
finest fabrics, woods, and marbles. Behind the attar, a tapestry depicted
Lucifer Triumphans. With gilded prayer desks and chairs covered in crimson
velvet, the decor exuded luxury that bespoke of great wealth.
Dominating this chapelle noire was an elaborately carved attar, replete with
black candles. A majestically Sculpted scowling Satan greeted the startled
intruders. Overhead, illuminated by electric light, a huge eye was fitted
into the ceiling.
No one ever admitted knowing who had created and used this satanic sanctuary.
That was in 1895; to this day the groups who worshiped there remain a
mystery.[2]
Are such things occurring today? That they do is certain; when, where, how
often, and for what reason is uncertain. Commercial Messes Noire have been
staged throughout Europe for years, put on by a segment of the velvet
underground for wealthy tourists with a taste for the perverse. These are
little more than quasi-spiritual sex shows.
But what about the real thing?
pps.166-180
--[notes]--
Chapter 15
1. Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica ed. Alexandre Koyre and Bernard Cohen
(London: Cambridge UP, 1972).
2. Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts (New York: Capricorn Books, 1968).
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
