The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Paranoid Style Podcast
Satanic Panic
Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast! In this episode we dive right into H-E-Double Hockey Sticks with that super baddie, Satan and we try to figure out why he is always causing people to panic wherever he goes. From the middle ages, to the Salem Witch Craft trials and through his panicky heyday during the 1980's and 90's, we look at why he's got such a bad rap and why heavy metal loving teens and feminist astrologers are suspected of being in league with him. Travel with us to the bottom of the 9th circle of Dante's inferno and the top of the Harz Mountains, to Anton LaVey's black victorian in San Francisco in 1966 and find out if Mr. Ed, the talking horse, is a fan of the devil, SPOILER ALERT, HE IS...ALLEGEDLY! This episode is as weird and confusing as it sounds.
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Music in this episode is from: Purple Planet Royalty Free Music (purple-planet.com)
Sound Effects are from: Free Wave Samples | High quality wav samples for free. & Fesliyan Studios
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
ARK: Hey-ail Satan, Sister.
CCK: Wow. This podcast just took a weird turn. Hail-Hey Sister!
ARK: Tell me what you know about the Satanic Panic.
CCK: Is that the dance craze where you take a step to the left and then a step to the right, put your hands on your hips and pledge allegiance to the dark lord?
ARK: Not exactly. Let's just start with telling me what you know about Satan.
CCK: Being an ex-Catholic schoolgirl. I know more about Satan than probably the average person because no one is as obsessed with Satan and Satanism as a Catholic.
ARK: That's very true.
CCK: I suppose Christians are also obsessed with that little Lucifer guy. No one gets as enraged or as enthralled or as titillated by Satan as people raised in Christian faiths since he is the ultimate bad guy. Thanos to Jesus’ Captain Aramaic-a if you will.
ARK: I won’t.
CCK: Fair Enough! As far as my research goes, I started out by looking at Satan as a character. There is really an extensive evolution over time from the rather scant biblical references to the debonair British gentleman we picture today, or the red guy with the horns and tail.
ARK: And really if you think about it pre-Bible, several religions had devil figures which have characteristics that have been incorporated into the Christian concept of Satan. The Egyptians all the way back in 2000BC, had Apep, a chaos demon in the form of a giant serpent who was a foe of Ra, the sun god.
CCK: Sounds very much like a certain fruit peddling snake in the garden of Eden.
ARK: And the Zoroastrians in 1200 BC had Angra Mainyu, who was the god of evil in opposition to Ahura Mazda, the god of good. The world was their battlefield and Ahura Mazda created humans with the free will to choose whose side they would fight on, good or evil. Spoiler alert, Zoroastrian texts state that in the end, good prevails.
CCK: When I started looking at Satan, who is the devil figure in Christianity, I realized that it was a massive can of snakes to open. Satan is a Hebrew word meaning, adversary. The aforementioned snake in Genesis is not referred to as Satan, but is usually assumed to be one in the same because in the book of Revelations Satan is called "that ancient serpent". There are other names in the bible which are associated with Satan, Lucifer which means light-bringer or Morning Star, the Father of Lies, Beelzebub AKA Lord of the Flies and the Red Dragon, to name a few.
ARK: Early Christians didn't have much of a focus on the biblical devil, probably because of the fact that there wasn't necessarily a clear, concise picture of him. Instead, they looked to some existing non-Christian gods as demons and personifications of evil. Over time, features of these other gods made their way into the portrait of Satan. Pan, the half-goat Greek god provided cloven hooves and horns and Bes, an Egyptian god of protection, provided the beard and tail.
CCK: Poor Bes. He wasn't evil, but he wasn't what you would call classically handsome, which is part of why he got vilified.
ARK: It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the frightening demon overseer of hell image we have today started to appear in Christian art. With things like famine, plague, smallpox and the inquisition happening, it was probably a lot easier to believe Satan existed and was wreaking hell on earth. In Canto 34 of Dante Alighieri's Inferno from 1317, Virgil leads the character Dante to the 9th circle of hell:
"The Emperor of the Realm of Woe stood forth, out of the ice from midway up his breast; and I compare more closely with a Giant, than merely with his arms the Giants do; consider now how great that whole must be, that with such parts as these may be compared. If, once as beautiful as ugly now, he still raised up his brows against his Maker, justly doth every woe proceed from him. Oh, what a marvel it appeared to me, when I beheld three faces to his head! One was in front of us, and that was red; the other two were to the latter joined right o’er the middle of each shoulder-blade, and met each other where he had his crest; that on the right twixt white and yellow seemed; the left one such to look at, as are those who come from there, where vale ward flows the Nile.
Under each face two mighty wings stretched out, of size proportioned to so huge a bird; sails of the sea I never saw so large. They had no feathers, but were like a bat’s in fashion; these he flapped in such a way, that three winds issued forth from him; thereby Cocytus was completely frozen up. With six eyes he was weeping, and his tears and bloody slaver trickled o’er three chins. In each mouth, as a heckle would have done, a sinner he was crushing with his teeth, and thus was causing pain to three of them."
Sister, can you do one of those handy dandy Clarification Corners on this?
CCK: And now it's time for Clarification Corner with CCK, this is a paraphrasing of Dante’s description of Satan from Canto 34 of the Inferno: The Emperor of Unending Bummersville stood frozen in a lake of ice midway up to his chest. He was so giant, that I'm closer to the size of a giant than a giant is to one of Satan's biceps. If he used to be as beautiful as he is now fugly, he must have been a total hottie and he is so pissed at his Maker that he is the source of all misery in the world. Also, he has three faces, which is weird. A red face in the middle and then a white and yellow face over one shoulder and a black face over the other shoulder. On each shoulder blade he has two creepy bat wings the size of sails on an impossibly huge boat. When he flaps his wings, it acts like air-conditioning to keep the 9th circle of hell eternally frozen. All three of the big guys faces were crying and his tears and drool dripped down his three chins. In each of his mouths he was chomping down on a sinner like a piece of beef jerky, which was painful for all involved.
The three sinners are: Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Jesus and Brutus & Cassius the murderers of Julius Caesar, but Satan the Ultimate traitor is also trapped forever in the inferno according to Dante. And that’s how Satan got his groove back and came to be the soul munching monster of the Middle Ages that we know and love. Until the enlightenment and romantic poets and artists got ahold of him and gave him a complete top model style makeover from ogre to misunderstood rebel.
Ark: No wonder he’s often smizing in the artwork of the time.
CCK: In 1667, John Milton published his epic, blank verse poem, "Paradise Lost."
ARK: At least it wasn't published in 1666.
CCK: It might as well have been because according to the poet, William Blake, Milton was on the side of the devil without knowing it. Milton's poem concerned the fate of Satan and other rebelling angels after their expulsion from Heaven and also the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Satan is portrayed as the most beautiful of the fallen angels, persuasive, clever and proud, the phrase, "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n" is from Paradise Lost, Book One. However, after Adam and Eve's fall later in the poem, Satan and all of the other bad angels are permanently turned into serpents, so in the end, even Milton's sympathies had their limits.
ARK: When the Puritans started shipping off to America in the 1630’s, they brought Satan with them.
CCK: Puritans believed that Satan attacked the human body to get to the soul, and since women are and I'm air-quoting here, the weaker sex, they were the most vulnerable to satanic influence. Even in the Puritanical version of the devil though there is the element of Satan as the seducer, who lures the weak in with the honeycrisp of knowledge.
ARK: And now it's time "For let me interrupt you with this fun fact with Amanda" the "forbidden fruit" of garden of Eden fame was almost certainly not an apple, which are not from the Middle East, but from Kazakhstan in Central Asia. It was possibly a fig, since Adam and Eve later use fig leaves to cover their naughty bits once they realize they are naughty, or it might have been citrus or grapes, both of which were fruits found in the Middle East.
CCK: So apples keep the doctor away and were not responsible for the fall of man. They should add that to the apple slogan.
ARK: Once we've got Satan to the New World with the arrival of the Catholics and Puritans, how did that go?
CCK: Not great.
ARK: Surprise!
CCK: Obviously, we’re seriously condensing history here.
ARK: Cream of History soup if you will.
CCK: Exactly, so I’m going to skip ahead to the Salem Witch Trials. In January of 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, a niece, and the daughter of one Reverend Samuel Parris became ill. After examining the girls, the village doctor, William Griggs made a diagnosis of bewitchment. The witch fever, that included accusations of spectral devil worship and an effort to start a Satanic church, would spread to surrounding villages in Massachusetts and before it subsided in November 1692, resulted in accusations against over 150 people. Many of the accused were jailed and tortured and 19 were executed by hanging.
ARK: Historians have speculated that distrust among the various villages, strong belief in the existence of the devil, a smallpox outbreak around the same time, and fear of attack by displaced native tribes led to the hysteria that caused the Salem Witch Trials. However, Benjamin Ray, a religious studies professor from the University of Virginia has a book, “Satan and Salem” that posits something else as the major factor that kicked off the hysteria. And that something else was one Reverend Samuel Parris. He arrived in Salem Village shortly before the accusations started and he immediately made himself unpopular when he declared that only people who were fully members of the church were eligible for the sacraments. Many of the residents of the village wanted to be able to baptize their children, but did not want to commit to the rigorous requirements of full membership. Samuel Parris thus found himself roundly disliked leading to widespread protest in the village that resulted in some townsfolk refusing to pony up their share of the Pastor’s salary or to deliver firewood to his house. Which in an East Coast winter scenario, is not ideal. Suddenly, Samuel’s niece and daughter became afflicted by a witch’s curse and they reported satanic shenanigans occurring in the field near Parris’ house. The threat of Satan, would be a good way to drive up attendance at the church. But hysteria can be a very catchy illness and if this was a plot by Parris, it seems to have spiraled beyond his plan to drum up compliant worshippers and caused what might have been the first American Satanic Panic.
CCK: What is this Satanic Panic thing you keep speaking of?
ARK: Satanic Panic is a sort of contagious, widespread fear sparked by concerns about the current state of a society and fueled by a cultural and religious influences as well as the media, politicians, fiction, word of mouth and nowadays that collection of tubes known as the internet. The fear is that society is going off the rails and descending into madness or a fall which is so precipitous, and here is where the conspiracy theory comes in, that the chaos must be caused by demonic forces being wielded by groups of humans practicing the satanic arts.
CCK: Macrame?
ARK: Among other things.
CCK: Accusations of devil worship and witchcraft as well as cases of suspected demonic possession were not uncommon in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The Knights Templar, after several centuries as a powerful military and political force, met their end after being accused of Satanism and were disbanded by Pope Clement the Fifth in 1312. Undoubtably there were people and organizations involved in the worship of Satan or demons at various points in history, but there was not really a self-proclaimed Satanic Church, until the 1960’s, in the good ol’ US of A!
ARK: Not JUST the USA, but that hub of all weirdness and excellent sourdough bread, San Francisco. Soooo…Picture it…1966, a standard residential street in San Francisco and about 1/3 of the way down the block at 6114 California St., looking for all the world like a jagged, rotten tooth, is a Victorian house painted completely black.
CCK: The neighbors must have been DELIGHTED!
ARK: No doubt.
CCK: The following information about Anton LaVey, owner of the black Victorian and founder of the Church of Satan comes mostly from the website of the still existing Church of Satan, churchofsatan.com and also from a profile of LaVey in Rolling Stone Magazine’s September 1991 issue called, “Sympathy for the Devil: It’s not easy being evil in a world that’s gone to hell”. The article is by Lawrence Wright with photos by Mary Ellen Mark and it’s one of my favorite magazine profiles I’ve ever read.
ARK: Howard Stanton Levey, L-e-v-e-y, was born in Chicago on April 11,1930. His parents moved to California shortly after his birth and after that, LaVey’s account of his life includes a name change to Anton LaVey, L-A-V-E-Y, a stint as an oboist for the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, a lion tamer in the circus, a burlesque pianist who had a brief affair with a pre-fame Marilyn Monroe, official organist of the City of San Francisco and police crime scene photographer.
CCK: In the Rolling Stone article, Wright attempted to verify LaVey’s background story and in many cases, it seems that LaVey’s accounts were either exaggerations or fabrications. For example, there was no San Francisco Ballet Orchestra and there was no record of employment for LaVey with the San Francisco Police department. What is clear from the article though is that LaVey was an adept raconteur and musician. And whether or not he actually ever worked as a lion tamer in the circus, he did in fact keep a lion named Togar in the blackhouse until the neighbors complaints about roaring resulted in a city ordinance against keeping big cats. LaVey was forced to turn Togar over to Tippy Hedrin’s big cat rescue, where the lion was renamed, Neil. Also, he definitely was the founder of the Church of Satan…Anton, not Neil.
ARK: On April 30, 1966, Walpurgisnacht, at the black house in San Francisco, Anton LaVey, shaved his head, slipped into a black robe, and declared 1966 as Anno Satanas, the first year of the Age of Satan. This was the beginning of the Church of Satan with Anton LeVay as its high priest.
CCK: Walpurgisnacht, established in 870AD, is the eve of the feast day of Saint Walpurga. Saint Walpurga, born around 710AD, was an English Christian missionary to Germany. Walpurga was believed to have the power to battle pest, rabies, whooping cough, and witchcraft. In German folklore, April 30 was believed to be the night when witches would hold congress…
ARK: The creepy kind with Mitch McConnell?
CCK: No, the slightly less creepy kind with Satan on Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains, a range of wooded hills in central Germany. So people would light bonfires to scare away the evils out and about on that evening.
ARK: In the Church of Satan, as with many modern Satan-based belief systems, the focus was not on Satan as a god figure, but rather a kind of atheistic religion with an adversarial relationship to the prescriptive nature of traditional religious organizations. Where the old testament has “Thou shall not”, Church of Satan had “Do as though wilt, as long as you’re not infringing on anyone else’s autonomy and right to do as they want.” Current Church of Satan High Priest Peter Gillmore, describes the religion as – Egotheism, the deification of the self, or the belief that "you are God".
CCK: Between 1966 and 1972, the Church of Satan grew and expanded to include grottos around the country and thousands of members. And while they may not have believed in Satan as an actual entity, LaVey definitely knew how to put on a satanic show with ceremonies that involved naked women, candlelight, black robes, pentagrams and skulls. In 1969, Anton LaVey published “The Satanic Bible” which codified the beliefs of the Church of Satan. The Satanic Bible has had thirty printings and never gone out of print. It sold an estimated one million copies since the initial release and has been translated into Danish, Swedish, German, Spanish, Finnish and Turkish.
ARK: By 1975, it seems that LaVey’s interest in running what was growing into somewhat of an organizational behemoth was waning. Membership numbers had peaked and Church of Satan member, Michael Aquino, who we’ll talk more about later, questioned LaVey’s commitment and integrity, ultimately leaving the church to form his own sect, “The Temple of Set.” LaVey lived out the rest of his life as the head of the Church of Satan in the black house in San Francisco. I have a very vivid memory of that house from when I was in high school in the mid-90’s. We had been to see a movie at a nearby theater and went out of our way at night to walk in front of the house.
CCK: A favorite pastime! By the 90’s the house was pretty run down looking, but still spooky and there was a high chain link fence with wooden slats in front of it to keep people from knocking on the door or trying to break in. Anton LaVey lost the house after a divorce in 1991 but a wealthy patron of his bought it and allowed him to live there rent free until his death in 1997. The house was finally demolished in 2001 and is now the site of a three-story condo.
ARK: Truly a San Francisco ending.
CCK: The total membership of the Church of Satan and the actual beliefs of the church seem to have been both amplified and somewhat obscured by media coverage in the early 70’s. There was a Time Magazine cover story in the June 19, 1972 issue called, “The Occult, A Substitute Faith” which talked about a number of different occult organizations and while it did present a fairly accurate description of the Church of Satan’s beliefs, the article was paired with a picture of LaVey in a devil horn cowl holding a sword and surrounded by figures with animal masks obscuring their faces. A line from the article states, “The recent scene – and many a similarly bizarre one – is being re-enacted all across the US nowadays.”
ARK: Satan did seem to be having a moment. From the 1900’s through the 1960’s, there were about 6 major American movies where Satan or Satanists were main characters. Obviously, monsters and evil things are popular cinematic subjects, and Satan and Satanists may have been supporting actors in many other movies during this time period but ghosts, witches, vampires, werewolves, swamp people and sometimes blobs were usually the stars. In the 1970’s there were at least 31 major American films with Satan or Satanists as main characters. Some of these films, The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist in particular, seem to have embedded themselves permanently in the American psyche.
CCK: The Exorcist was the first horror film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. It was the highest grossing R-rated horror film of all time until 2017. In 2010, under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, the Library of Congress added “The Exorcist” to the National Film Registry as a film that is “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant, to be preserved for all time. National Film Registry preservations are not selected as the “best” American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring significance to American culture.
ARK: Throughout the 1960’s and 70’s frightening things are happening in the world, the continuing cold war, the threat of nuclear extinction, the Vietnam war, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinations, Watergate, gas shortages, droughts, serial killings, death cults and bralessness! You also have the changing model of the nuclear family and more families where both parents were working outside of the home which meant little kids are going to daycare, or the older kids are becoming latchkey kids and spending more time out of the sight of their parents. Add to this the creation of the Church of Satan, growing numbers of people dabbling in the occult, or at least growing coverage of people dabbling in the occult and then put out 31 Satan movies in one decade as well as a 1973 pilot for a TV show called “Poor Devil” starring America’s Sweetheart, Sammy Davis Jr. who was at one time an honorary priest in The Church of Satan and you have basically created the perfect powder keg for a full-blown Satanic Panic.
CCK: What finally lit the fuse on the Satanic Panic Powder Keg?
ARK: Canada.
CCK: Canada, of course!!
ARK: Well, specifically, a Canadian psychiatrist named Dr. Lawrence Pazder and his patient cum wife, Michelle Smith. In 1980, Pazder published a since discredited memoir of Michelle Smith called “Michelle Remembers” It chronicled her childhood in the 1950’s in Victoria where she claims she was handed over to a Satanic cult by her mother and subject to extreme physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Pazder helped Michelle recover these memories of past abuse via hypnosis resulting in 600 hours of testimony from Smith in a childlike voice. Michelle Smith’s father, other family members, neighbors and childhood friends all refute her claims, but the book became a non-fiction best-seller despite including descriptions of a meeting with Satan himself and a guest appearance slash intercession by the Virgin Mary. Pazder, the consummate theraputic professional, transcribed and edited the details of his fragile patient Michelle’s testimony, sold the manuscript for $340,000 and then married her. Pazder came to be seen as an expert on Satanic ritual abuse and the book itself was considered a manual of sorts for law enforcement and legal professionals.
CCK: In the 1980’s and 1990’s in Canada, the US and around the world, numerous high-profile cases of reported Satanic ritual abuse of children were investigated and brought to trial. One of the most widely covered cases occurred in 1983 in Southern California’s Manhattan Beach. The resulting trials were the most expensive and the longest in American history, running for 30 months, not including pre-trial investigations which took three years, at the cost of fifteen million dollars, with no convictions. The initial accusations came from a woman named, Judy Johnson who accused the owners of the McMartin day care of abusing her child and conducting Satanic rituals. She said they had secret tunnels under the daycare and that the man who abused her child could fly. The police in an effort to substantiate the abuse charges sent a letter to over 200 parents of children who were enrolled in the school at the time, or who had previously attended the school during the time that the accused man worked there. The letter was alarming, prejudicial and leading.
ARK: The main suspect, Ray Buckey was mentioned by name in the letter and the statement was made that he was arrested on Sept. 7, 1983. What it failed to mention is that he was not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. The letter stated: The following procedure is obviously an unpleasant one, but to protect the rights of your children as well as the rights of the accused, this inquiry is necessary for a complete investigation. Records indicate that your child has been or is currently a student at the pre-school. We are asking your assistance in this continuing investigation. Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim.
CCK: This put parents in a terrible situation. As a parent, you would obviously want to know if someone has hurt your child, but unless you happen to have special knowledge regarding the examination of sensitive witnesses without leading them, traumatizing or intimidating them, you have been given a nearly impossible task. The next part of the letter goes into specific detail about possible criminal acts that were committed, thereby further panicking parents and ensuring that questions are posed to back up the existing accusations, instead of being open ended to illicit responses from the children with no details of what potentially occurred.
ARK: When you work as a 911 dispatcher, one of the things they really drum into you is that you are not allowed to ask any leading questions of the person on the phone. You have to get them to tell you what is happening, you can't suggest what might be happening because at that point people are panicked or scared and suggestible and might just tell you what they think you need to hear. You need to ask your questions in a way that gets that person to state what is going on.
CCK: Hundreds of children were ultimately questioned, but because they were so young, the police turned over questioning to Kee MacFarlane of the Children’s Institute International. The Children’s Institute is an organization in Los Angeles dedicated to helping children and families affected by violence. MacFarlane and other social workers and therapists with the Children’s Institute conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. The interviews were video taped and transcribed and ultimately served as a how not to question children, with leading questions and continued questioning after children initially answered that they had not been abused.
ARK: Raymond Buckey, his mother, grandmother, sister and three other teachers from the McMartin preschool were indicted on 115 counts, later expanded to 321 counts of child abuse involving 48 children. After 20 months of preliminary hearings prior to the first trial, charges were dropped against everyone except for Raymond Buckey and his mother Peggy. The district attorney called the evidence against the teachers and Buckey’s sister, “incredibly weak.”
CCK: Not at all fun fact, in 1984 during the time of the preliminary hearings, one Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith visited with some of the parents and therapists involved with the McMartin case and according to an interview that Debbie Nathan did for her book called “Satan’s Silence” the initial prosecutor for the McMartin Trial, Glenn Stevens stated he believed Pazder may have influenced the children’s testimony. At the time of Debbie Nathan’s interview with Stevens in 1994 he also stated that he no longer believed the McMartin defendants were guilty.
ARK: Additional un-fun fact, before the trials were over, Judy Johnson, the original accuser was diagnosed as an acute paranoid schizophrenic and died of complications from chronic alcoholism. In 2005, Kyle Zirpolo, one of the children who had been identified as an abuse victim in the McMartin Preschool case, came forward as an adult said that he was pressured to make false accusations of ritual abuse and that his testimony was a lie.
CCK: For all of the negatives that came out of the McMartin trial for everyone involved, the one positive that came out of it is that the way young witnesses were questioned changed dramatically to avoid contaminating cases and hopefully limit the trauma children experienced recounting what happened to them or to prevent implanting false memories. Not necessarily in this case, but it seems like in other cases of alleged Satanic ritual abuse in daycares during this time period, the attempts to blame Satanism for the crimes weakened and obscured what may have been legitimate abuse in some circumstances.
ARK: In 1986 while the McMartin Trial was still in progress, a preschool abuse case surfaced in San Francisco’s Presidio, which at the time was an active Army base.
CCK: I was in high school at the time of the Presidio and McMartin cases and it’s strange because in my head, before I started looking for information on McMartin, I thought it was the same case as the one here in Presidio. I think because the news media at the time probably kept linking the two cases.
ARK: On the Presidio army base in San Francisco in November 1986 a three-year-old boy was showing signs of possible sexual abuse and he told his mother that Mr. Gary had hurt him. Mr. Gary was Gary Hambright. He was a former Baptist minister and an employee at the preschool day care center run by the US Army at the Presidio. The preschool was for the children of army personnel and civilians who worked on the post and employed around 40 civilians. The boy's mother contacted the day care program's director Diana Curl once she became aware of the abuse. Curl told the victim's mother that she would not be able to see her until two days later despite the seriousness of her concerns. Curl then immediately notified all of the staff of the daycare about the accusations. The boy's father, concerned by the lack of immediate response, reached out to an army chaplain and the chaplain contacted the Army's criminal investigation division or CID. The CID, interviewed and taped the child and then the boy was examined by the child adolescent sexual abuse referral center, at San Francisco General Hospital. The doctor at general hospital who saw the boy concluded that sexual abuse had taken place. It then took the Army twelve days to form a strategy group. Twelve days to even get people together to talk about what they should do with the investigation and another month to notify any of the other parents who had children in the program.
CCK: At this time, the army had already been dealing with a day care abuse scandal at West Point from 1984 which resulted in no indictments and allegations of a coverup as well as a 100 million dollar civil suit filed by the parents of the children. There were also investigations at Fort Dix in NJ and 26 of the other 292 army daycare centers around the world.
ARK: The FBI was ultimately brought in to investigate at the Presidio and in January 1987, Gary Hambright was arrested by FBI agents on charges related to molestation of the three year old boy. However, in March 1987, the case was dismissed by US District Judge William Schwarzer who ruled that testimony from the child to his parents and doctor was inadmissible as hearsay and that the child was too young to testify directly.
CCK: During this time and all the way through November 1987, the Presidio day care remained opened.
ARK: Investigations continued after the initial case was dismissed and between 37 and 60 other children were identified as possibly having suffered abuse, with at least two testing positive for chlamydia. Some of the testimony from the children included accounts of having been removed from the daycare and taken to other houses in San Francisco, but the investigators were trying to avoid what was happening in the McMartin case six hours south and keep the focus on the more straightforward abuse allegations directly involving Gary Hambright on the daycare premises. Or viewed in conspiratorial mode, perhaps the United States Army was trying to keep the allegations focused on a single civilian to limit exposure.
CCK: At the end of September 1987, Gary Hambright was again indicted, this time with charges of abuse against ten children. An associated press article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel stated that parents felt that the army and FBI had kept them in the dark regarding what was discovered as part of the investigations and that their complaints and concerns had gone unheard. On September 22, 1987 the Army Community Services Building adjacent to the day care center, which housed some of the center’s records, caught on fire causing $500,000 worth of damage. On October 13, 1987, three weeks later, there was another fire at the daycare causing $50,000 in damage to a building that housed four classrooms, including Hambright’s. The Army initially listed both fires as accidental, but brought in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for help with investigations. The ATF investigators found that both fires, had been arson. They also found cinders under another building, evidence that a third unsuccessful arson attempt had been made at the center. The Army offered a $5,000 reward for information on the fires but the perpetrator or perpetrators were never identified.
ARK: Hambright’s trial was scheduled for April 1988, but in February 1988 all charges against him were dropped because the judge said the charges were too vague and the very young age of the witnesses, made it difficult for them to remember specifics about testimony they had given previously. Hambright was the only person ever charged with any crimes in this case, but in news reports in November 1987, information had started to come out about a raid that was conducted on the house of one Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino on August 14, 1987.
CCK: You may remember Michael Aquino from earlier in this podcast when we were discussing Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Aquino was an early member of the Church of Satan, editor of their newsletter, The Cloven Hoof, and depending on who you asked, Aquino or LaVey, one of the Council of Nine, the ruling body of the Church of Satan or a self-righteous, preening puffin. On June 20th, 1975, Aquino sent out a letter to all Church of Satan members detailing his issues with LaVey and his decision to leave the Church of Satan. One of his main objections was LaVey’s policy of selling high-status positions in the Church of Satan to anyone who wanted to buy in, which to me sounds like something Satan would totally be on board for, but Aquino felt it betrayed the seriousness of the religion. Anton LaVey’s response to this letter, which is available on the Church of Satan website, includes a rather unflattering cartoon of Michael Aquino and a statement of which this is an excerpt:
Anton LaVey: “As you know, Michael Aquino has severed his connection with the Church of Satan. I have been increasingly aware that Mr. Aquino has become too large for his trousers, and have attempted to subdue him as tactfully as possible. In his recent packet to you…he reproaches authoritarian whim and belief of infallibility. Two pages later…he himself assumes not only human infallibility, but spiritual and supernatural as well. He has relieved me of an “Infernal Mandate” which I have never claimed to hold. I have freely admitted that I assumed my office of High Priest because at the time there was no one else who did. The titles “Infernal Empire”, “Exarch of Hell”, etc., are symbolic, not literal…Judging from initial response to Mr. Aquino’s packet, the vast majority of recipients have reaffirmed their alliance with the Church of Satan. Response has been most gratifying and will not be forgotten. His behavior has been described by communicants as: "petty", "priggish", "raging", "puritanical", "bitchy", "disgusting", "foppish", "overbearing", "unimaginative", "lacking perception”…etc.—the list is long and varied, but unanimous on certain points.”
CCK: Suffice to say, LaVey was not sorry to see Aquino leave. Aquino and his wife, Lilith, formed “The Temple of Set” in 1975 after allegedly invoking Satan who revealed to them his true name was actually Set, the god of deserts, disorder, violence, storms, and foreigners from the ancient Egyptian religion. The Temple of Set has been described as esoteric Satanism, versus LaVey’s practical Satanism, and also saw the individual as a diety, but instead of the hedonistic bent of the Church of Satan which seemed to emphasize following the impulses of the body, the Temple of Set advised following the desires of your mind along the left-hand path to your own bliss and self-deification while simultaneously practicing black magic rituals to help things along, or that’s what I gathered from a look at the Temple of Set website.
? ARK: The following biographical information for Michael Aquino comes from his Amazon author page, oddly, he does not have a Wikipedia page, a conspiracy for another time. He was a Lt. Colonel of Psychological Operations in the U.S. Army until his retirement in 1994. He graduated from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces; Defense Intelligence College; Foreign Service Institute; U.S. Army Special Warfare Center; U.S. Army Command & General Staff College; U.S. Army Intelligence School, and U.S. Army Space Institute. His decorations included the Bronze Star, Meritorious Service Medal, Air Medal, Army Commendation Medal three times, Special Forces Tab, Parachutist Badge, USAF Space & Missile Badge, and the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross, Psychological Warfare Medal (First Class), & Air Service Medal (Honor Grade). His academic credentials included the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the M.P.A. in Public Administration from George Washington University. He taught as Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He was a past National Commander of the Eagle Scout Honor Society and recipient of its Knight Eagle Distinguished Service Award, as well as of the Vigil Honor of the Order of the Arrow and the Distinguished Service Key of Alpha Phi Omega Fraternity.
CCK: I’m beginning to see why Anton LaVey called Aquino an “impeccable and irrepressible letter-writer” who “excelled at test-passing and institutionalized paper work.”
ARK: In a society experiencing a satanic panic in the 1980’s, Aquino and his wife, Lilith, would have definitely attracted attention. Aquino wore his hair in a lacquered black bowl style with a widow peak cut into the bangs. His eyebrows were oddly waxed up into a point at the arch of the brow and he frequently wore a black shirt with a high collar and a large pentagram medallion on a chain around his neck. Lilith was a striking, former model with pale skin, black hair, dark eyes and a penchant for black lace dresses.
CCK: As part of the interviews of children in the Presidio day care case, a three-year-old girl had reported that she was abused by Hambright, but also by a man called Mikey and a woman called Shamby. The possible identity of Mikey and Shamby were unknown until August 1987. While the little girl was shopping with her parents at the Presidio PX, she became extremely upset and frightened. When asked why she was so upset, she allegedly pointed out a couple in the market and identified them as Mikey and Shamby. The couple that she identified were Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino and his wife Lilith.
ARK: The girl’s parents immediately called the FBI and when interviewed by authorities, the little girl alleged that she had been driven to a house by Gary Hambright and that she was taken into a room with black walls and a cross on the ceiling and photographed. The man called Mikey wore woman's clothes and the woman she called Shamby was dressed like a man. The investigators drove the little girl to Leavenworth Street and asked her to identify any house she had been to before and the girl identified a house which belonged to Michael and Lilith Aquino. Not sure if that kind of identification would stand up today, but at the time it was enough to get a warrant to search the house. The FBI and the San Francisco Police Department were present during the search. They seized videotapes, cassette tapes, notebooks and photo albums. The police also confirmed that there was an all-black room and a soundproofed room in the Aquino home. But no charges were ever brought against the Aquino's and the SFPD discontinued their investigation in September 1988, stating that there was a lack of sufficient evidence, but to this day, the SFPD records for this case are not available, because the case is listed as still open. The Presidio case was a veritable conspiracy theory generation machine. Was the Army trying to cover up what happened, was there satanic ritual abuse, was this a black bag job on Michael Aquino or was this a whitewash of Aquino’s involvement?
CCK: Aquino and his wife claimed that they were the victims of religious persecution and that the Temple of Set members had a strong sense of ethics and didn’t harm people. Aquino stated that he thought the little girl whose testimony led to the raid on his house was coached into making accusations against him and that her account of details of his house were incorrect. Aquino continued to defend his innocence against accusations related to the Presidio case through a series of lawsuits. In 1988, he and his wife brought a two million dollar lawsuit against the SFPD for what they called continued harassment in the Presidio day care case even after the second round of charges had been dropped against Gary Hambright.
ARK: In 1991, they sued the army to attempt to have their names removed from official investigative reports issued regarding the Presidio case. That suit was denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1992. In 1994, the couple sued Warner Books and Linda Blood who was the author of a book called, The New Satanists. Blood a former member of the Temple of Set brought up the Presidio investigations in her book and Aquino stated that she falsely portrayed Temple of Set members as pedophiles and accused them of various organized Satanic crimes.
CCK: In 1997, a person using the name “Curio” posted online messages accusing Aquino of ritual sex abuse of children. The Aquinos sued the San Diego Internet Provider, Electri-Citi on whose service the messages were posted and asked that the real identity of “Curio” be released to them. The case was dismissed by a San Francisco Superior Court Judge, David Garcia, who ruled that federal law gives Internet providers protection for claims arising from messages or other items posted by users or third parties on the Internet. This was the first case in California involving an Internet Service provider following the passage of the 1996 Federal Communications Decency Act, which immunized Internet providers from liability in such cases.
ARK: If Michael Aquino wanted to avoid negative attention after the Presidio case, he made the very odd choice in 1988 of appearing on the Geraldo Rivera produced special on Satanism in America.
Announcer: (in a bright cheerful voice) The investigative news group presents the Geraldo Rivera special report on (change to demonic voice) DEVIL WORSHIP: Exposing Satan’s Underground.
ARK: Wow.
CCK: Very subtle.
ARK: Aquino may very well have been what he claimed to be, but his Forever 666 style and pointy eyebrows were not likely to help him convey his innocence on a tv show that was designed to provoke outrage and fear against Satanists.
CCK: The pointy eyebrows alone were enough for a conviction.
Jury Foreman: We find the defendant guilty, your Honor! Of hella creepy eyebrows!
Geraldo: The very young and impressionable should definitely not be watching this program tonight, because this is not the stuff of Halloween Fables, this is a real-life horror story and it will give small children bad dreams. As for teenagers and their parents we hope you are watching because it’s teenagers who are most likely to fall under the spell of this jumble of dark violent emotions called Satanism.
CCK: Who says journalistic integrity is dead? My main problem with the program, which is available to watch on You Tube, is that anything that contradicts a purely Satanic reading of behaviors is dismissed. At one point, Geraldo is talking to Ozzy Osbourne and says, I know that not all of your teen fans are Satanists, but all teen Satanists seem to be heavy metal fans. To which Ozzy says,
Ozzy Osbourne: I don’t know about that, I’m just a musician. I writes a lot of songs that are not about Satanism, but when I was young I grew up in a very dark and dingy world, with not many prospects for advancement beyond the working-class life I was born into so some of my songs are really dark
CCK: To which Geraldo says:
Geraldo: Thanks Ozzy, I don’t really want to get into economic despair as a cause of anything, because no one is going to tune into -
Announcer: The investigative news group presents the Geraldo Rivera special report on (change to demonic voice) Generational Poverty: Exposing the not so hidden class system in Western Cultures.
CCK: Geraldo tells Ozzy that he’ll get back to him and switches over to talk to Sean Sellers who at the time was the youngest person ever to end up on Oklahoma’s death row. Sellers had brutally murdered his parents and a convenience store clerk who refused to sell him beer, and when Geraldo asks him why he committed these crimes Sellers says the murder was because it was a sacrifice to prove allegiance to Satan and to prove his hatred toward society and everything.
ARK: Geraldo cuts him off and says, well hatred toward society is one thing Sean but how does Satan make you commit murder? He then moves on to talk to a Satanism expert, whose qualifications for such a title are not elucidated, to explain how Satan made Sellers commit his crimes. The show had extremely high ratings. It won the two-hour time period that it appeared in and was seen in about 19.8 million homes, which was one-third of the number of people watching TV during the timeframe of 8 to 10PM. However, ultimately, it probably lost money for the network because advertisers were not keen to buy ad time next to Satan.
CCK: I found a document online from 1993 which was a long memo from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service called, the Occult, A New Police problem. In the 80’s and early 90’s, there were various training seminars, handbooks, and pamphlets being distributed to law enforcement agencies to make them aware of Occult crimes and how to identify occult crime scenes and suspects. One thing the police, Geraldo, Christian preachers and Tipper Gore’s Parents’ Music Resource Council seemed to agree on is that Heavy Metal music was a direct highway to hell. I blame myself for turning you into a demonic middle school metal head. I just couldn’t resist those hot metal guitar licks!
ARK: Between taking me to Anton Lavey’s house and introducing me to heavy metal music, you’re either the coolest big sister in the world, or you were trying to cut a deal with the dark lord using my soul as collateral. Either way… awesome.
CCK: There were theories about acronyms in the names of some bands, KISS was suspected to stand for Knights In Satan’s Service and WASP for We Are Satan’s Preachers, AC/DC for Anti-Christ, Devil’s Child.
ARK: AC/DC had a rough time in the mid-80’s when Richard Ramirez, aka The Night Stalker left behind his AC/DC hat at the scene of a grisly murder. Suddenly there were newspaper headlines declaring that AC/DC’s music caused Ramirez to kill.
CCK: I must admit some of these bands took advantage of the frenzy surrounding fear of the devil. There were a lot of bands and album covers that seemed to celebrate darkness and evil, except that they were all pretty campy and with a few exceptions, most of these bands, if they sang about the devil, it was as an adversary, not an ally.
ARK: Yeah! It was Shout AT the devil, not shout with the devil! Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath is credited with giving the band their sound and aesthetic, when he pointed out that people like going to the movies to get scared, so why not make music that scares people too.
CCK: A few years after AC/DC was implicated in night stalkers killing frenzy, Judas Priest was on trial for inspiring suicide.
ARK: Two young men in Nevada, spent hours drinking alcohol and smoking weed while listening to Priest’s album, Stained Class, and then decided to go out to a playground and shoot themselves. The 18 year old boy died instantly, while the twenty year old survived, but would die a few years later from complications from his injuries. The boys' parents filed a lawsuit against the British band claiming that subliminal messages in the song, "Better By You, Better Than Me", drove the young men to this act. Those backward masked messages allegedly included phrases like "Let’s be dead" and "Do it".
CCK: Getting your fans to kill themselves seems like an ineffective strategy for career longevity.
ARK: The bands manager said almost exactly that. Quote, "If I were going to do that, I'd be saying 'Buy seven copies', not telling a couple of screwed up kids to kill themselves." The trial lasted a month before eventually being dismissed.
CCK: And while there were no specific Satanic reasons given for why these boys committed suicide, I do feel like these trials were fall out stemming from the panic still gripping the country. The backward masking theory had already been around since the 70's, with people accusing Led Zeppelin's song "Stairway to Heaven" of including messages like "master satan" and in the Beatles Song, Revolution 9 there was rumored to contain the phrases "Here's to my sweet Satan" or "Turn me on dead man".
ARK: But, you know where else they found backward masking messages about Satan? In the theme song for the television show, Mr. Ed.
CCK: Of course, of course.
ARK: Yep, a pair of Ohio preachers claimed that when played in reverse, the Mr. Ed theme song included such lines as "Someone sang a song for Satan" and "The source is the devil".
CCK: And while somehow that well-known reprobate, Mr. Ed, got off scot-free, there was a call to parents that the only way to save their children was to rid their homes of soul-threatening past times, like music and role-playing games. There were rallies held at churches that encouraged parents to take their kids' heavy metal albums and burn them.
ARK: Lucien Greaves, who we'll talk about later, really summed it up perfectly. He said, "As heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons came to be blamed for Satanism, people who embraced heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons began to see nothing wrong with Satanism".
CCK: The police memo also had additional ways to identify a Satan-y Teen. In a section called “Signs of Pagan & Satanic Practices Amongst Teenagers” there is a profile of a teen Satanist: “Male, intelligent but an underachiever, creative, curious beyond the norm, low self-esteem, difficulty in relating to peers, boredom and alienation from family and religion.” Or as they’re sometimes called, teens.
ARK: Or as they’re sometimes called, guys I was attracted to in high school. The police guidelines casted a rather wide net in search of dangerous occultists. One list of supposed occult organizations included a collective of feminist astrologers in Minnesota.
Cop: Are you a Satanist ma’am?
MN Feminist Astrologer: Oh gosh no, officer, I’m an Aquarius!
CCK: Even during the height of the panic though, not all law enforcement agencies were on the same page regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse. In 1992, Kenneth Lanning, an FBI agent and expert in crimes against children wrote a report stating that after eight years of investigation, “there is little or no corroborative evidence” for widespread satanic ritual abuse.
ARK: But what about Satanic imagery in, well, almost everything!
CCK: What??? What’s occult about not at all suspiciously named companies like Oracle, Morningstar farms and Apple? Oh wait, not Apple, FIG NEWTONS!!!
ARK: An article in the Minneapolis paper the Star Tribune from 1995 started, “The maker of Pert shampoo is trying once again to wash that malicious rumor out of its hair. The one that says its moon and stars logo is a Satanic symbol.” Proctor and Gamble at the time was suing an Amway distributor for spreading the rumor that their man in the moon staring at 13 stars logo was satanic. It was a battle they’d been fighting for over 15 years, involving multiple lawsuits and by 1995 they weren’t even using the 103 year old logo anymore because it had caused them so much grief. The logo dated to 1882 and the stars referred to the 13 original colonies.
CCK: Allegedly.
ARK: The Walt Disney signature logo is said to contain three sixes. One in the first part of the W, one over the dot on the I and the last in the y at the end of the signature.
CCK: I think anyone who has ever been on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride with its drive into Hell can confirm Satanic shenanigans.
ARK: In the 1970, Universal Product Codes became the standard for marking products to make it easier for stores to track, price and sell them. The original UPC was created by Joe Woodland, an inventor who came up with the idea on Miami Beach and drew the protype in the sand. He envisioned the code as a bullseye of lines, not the barcode that we have today. He patented his idea in 1952 but the micro-computing technology and laser scanners that were needed to read the codes were not affordably available until the mid-70’s. And what does this have to do with Satan you ask? Well, there’s a line in Revelations, Chapter 13, Verse 16 that says "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666."
CCK: There’s a rumor that the three slightly longer sets of double lines in every UPC stand for the number 666, which is not the case.
ARK: There’s a video online from 2014 of a woman named Christine Weick, a Christian activist who is not a huge fan of Monster energy drinks. It’s worth a watch to see how she ends up with the conclusion that every time you tip a can of the energy drink to your lips you’re hailing Satan.
CCK: When your slogan is Unleash the Beast, I feel like you’re probably fine with that interpretation. But did you say 2014? Didn’t the Satanic Panickers stop panicking sometime in the 1990’s?
ARK: Because of the number of failed prosecutions, overturned prosecutions and lawsuits related to cases that had been labeled as occult crimes, it does seem like it subsided somewhat among law enforcement and the general public. However, you may have heard about a recent theory in the last few years that’s been making the rounds concerning a Satanic pedophile ring run by politicians and celebrities that’s gained a lot of attention, so the panic isn’t really gone, it’s just gone 4chan. As for Satanic religions, the Church of Satan is still active and has on Twitter what “The Ringer” website called, “one of the only tolerable social media accounts of 2017.”
CCK: In 2013, The Satanic Temple, a nontheistic religious group based in the United States was started by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jeary, not their real names. The mission of the Satanic Temple per their website is to: Encourage Benevolence And Empathy, Reject Tyrannical Authority, Advocate Practical Common Sense, Oppose Injustice, And Undertake Noble Pursuits. In 2016, the temple set up official headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts in a former Victorian funeral home that is painted charcoal and also serves as the Salem Art Gallery. A documentary about the group, Hail Satan? was released in 2019. In the documentary, it is clear that one of the main objectives of the Temple is to promote first amendment rights, including religious freedom. In the United States freedom of religion should also mean freedom from religion so one of the Satanic Temple’s efforts focused on erecting a statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed, winged creature in response to a statue of the ten commandments located outside of the Arkansas State Capitol.
ARK: Their point was, if you’re horrified by the idea of having Baphomet outside your capitol building, consider the possibility that the separation of church and state should apply to all churches or be prepared to have a monument for every religion in front of your statehouse. The ten commandments monument was moved to another location on the capital grounds after being stuck by a car but the ACLU currently has a legal suit pending to challenge its location at the capitol.
CCK: The Satanic Temple seems to be the business in the front of satanic religious organizations with Church of Satan being the party in the back. A satanic mullet if you will.
ARK: Again, I won’t. In 2014, the Satanic Temple held a black mass in Boston. Originally it was going to be conducted at Harvard, and while Harvard did not prohibit the event, the student free-speech campus group received enough pressure to pull its support so it was held instead at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Over 1500 Catholics turned out to protest a small group of people exercising their right to free speech and religion and presumably consumption of potstickers. Lucien Greaves, one of the founders of the Temple said that he actually felt a sense of guilt and shame about himself after the mass because of the huge amount of negative press and public reaction. And then he remembered the millions of dollars spent by the Catholic Church in Boston paying people off and keeping people quiet and moving around priests accused of sexual abuse of children without addressing the issues. Vicious crimes and crimes against children may evoke horror and feelings that the perpetrator is in league with the devil, but obviously human depravity doesn’t require membership in a Satanic cult.
CCK: I guess every religion has their bad apples.
ARK: I think you mean, bad figs
CCK: Oh yes, thank you.