HISTORY OF SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE AND OTHER "URBAN FOLK TALES"

These are a type of rumor that:

	involves unknown people (typically a friend of a friend)
	has been heard by almost everyone
	spreads very quickly
	is quite believable
	is of an event that never happened

Some older examples of urban folk tales were:

	During the 17th and 18th century, stories circulated about large numbers of young white women having been kidnapped by natives and badly abused.
	During the late 19th century, a series of small, anti-Roman Catholic books were written. They described allegedly true accounts of events in convents, including the killing of infants. Perhaps the most famous of the books was "The Adventures of Maria Monk". This piece of hate literature was still being circulated in the mid 1950's, at least in Northern Ontario, Canada.
	During the early 20th century, books and pamphlets were circulated, describing how evil foreigners were kidnapping young innocent girls who had left their farm to live in the city. The stories involved allegedly true accounts of some of the thousands of girls who were believed to have been lured into a life of prostitution.

Some typical modern urban folk tales are:

	Alligators in the New York city sewer system
	The couple that fell in love with a cute dog while on vacation, smuggled it back into the US, and later found it to be a Mexican sewer rat
	Children cooking live cats in a microwave
	Evil people putting pins and razor blades in Halloween apples
	A terminally ill boy who wants to get into the Guinness Book of Records by collecting the largest number of business cards in history.

Occasionally, some group will research one of these folk tales and show that it is a hoax.

One of the most tenacious hoax involves imaginary evil religious groups who engage in the ritual murder of children. This story describes an evil religious cult which is engaging in degenerate sexual orgies, kidnapping babies, conducting human sacrifices, drinking blood and eating the flesh of their victims. It has many points of similarities to Urban Folk Tales: many people believe it to be true, even though it is not. This tale differs somewhat from most urban folk tales, because:

	it has lasted for almost two millennia;
	the group blamed for the abuse changed continually through the centuries (from Christians in the late first century CE to Satanists today);
	it surfaces from time to time, typically in rural areas, and can trigger a Satanic panic - a mass hysteria in which a many adults fear that their children are in imminent danger.

This belief is directly traceable back to the first few centuries CE when the early Christians were in conflict with the Roman authorities. The government created false rumors in order to facilitate persecution of the Church:

	They twisted elements of the Eucharist and said that the wine and wafer were really the blood and flesh of ritually killed babies.
	They noted that Christians often picked up newborns who had been abandoned to die of exposure. The Christians then placed the babies in loving families to be raised. The rumor implied that they were really collecting babies for human sacrifice..
	They implied that the Agape (Love) Feasts were not group meals, but were really excuses to engage in sexual orgies, incest, sexual abuse of children etc. [There appears to be archaeological evidence that Gnostic Christians did engage in ritual sex; they regarded semen as a sacred fluid and consecrated their status with it. However, their rituals only involved adults, not children.]

Minicus Felix, a first century Christian writer, wrote a dialogue "Octavious," between a Pagan and a Christian. He had the Pagan repeat unfounded rumors spread about Christians. One lie involved their behaviors at religious services. The stories allege infant sacrifice, cannibalism and incestuous group sex:

The long-running belief in SRA is believed to be more related to our fascination with evil, demonic activity rather than to any reality. Numerous government studies have concluded that no Satanic conspiracy exists. Hard evidence has never been found. However, belief in the legend continues. It is supported by:

	A widespread and increasing belief in the existence of the devil. The General Social Survey (GSS) of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) found in 1991 that 65.4% of adult Americans believed that the Devil either probably or definitely exists. This is the highest percentage of any industrialized country other than Ireland. A Barna Research study in 2001 found that only 27% of the adult population strongly disagrees that Satan is just a symbol of evil.
	Past discussion of SRA on TV talk shows
	Plenty of soft evidence, the memories of SRA survivors recovered during therapy (one author conservatively estimates 1 million Americans per year enter therapy and recover memories of childhood sexual abuse during the 1980s and 1990s; this implies about 200,000 per year recover memories of SRA)
	Horror movies which often have a Satanic theme.
	Projection of parents' guilt onto a scapegoated group.
	Promotion of SRA during seminars and in books by "survivors" and conservative Christians, now in rapid decline.
	The need to have a new enemy to fear, after the fall of Communism.
	General public anxiety over the imminent end of the world.

There is evidence that the legend's target is shifting. During the 1980's, Satanists were almost exclusively blamed for the abuse. SRA promoters now realize that there are very few Satanists in North America - certainly not enough to create all the abuse that is supposed to occur. Seminar leaders and authors are now pointing at benign religious groups (New Agers, Quakers, small Christian and Jewish groups, Wiccans, etc.), at criminal gangs, at men's fraternal organizations, and at self-help/mutual support groups.

We hope that the legend will eventually fade from view - perhaps by the year 2010. Several factors will contribute to this:

	Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian authors and seminar leaders who are promoting the SRA belief system are being increasingly exposed as frauds by fellow Christian and by Pagan groups;
	30 years will have passed without any hard evidence of SRA. Eventually, people will realize that it does not exist;
	A consensus will be reached within the mental health community about recovered memories of SRA. We expect that memories revealed during therapy (involving guided imagery, hypnotism, age regression, etc.) will be found to be false memories. These are recollections which feel real, which are believed in by both therapist and client, but which are of events that never happened.

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