This is a rough draft of an article
on an article Ms. published in February 1993 on ritual abuse. A finished
version of this article will appear at this URL by April 1, 1998.
The cover illustration for the February
1993 issue of Ms. was certainly one of the most dramatic for
any magazine that year. In the center is a naked child with arms outstretched
as if struggling and a look of terror on his or her face. Encircling the
child are three snakes, their coils overlapping, each possessing human-like
heads with outstretched forked tongues menacing the child.
The copy is simple and stark, placed
on three lines “Believe It! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists/One Woman’s
Story.”
Inside the magazine the reader
finds the accompanying 6 page article, “Surviving the unbelievable:
a first-person account of cult ritual abuse,” which purports to recount
one woman’s tale of her family’s multi-generational involvement
in a satanic cult. Reading the article, just how believable is this “unbelievable”
tale? Should the reader just “believe it” as the cover suggest?
And what would believing this account entail?
A Rose by any other name
The first red flag that pops up
is the author of the article itself — Elizabeth S. Rose. Rose does not
exist; she is a pseudonym invented by the author of the article. There
is no way anyone reading this article can in any way, shape or form hope
to find any corroborating evidence for Rose’s claims. The people
Rose accuses of numerous capital crimes will never have a chance to respond
to her accusations. All the reader has to go on is what Rose herself says,
and according to the editors at Ms. everyone’s just supposed
to “believe it!”
Leaving aside the details of Rose’s
story for the moment, this is asking readers to be extraordinarily credulous.
Should people simply believe anything said by anonymous authors with no
possibility of corroborating the author’s story?
The second red flag is the details
in the story itself. Although Rose has the opportunity to tell her side
of the story with no risk of challenge, parts of her story are confusing.
For example, it’s never quite clear whether Rose has always had memories
of the alleged ritual abuse or whether she believes she repressed them
and then recovered them in therapy. She claims early in her story that
“Although I had been sworn to secrecy as a child, only two months
earlier I had begun talking in therapy about my cult experiences.”
A few sentences later she refers to her “long-repressed terror”
that gripped her while caring for her sick child.
Near the end of her account, she
allows how it was difficult for her to tell her paternal grandparents
of the abuse she was suffering and notes how
dissociation and repression of memories make disclosure very difficult.
The victim may not have conscious awareness that abuse took place. If
memories do emerge years later, descriptions of the rituals are so bizarre
that they are often discounted as untrue.
Rose appears to be writing as if
this describes her case, and in fact although it is not explicitly stated,
it is likely that many of Rose’s memories are very recent. Furthermore
it is extremely likely that her memories were created as part of some
sort of “recovered memory therapy.” Rose describes being in
an ambulance with her daughter who is very ill when,
seeing my baby so close to death brought forth startling flashbacks.
I could hear my uncle’s voice; I could even smell his sweat, as
I remembered his chilling words: ‘When you grow up, I’m gonna
kill your babies the same way we killed your baby sister, understand?
Babies deserve to die. Satan wants their blood, especially girl babies,
because they taste so good.
Typically in therapy designed to
“recover” long-repressed memories, patients are instructed in
the therapy session that they more than likely have been abused and will
be able to correct whatever problem they are facing in life by recovering
those memories. Memories can be recovered in a variety of ways from hypnotic
and trance-like states, dream interpretation, any of a number of written
exercises designed to induce alternative states of cognition, etc. The
particulars of the debate over recovered memory are beyond the scope of
this article, except to note that many former patients are convinced that
these techniques have a distinct possibility of creating a set of memories
which do not accurately describe the patient’s past (in fact many
are now winning lawsuits against their former therapists). The sort of
things Rose describes is typical of what someone in a recovered memory
therapy setting might experience.
Before moving on to the details
of her account of ritual abuse, it is important to note that Rose herself
recognizes she is prone to fantasy about her ritual abuse experiences.
In describing her ambulance trip with her 15-month-old daughter, who apparently
contracted meningitis, Rose at first appears to believe the Satanic cult
is behind her daughter’s illness.
I had betrayed the cult [by talking about it with her therapist] —
and now revenge was being taken against my daughter. Or so it seemed.
I thought my daughter’s illness a punishment brought down by the
cult, or by Satan — maybe even by God, because of my cult involvement.
Long-repressed terror gripped me; irrational thoughts filled my mind.
[Rose goes on to describe the flashback experience quoted above of seeing
her uncle threaten to kill her.]
Consider, then, Rose’s beliefs about her fears, fantasies and reality
when it comes to the Satanic cult which allegedly abused her for years.
On the way to the hospital she
is clearly in an agitated state, believing there is a good chance her
infant daughter may die. She has recently started remembering experiences
as a child where she was allegedly abused by a cult for a number of years.
Suddenly a maddening thought pops into her mind — what if the cult made
her daughter sick to get back at her for revealing its secrets? What if
Satan himself is punishing her for defying him? But ultimately Rose rejects
this explanation. As she puts it, “revenge was being taken against
my daughter. Or so it seemed.” A brief note at the end of the article
claims that Rose’s two children in fact “have never been exposed
to cult activities.”
Apparently Rose’s fear that
the cult induced the meningitis in her daughter was an example of the
“irrational thoughts [that] filled my mind.”
But, despite this, she is absolutely
convinced the flashbacks of her uncle threatening to cannibalize her represent
actual historical events. As she puts it, “this was the reality I
had been taught as a child.”
Without any sort of corroborating
evidence available to decide the issue, it certainly doesn’t seem
impossible that a woman so agitated she wrongly fears a Satanic cult has
induced a horrible disease in her child, might also erroneously come to
believe her uncle once threatened to kill and eat her. At the very least
the reader should demand an accounting on how Rose decides which, if any,
of the sudden impressions she receives in such an agitated state correspond
to reality. How does she decide that it only “seemed” to be
the cult that caused her daughter’s illness, but it is a “reality”
that her uncle threatened her?
The devil is in the details
So what form did this cult and its
ritual abuse of Rose take? Rose claims she was involved in a cult of “approximately
20 adults and eight to ten children.” She believes her family’s’
involvement in this particular cult stretches over generations, extending
back at least to her maternal grandmother who indoctrinated Rose’s
mother in the cult “at a very young age” (in fact, Rose writes,
her family’s involvement in the cult “probably goes back further.”)
In turn Rose’s mother indoctrinated her into the cult “when
I was four or five years old.” Other members of Rose’s family,
including an aunt and the aforementioned uncle, participated in the acts
of ritual abuse Rose claims she witnessed.
Although she describes her mother’s
family as “[an] otherwise ordinary middle-class family,” in
fact unbeknownst to the rest of the community “our Saturday nights
were regularly spent at explicitly satanic cult meetings held in a cabin
in the country, a site the cult owned specifically for ritual purposes.”
The theology of the cult bears
a striking resemblance to feminist criticisms of Christianity (a point
Rose makes on at least one occasion). The Satanic cult at least on the
surface idolizes women, but of course underneath women are valued only
as sexual objects or for their ability to bear offspring (shades of the
Madonna/whore archetypes), and in fact women are treated exceedingly poorly
by the cult; in fact the worst of the abuse is reserved for the women.
Rose claims she witnesses numerous
acts of horrifying brutality. When her mother becomes pregnant and the
cult becomes convinced the fetus is a female, the mother allows labor
to be induced so that the baby may be sacrificed,
My mother became pregnant a few months after I was inducted into the
cult. About seven months later, the cult decided she was carrying a
girl child. Her labor was induced and the infant delivered prematurely
by the cult doctor at our house. I witnessed the birth. The baby was
born tiny, but alive. Two days later, I was forced to watch as they
killed my baby sister by decapitation in a ritual sacrifice. The sacrifice
was followed by a communion ritual, during which human flesh and blood
were consumed.
Rose also describes her aunt ritually abusing her,
My mother’s sister was the first person to perform acts of ritual
abuse on me. My aunt told me I was being punished because I was a wicked
little girl. In the months following, I witnessed my aunt commit many
acts of ritual abuse.
Rose never tells us what exactly her aunt did to her on this occasion,
but writes that ritual abuse by cults can include:
torture with pins and needles, forcing a child to take mind-altering
drugs .. submerging a child in water, particularly as part of a satanic
baptismal rite … withholding of food or water, sleep deprivation,
and forced eating of feces, urine, blood, or raw flesh … physical
beatings, use of cuts, burns, or tattoos, and the removal of body parts…
In a particularly gruesome passage, Rose describes how this supposedly
male-centered cult ritually abused a young boy,
I personally witnessed the removal of a boy’s testicle as part
of a ritual ceremony. nothing was used to numb the pain. He was instructed
to tell anyone who asked that he had been born with only one testicle.
And, of course, Rose now has vivid memories of being raped during Satanic
fertility rituals,
The victim was strapped to the altar table in front of a ritual gathering
and systematically gang-raped while the fertility rites were chanted.
The purpose was to impregnate the victim. The resulting fetus was sometimes
used in ritual sacrifice.
To condition her further to endure all of this abuse, Rose writes how,
I was once put in isolation for several months, which meant that no
one spoke to me, answered me, or touched me unless in public with noninitiates
around me. I remember feeling literally invisible, believing that I
would die unless someone touched me — any kind of touching, even painful,
was better than none.
The truth could set her free
There are a couple of observations
that immediately stand out from Rose’s description of her alleged
ritual abuse. First, the narrative presents numerous possibilities
for corroboration. Medical records and examinations could corroborate
much of her story. Checking the medical histories of those involved would
give police a very good idea of whether or not much of this is true. Finding
the location of this cabin the cult allegedly owned and examining property
records for the time period described would allow us to evaluate how likely
Rose’s claims are. But, of course, it’s impossible to check
any part of her story because she doesn’t want the reader to do so
Second, it is obvious that Rose
bears a great deal of animosity toward her female relatives in particular
and her mother’s family in general. In fact it is interesting that
the only individuals identified specifically as engaging in acts of ritual
abuse are women — Rose’s aunt, mother and grandmother — while,
on the other hand, she completely absolves her father of any culpability
for the ritual abuse (throughout the article Rose maintains that the abuse
took place while her father, who was in the military, was away from the
family on assignment. Although she is sworn to secrecy, she tells her
father about her abuse but he “passed my stories off as childhood
nightmares.”) Similarly she absolves her paternal grandparents, who
lived in the same small town, of any responsibility because they simply
didn’t know what was happening to her.
And as Rose tells it, it is her
mother and grandmother and perhaps their mothers and grandmothers who
are responsible for indoctrinating young children into the cult. In short
much of Rose’s problems stem not just from cult members, but from
women cult members specifically. This is typical of allegations of Satanism
or witchcraft — it is largely women who suffer and are punished under
such claims. The witch hunt that occurred in the United States in the
17th century is a perfect example of how this plays out.
Do you believe it?
As you can probably guess, based
on the evidence provided in this article, I am extremely skeptical of
Rose’s claims. It is impossible to prove that these events did not take
place, but to begin to take seriously such incredible claims would require
a minimum of corroborating evidence. Since Rose makes it impossible for
us or anyone else to independently verify her claims, they must be rejected;
to accept Rose’s claims would entail relying on a standard of evidence
from which it would be impossible to hold back any claim, however flimsy.
We would end up simply uncritically believing anything people tell us
– as Ms. and feminists such as Gloria Steinem seem to be.
Oddly enough, this is precisely
the position that Rose herself takes; people should believe these claims
simply because people make these claims. Along the way Rose mixes in proper
feminist theory about sexual assault (this is, after all, Ms.)
As Rose describes the feminist position,
Most important, if we want to stop ritual abuse, the first step must
be to believe that these brutal crimes occur. Society’s denial
makes recovery much more difficult for survivors. Those who have suffered
from ritual abuse need the same respect and support that would be given
to survivors of any tragedy.
Notice the circular reasoning: we
must stop ritual abuse. We help stop ritual abuse by believing it is happening.
We know ritual abuse is happening because people are denying that it happens.
This is, of course, an old argument
recently taken up by feminists, including Gloria Steinem who has supported
claims of ritual abuse and repressed memory. How do anti-Semites know
a worldwide Jewish conspiracy exists? Because they are hidden so well
in our society at all levels of government. Well, give us proof of this
conspiracy and lets check them out? What — stop with the denial already;
the truth is Jews have infiltrated our government and social institutions.
Lets stop trying to pretend they haven’t.
The fact that no evidence has ever
been found to corroborate these stories of Satanic ritual abuse is, in
the minds of the true believers, further proof that the Satanic cult conspiracy
does exist. Doctors, lawyers, police, the CIA, the FBI, etc. are all on
the payroll covering the whole thing up.
The parallels with right wing conspiracy
theories and witch hunts are further illuminated with probably the most
bizarre recommendation in Ms. history. Right there along with
several groups dedicated to helping sexual assault and abuse victims,
Ms. publishes the address of the right-wing American Family Foundation
as a resource women should use to find out more about ritual abuse.
In conclusion