Satanic Panic

Yesterday I was reminded of a period in American history that I'd just as soon forget, but perhaps it's important to examine it and understand what it says about us. 

In the 1970's and 80's in America we went through what I can only call a period of mass psychosis where we were seeing the devil around every corner. Christian fundamentalists and people with dark imaginations came together in the worst possible way to create "satanic panic". Everything the fundamentalists didn't like was suddenly automatically associated with devil worship. Heavy metal, Stephen King novels, ouija boards, Dungeons & Dragons, black clothing, Halloween and on and on.

Where It Began

Spiritualism

From about the 1840's to the 1920's, spiritualism had its heyday in America. The great-grandparents of today's generation were into things like seances and spirit divination. They believed in ghosts and flocked to things like hypnosis demonstrations. They were serious about it too. Much as in the 1980's, religion was going through a phase as well. The religious fundamentalists were just then inventing the idea of the "rapture" and having tent revivals in which people gave themselves over to a sort of collective trance state communing with God and witnessing miracles like faith healing, etc. I'd like to say that Americans haven't always been as impressionable and given to hysteria as they are now, but it wouldn't be the truth. The religious fundamentalists and the Pentecostals have been going on about the coming end of the world for over a century. People back then were very interested in the spirit world, and if you happened to be religious that belief took on a darker, more religious tone. The religious ones believed that the ones calling up spirits during seances were really summoning spirits, but they believed them to be devils and believed in demonic possession.

It was also in this period that supernatural literature like H.P. Lovecraft came into vogue, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. People couldn't get enough of their dark imaginings and enjoyed being terrified. The books might have been written as lurid entertainment, but they planted a seed in the minds of impressionable people and made them imagine that such primal horrors existed. Then for a while after WWII the whole spiritualism craze died down and was largely forgotten except in the sense that people might have some elderly aunt who continued having seances and dabbling in automatic writing. Otherwise it was over and people got on with the sensible business of living their lives. 

70's Revival

Rod Serling's Night Gallery

In the 1970's this belief in the supernatural got dusted off and rebranded. In 1969 the Charles Manson murders happened and Anton Lavey wrote the Satanic Bible. This got the ball rolling and in the 1970's the horror movie genre took off and everyone was watching movies like The Exorcist and Amityville Horror. The weirdos took all of this and ran away with it, and suddenly there were loners in black listening to heavy metal and wearing pentagrams and upside-down crosses and dabbling in the same things their grandparents had dabbled in but now with a darker feel to it. The Christian fundamentalists were experiencing something of a revival at the time and they did the same thing they had the last time, wailing that all of it was a sign of the end times and that the devil was waging spiritual warfare on the young folks. Jack Chick started writing his comics in which everything secular or popular with the younger generation was witchcraft and satan worship. 

Stranger Danger

This gained momentum throughout the 70's with rumors that there were albums you could play backwards and hear a message on, or things like saying the name of the band KISS stood for "Knights In Satan's Service", Ozzy Osborn bit the head off of a live bat on stage, etc. The pump was primed. Then in the 80's we got televangelists like Billy Graham and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on the airwaves. AM radio had plenty of evangelists too. All of them set about calling everything they could satanic. The concept of "stranger danger" took off in this decade too, with everyone panicking that the bogeyman was going to make off with their children and that they couldn't take their children trick-or-treating on Halloween because there might be razor blades and needles in the Halloween candy. People got pretty paranoid. Never mind that it was almost never a stranger who was doing stuff to the kids. 

Unfortunately people started taking it too seriously and it resulted in some people being accused of satanic ritual abuse of children. Some of it really happened, because there are always people who hear of such a thing and decide it sounds like something they'd want to do. People were seeing the bogeyman everywhere, and on some level it seemed like they liked to be frightened out of their minds and they had really dark imaginations. This was not helped by all of the media out there making money from the phenomenon. Lately in the news we're hearing about all of the priests and ministers who were molesting children while everyone was scanning the horizon for the devil. 

We seemed to have recovered somewhat from our obsession with the devil in America, but you can still hear echoes and see signs that we want to start up again. Sometimes it seems to me as if we're addicted to our own panic hormones and we trigger them on purpose to get our fix. We settle down for a little while and then we get a wild hair up our ass and we go looking for what isn't there. I for one would not miss either group that contributed to this, the creepy weirdos in robes playing at devil worship or the fundamentalists who overreacted to it. This panic had a body count in the 80's. It was a dark and paranoid time to grow up in.