The Devil Made Me Do It
June 29, 2021 9:10 AM   Subscribe

Chaos and despair are regular guests in the Christian church: often cast out, but rarely interrogated. Demons, Panic and Memory: writer and podcaster Sam Thielman on the Satanic Panic and the compulsion to avoid horrific truths.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (29 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
During the Satanic Panic era, I had a good friend who said he had been abused in this way. He grew up in a small town, and essentially the whole town was in on it—he couldn't go to the police for help, or the principal at his school, because they were all part it. His stories included all the kinds of things that are in these stories—the sexual abuse, forced pregnancy, sacrifice of animals and infants.

I believed him, because I know that people have done unspeakable things. Also, it felt like my duty as his friend—to support him in his quest for improved mental health and reduction of suffering, I felt I should accept what he said, not challenge him.

Then I met another person who had had the same experience growing up, but in a small town in Michigan. And then I met another, from a different small town in Michigan. And then I met another...

I could believe in one small town that had given itself over to such a cult, but at least four? Three of them in Michigan?

The thing that all but one of the people I knew who shared this narrative were queer. This may be a selection bias—I am also queer, and at the time spent hardly any time with straight people. It was pretty horrible back then, to grow up queer in a small town, even if, like me, you didn't know yet that you were queer, but only had an abiding intuition that you were somehow different from everybody else and didn't belong there, and that your only hope was to escape from it as soon as you could.

I would be interested in whether any of the people who believed they had been subject to Satanic Ritual Abuse have written about that time, and how they coped with the growing clarity that these stories weren't true. I am no longer close to that particular friend, so I don't know how he talks about his upbringing now.
posted by Orlop at 9:58 AM on June 29, 2021 [18 favorites]


The Satanic Panic mania is one of many examples of the extreme lengths to which members of dominant groups will go to avoid interrogating the problematic aspects of their institutions, or even entertaining the notion of dismantling toxic power structures (like, say, capitalism or patriarchy). It's like an institutional version of the "Men will _______ instead of going to therapy" meme.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:19 AM on June 29, 2021 [14 favorites]


Do we immerse ourselves in fictional horror as a way of numbing our emotions to its real-life counterpart?
It is also that we prefer tall tales to true accounts of abuse again, and again, and again.
This is why, for my money anyway, the film of The Shining is superior to its source novel (which is, as anyone who knows me will confirm, an unusual position for me to take - I never took to the Wizard of Oz movie musical, pint-sized literary snob that I was). It allows for the very real possibility that there are no evil spirits, that the evil and horror was in and among us the whole time and we just willingly closed our eyes to it until we were forced to open them.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:07 AM on June 29, 2021 [10 favorites]


I was born in 1979 and got the full blast of the panic throughout my childhood. There were a lot of familiar names in the article. I was a voracious reader and my mother had both This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness around the house so I read them both. Frank Peretti went what I think of as the Law & Order: SVU route; presenting the sin as bad but also in the most titillating way he felt his audience could accept. I also had a couple of Mike Warnke standup cassettes, which I justify as being the best that an eight year old boy with limited exposure to comedy and extremely watchful conservative Christian parents can do. I don't remember any mention of the Satanic cult from either cassette; if my memory serves Warnke was making up stories about his time in Vietnam rather than making up stories about ritual child abuse on them.

My childhood sexual abuse wasn't at the hands of a Satanic cult but it also wasn't at the hands of anyone in our church. To the best of my knowledge the church my parents attended didn't have any problems of that sort (and I feel I was in a good position to know about it if it had happened).

I have known a couple people over the years who have made claims about sexual abuse / rapes both from their childhood and in their more recent adulthood that... test credulity. I tend to lean towards taking "believe victims" as my default position but a few of the alleged victims in question have asked me to believe things that would require (among other things) a reworking of the human understanding of how physics work. At the same time I recognize predators have an incentive to target people who are known to be delusional or compulsive liars because others are disinclined to believe them. It's tough to know what the right thing to do is in these cases.

Mostly I just feel bad for my parents. I was born when my father was 23 and my mother was 22. I shudder to think what I'd have been like if I'd had children at that age. I'm sure they were scared and they did their best and listened to the advice of people they trusted and unfortunately they trusted the wrong people.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:32 AM on June 29, 2021 [7 favorites]


Nice account, focusing on the conservative religious matrix out of which some of the Satanic Panic emerged.
(There's more. For example, Michelle Remembers was in 1980, and played a key role. Even now, Teal Swan says it influenced her.)

I was surprised by how Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It went full Satanic Panic, taking it fully seriously. I do wonder what the thinking was?
-historical recreation
-belief that this stuff actually happened
-working with the evil cult horror fiction trope
posted by doctornemo at 12:08 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


I am still fascinated by the parallel: that the Satanic Panic roared along for a decade, yielding no evidence whatsoever. At around the same time revelations of actual abuse in a religious setting were starting to go public, but from a different religious source, the Catholic church.
posted by doctornemo at 12:09 PM on June 29, 2021 [14 favorites]


I grew up all around this, from a small town completely obsessed with it, and inundated by it in the fundamentalist church I grew up attending. But, really, I just wanted to add this, one of the funniest moments in all of U.S. political history.
posted by General Malaise at 1:06 PM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


I've told this story elsewhere on here, but here is something that happened in the late eighties at a well-regarded high school in a middling-affluent midwestern suburb. To my mind it illustrates something pretty critical about the Satanic Panic stuff.

I was a wretchedly miserable kid, one of the ones at the very bottom of the pecking order who can be bullied by everyone - it was me, the kid with an illness that made him very, very overweight, the girl with a serious mental disability and a couple of kids from the wrong side of the tracks who were either too weird or too truculent to escape. My high school was a real eighties teen movie house of horrors - the violent rich white jocks, the Carrie type bullying by mean girls, the intense hierarchy. the constant cruelty overlooked by or sometimes perpetrated by the teachers.

In assembly I sat behind one of the other outcasts, a kid I didn't know at all. He was one of the poor weird kids. He always wore a denim jacket with a couple of Dead Kennedys patches, various punk things and a pentagram drawn on. This was before nineties punk and after seventies punk. You could not buy fun hair colors at the store, it was not a style choice embraced by well-off fun kids, it was stigmatized and most of the punks were actually the poor kids. (We literally had tracks to be on the wrong side of in my suburb, too.)

There was another kid who bullied us both, a big mean kid with a little gang of followers. He was scary, if you like - he was really, really malicious. He didn't torment people to get ahead with his friends or because he was scared; he liked hurting you and he'd go out of his way to find out methods. You felt sick with despair when he was after you because he would not stop.

The exact sequence of events is blurred by memory, but one afternoon the bully was after the kid from assembly once again, and the kid from assembly took out a pocket knife (you could carry pocket knives then; we all had them, little ones) and chased the bully down the hall and stabbed him. The assembly kid holed up in an empty classroom until the cops came and hauled him away to juvvie, whence he never returned.

This was of course a local scandal...and the media immediately leaped to "Satan made him do it". Supposedly, "Satanists" gathered in a nearby abandoned factory (the evidence for this was some heavy metal graffiti and empty beer cans). And supposedly this kid's jacket and Dead Kennedys patches were proof that he was a satanist and Satan made him stab the bully. No one in any of the media coverage I ever saw even mentioned the bullying because this was Reagan's America and if you were getting bullied it was because you were a commie fag weirdo and probably deserved it, and anyway adults certainly couldn't fix something like that.

A couple of the other punk kids were on TV because they looked disreputable and they ran with it - yes, there were Satanists who met at the factory, yes our suburb was rife with devil worship.

I always felt so sorry for that kid. There were probably twenty or thirty people in school who felt an electric thrill of relief when we heard that the bully was stabbed and who desperately hoped that he would never come back. (He did come back but he was a pallid shadow of his old self - he hated me up through graduation, went out of his way to harm me a couple of times but somehow the force he'd embodied was dissipated. If anything, the stabbing drove a devil out.) That kid didn't do anything the rest of us hadn't wished for, just to end the torment. It wasn't mystifying, what happened.

In the end I felt like the whole thing was about using people - the town and the media weren't stupid enough to believe that it was really Satanists writing "AC/DC" on the walls of the old factory or that Satan really caused the stabbing. It was just titillation - much more fun to gawk at the punks and poor kids and get all worked up about devil worship than to say that there was a scared kid in a toxic Reaganite school who got pushed so hard that he pushed back even though it cost him.

That suburb, that region, that era - it was all about malice and enjoyment of malice. The same logic as Guantanamo and drug testing welfare recipients and pretending that the people who get shot by police have guns, etc etc etc, just an excuse for a festival of hatred. If there really were devil worship, it would be that very kind of hated and spite cultivated through knowing lies.
posted by Frowner at 1:07 PM on June 29, 2021 [99 favorites]


Two things about the Satanic Panic stand out to me. One is that it took place not long after (if not very slightly coterminous with) the brief time in American history when it was OK, at least in certain circles, to be a Satanist, of the Anton LaVey variety. The seventies were when a lot of fringe beliefs, if they didn't exactly go mainstream, were at least discussed in or near prime-time and not on something like AM Coast to Coast; pretty much everything that was on
The X-Files
two decades later was taken seriously. I'm not blaming LaVey or any other pagan or pagan-adjacent person for the panic (I'm a born-again pagan myself), but some of it may be the panic-mongers claiming that, if you had someone going on a talk show to talk about his affinity for Old Scratch, there were likely even more wicked things going on in secret.

The other thing is that it was the first time I was conscious of a whole lot of people in my society who believed something that was not only patently irrational but potentially harmful. I mean, you could say that about any number of political and religious movements and sects, but in this case I'm talking about claims made about events that clearly did not and could not have happened. And it persisted for a while; I went to a library conference in the mid-nineties where a speaker just casually dropped some classic SatPan claims into the middle of her talk, and stuck to her guns even after the audience audibly made clear its disbelief and scorn. The case of the West Memphis Three was probably due in part to the lingering effects of the panic.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:30 PM on June 29, 2021 [11 favorites]


I was surprised by how Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It went full Satanic Panic, taking it fully seriously. I do wonder what the thinking was?

My main problem with those movies is how positively they depict Ed and Lorraine Warren, two of the biggest lying grifters who ever grifted. They'd been exposed as charlatans way back when The Amityville Horror was still stinking up the box office, more than 30 years before the release of the first Conjuring film. And yet these newer movies fully buy into their bullshit, portraying them as self-sacrificing heroes whose only worldly concern is the protection of their hapless, demon-haunted clients. It would be like making a current-day biopic about Jimmy Swaggart that depicts him as a pious and put-upon martyr whose name had been unjustly dragged through the dirt by the scheming, godless media.
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:48 PM on June 29, 2021 [11 favorites]


supposedly this kid's jacket and Dead Kennedys patches were proof that he was a satanist

Reminds me of the West Memphis Three, as Halloween Jack notes. (Last time I was in Arkansas I met with a bunch of academics; they were evenly divided about the kids' guilt.)

A very sad story, Frowner. I'm sorry.
posted by doctornemo at 1:53 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


Atom Eyes, I don't get the franchise business model. How much is hard right religious types, and how much folks interested in the occult but never heard the actual history?
posted by doctornemo at 1:54 PM on June 29, 2021


The new Conjuring movie isn't the only thing on Netflix going full "Satanic Panic."

The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness "documentary" they put out a couple of months ago does the same thing. While ostensibly describing the work of investigator Maury Terry, it reports some of his conjectures with a credulity bordering on breathlessness. Apparently, Berkowitz was somehow working with Satanists in Yonkers, the Manson Family, the Process Church, and a global occult network.

It's so sensationalist and stupid, in the last episode they actually try to pull a "Maybe the real Son of Sam was the friends we made along the way." Naturally, I hate-watched the entire thing.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:32 PM on June 29, 2021 [6 favorites]


What stands out for me about the Satanic Panic is the timeline corresponds with the emergence of public discussions of very real sexual abuse. This came out before the scale of church-based abuse was known. The 80s were the days of starting to admit that most sexual abuse is perpetrated by family members. I think this article hints at it but made me want an even deeper dive. Was Satanic Panic a cultural Reaction Formation of some kind at the dawning reality that sexual abuse is endemic?

As mentioned above, I would be extremely curious to hear from folks who lived through this as an insider to hear their perspectives now.

I can think of a couple family members who have stated they were sexually abused in a way that I found implausible. I did not tell them that feeling, and I could very certainly be wrong about my assumptions. On the other hand, knowing both of them, it seems quite likely that they did experience some kind of invasive harms, perhaps sexual. Given what we now know of the fallibility of memory, when trying to reconstruct childhood traumas it seems likely that while someone might come to describe the events in a way that is not strictly factually correct, they are likely speaking to a true experience, the exact details of which may be somewhat different but the trauma of which is very true and real.
posted by latkes at 2:45 PM on June 29, 2021 [4 favorites]


Hard reactionary movements like the evangelical one basically require bullshit conspiracy theories like the SatPan as a justifying myth. There is not a millimeter from there to the 'election fraud' chasers today. There is not a millimeter from there to the stab-in-the-back myth in the Weimar Republic.
posted by StarkRoads at 2:50 PM on June 29, 2021 [12 favorites]


I would be interested in whether any of the people who believed they had been subject to Satanic Ritual Abuse have written about that time, and how they coped with the growing clarity that these stories weren't true.

I was ritually abused, although not full out SRA - no weird dark masses or anything like that. But I know I was because not only did my abuser admit to abusing me to my family, when he was diagnosed with brain cancer he wrote me a detailed letter apologizing (and possibly enjoying the thought of me reading it) in some detail. He definitely had a couple of pedophile friends who participated. He was also a meticulous records keeper and kept medical records from when I was in his care, which had some fairly clear in hindsight information.

My grandfather did put the abuse into a religious context. During therapy I used to wonder if there was some kind of pedophile newsletter that went around. In my case it wasn't like, Black Mass/upside down crosses, but he definitely placed the abuse into a narrative that involved the forces of good and evil, eternal damnation, etc. In other words, he used a child's natural desire to be both good and powerful against her in order to control her. He took me to see The Exorcist at a very young age as a kind of instruction manual. He had an incinerator on his property and I certainly was told that it could be used to burn bodies (really in pieces.)

During the height of the SRA stuff, or least soon after it, I was in several survivor groups/multiple mailing lists, and we all did trade war stories. While I think some of it probably was group think, and certainly I had people in my head that were expressing their experience in the terms they were given (one of the people in my head's names is actually Edie - short for Eternal Damnation) I also think that the vast majority of people in those groups had undergone abuse. To some degree the narrative structure was imposed by others.

(I personally think there were a couple of fakers, but even fakers have Reasons.)

In therapy, I had a really good therapist who wasn't like BEGONE SATAN and who worked to put my legitimate memories and child-driven beliefs into some kind of understandable context. I read the FBI "where are the bodies" report and in general I agree with the conclusion - there are plenty of garden-variety abusers, you don't need a worldwide conspiracy of Satan, and certainly there were clearly many, if not most, areas where hysteria and moral panic took over. In my case it was a guy, and a couple of gross friends. But it was contextualized for me as a child into a religious context that was, if not SRA, definitely lead in that direction.

I have to say that I am left with at least one set of memories that I feel ambiguous about. Not that I think there was a Satanic Cult, or Satan, but that I was pushed and drugged (we definitely were drugged) to a point where certainly weird shit was perceived. But that's not necessarily any different than other incredibly stressful experiences.

I will note two things.

One is that one of the key members of NXIVM was a neighbour, and my abuse happened within a 10-minute drive of the NXIVM compound. I totally enjoyed the You're Wrong About takedown of Michelle Remembers (I haven't listened to the latest one yet) because god that book was awful. However, I sometimes am amused when the Media Savvy extol the story of grown women who eventually end up starved and branded in an organization that is sex trafficking young women, and also are keen to explain the Satanic Panic. I do not, really never have, believe in a worldwide conspiracy of Satanists nor do I believe in Satan. But people who share my life and my mind spent years and years and years trying to mould themselves into a structure that was similar. Their innate drive as kids to be loved, special, meaningful was twisted by some sick individuals. Their attraction to a spirituality that connects human experience to meaning -- a quality which remains and which is quite significant in being open to change and compassion -- was twisted by a garden variety abuser. I don't like to see that erased.

And of course, in Canada, we are right at this moment learning that the stories of survivors of residential "schools", who reported to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that they knew of children who had been beaten to death, abused, left to die, and that they had been forced to dig mass graves for them -- that nuns incinerated babies -- all kinds of horrors, well, guess what? They found the bodies.

They. found. the. bodies.

I'm opposed to moral panics and the way kids in daycares were manipulated is horrific to me. But as the Satanic Panic podcast from CBC points out...a few kilometers down the road, those things were happening, to kids, committed by priests.

AMA. :)
posted by warriorqueen at 2:54 PM on June 29, 2021 [55 favorites]


warriorqueen - it was really powerful to read your story. Thank you for sharing it here.
posted by latkes at 3:22 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


And of course, in Canada, we are right at this moment learning that the stories of survivors of residential "schools", who reported to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that they knew of children who had been beaten to death, abused, left to die, and that they had been forced to dig mass graves for them -- that nuns incinerated babies -- all kinds of horrors, well, guess what? They found the bodies.

When the narratives are of elaborations and refinements of depravity of evil as perceived by a traditionalist mindset, they are probably made up. There's something about at least the American traditionalist mind that is drawn to a conception of evil as a matter of ritual and paraphernalia (see, e.g., the belief that kids using drugs are decorating their rooms with coded tchotchkes). Tragically, nuns starving children in their care or priests abusing altar boys doesn't fit that model. It's not the extreme nature of the allegations that makes for an implausible story (not by itself, anyway), it's their type.

I've often wondered what it's like to be one of those kids all grown up, to know that you were used in that way, but also to know that at the time you told your story, you probably believed in it. What a terrifying early lesson in the malleability of personality and memory.
posted by praemunire at 4:26 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


I feel a bit like my point got missed actually. Not surprising- it’s not the easiest topic for me. What I remember was real abuse. It was ritualized. It was religious. It was designed to inculcate me into a position of service - to the desires of my relative.

People wanted what they were getting inklings of be a worldwide conspiracy of Satanists, because — I believe — they didn’t want to really get it. And other narratives got mixed up - the heroic Christian therapist who gets to save his patient. The exorcising, post-Vatican priest. The bad daycare, letting mums work. D&D. But my memories are real and true - just not the whole truth.

Neither is the new view that SRA was just a moral panic, at least not in my view. What would you call the removal of Indigenous children from their homes but an affront to Christ? What would you call forcing them into Catholic and Anglican rites but blasphemy? What would you call priests abusing altar boys and being moved around but a worldwide conspiracy? Sure, the kids had things backwards and the church ladies got the vapours but it was, in fact, real.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:44 PM on June 29, 2021 [13 favorites]


My junior high Satanic Panic experience was, like Frowner's, that of a cultural-political trend that, among other things, prominently featured class antagonism - specifically, the exploitation of the fundamentalist religious beliefs of one section of families in the school district by the bullies who were from the more affluent section of families, and whose targets were from the working class section of families.

The beliefs being exploited by the bullies were quite regressive, of course. The Christian fundamentalist families sent their kids to school with Chick Tracts to pass around, and managed to get the US public school (which, theoretically, was legally obligated to maintain a certain separation of church and state) to send home a handout on 'how to tell if your child is getting into devil worship' (which included use of symbols such as the peace sign or the international sign language for 'I love you', both being an upside-down trident, apparently; probably the AC/DC logo was on there too - pop metal music was popular among students a couple years ahead of me in school). Crucially, their Christianity was tied up with anti-communism, anti-feminism, homophobia, and a very exclusionary and tribal nationalism that aligned very well with the socio-political outlook that the school bullies came from (definitely on its way to the politicized fundamentalism that we see today). latkes, this was soon after the beginning of the alignment between economic conservatives and Christian fundamentalists in US politics, and (where I was in New England, at least) the general sentiment fueling the Satanic Panic as a political-cultural trend segued quite naturally and easily into the nationalistic warmongering of the first Gulf War (and there was a direct thread that could definitely be traced back to reactionary opposition to countercultural protests against the Vietnam War, and likely back to the Red Scare before that).

You also see threads from the Satanic Panic in early responses to school shootings in the '90s, where many schools and communities were sort of starting to acknowledge bullying as a problem, but viewed victims of bullying as being at risk of becoming school shooters (rather than understanding mass murder as being farther along the spectrum of behavior of the bullies themselves). For example, in another town my family lived in in the late '90s, this sort of victim blaming resulted in the kid who was most bullied in a local school being suspended because other students speculated about this kid becoming a school shooter because of the bullying, despite zero relevant warning/risk behaviors on the part of the kid in question. Similarly, the gay panic defense for violence against queer people - the Matthew Shephard case in particular - felt basically identical to myself and my contemporaries to our experiences of having purported worries about Satanism used to bully and ostracize us scant few years previously.
posted by eviemath at 5:26 PM on June 29, 2021 [14 favorites]


(No one was accused of Satanism in my school, but the bullies did accuse one target, who was one of the poorest kids in the grade, of being a witch. They made little twig crosses to hold up against that student as part of the taunt, and embarked on the Playground Inquisition: asking everyone if they were a witch, if they believed in God, and if they believed in Jesus Christ.

Being both contrary and raised in a non-religious household, I answered honestly when they got to me. But rather than causing me immediate pariah status, my responses instead instilled some religious doubt in my classmates (admittedly, your average junior high level religious understanding is fairly easy to poke holes in even with an equally naive outsider's junior high level religious understanding). It was only once my classmates had a chance to ask their parents or church leaders some uncomfortable questions over the subsequent few days that I experienced social consequences. Thus my conclusion that the religious content was mainly instrumental window dressing for the underlying bullying based on classism and general intolerance of difference.)
posted by eviemath at 5:44 PM on June 29, 2021 [9 favorites]


qanon == satpan
posted by j_curiouser at 6:58 PM on June 29, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've been in a number of debates where I've had to point out that the last witch hunts in the United States were in the late 1980s. Unlike what my friends desperately wanted to believe, American society is not built of rational philosophical ethics, but it's a barely rational overlay on a foundation of religious fervor and superstition. It's why the last Satanic panic won't be the last, and why, given enough political power, the Qanon belief set will probably lead to another witch craze in the coming decade.
posted by happyroach at 7:56 PM on June 29, 2021 [6 favorites]




The propinquity in both time and space of Satanic Ritual Abuse which didn't actually happen and real abuse which did and was even worse than those fantasies is provoking a bit of restlessness in a line of thought I try to keep under tight control, to the effect that there is a Collective Unconscious, and it isn't necessarily restricted to modes of communication we have been willing to invite into our parlors of Scientific Rationalism up to now.

On the morning of 9/11 I had a dream I took to be about 9/11, and that's one of many experiences which predispose me to that kind of thinking.
posted by jamjam at 11:55 PM on June 29, 2021 [5 favorites]


The second season of the Conviction podcast (subtitled American Panic) is a harrowing, heartbreaking ride through some of the lives ruined and families destroyed by false accusations of satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s.

Also, reading the comments here takes me straight back to my Southern Baptist upbringing, smack-dab in the middle of the Satanic Panic of the 80s. Ugh.

I hadn't considered the fake abuse / real abuse dynamic of that time until now, but yeah, it checks out. A lot about the right-wing fundy subculture was (and is) propped up by that fake/real dynamic on different issues. Real: widespread devil worship, secret messages hidden in rock music, a Gay Agenda that threatens society, female psyches forever ruined by premarital sex. Fake: systemic racism, science, patriarchy, historical facts.

Believing / not believing in these things isn't merely a matter of reasoning and understanding for yourself. It's a test to ensure tribal purity. So in addition to being scary and sensational, satanic activity is something the fundy crowd is extra-predisposed to believe, because to *not* believe it is to call into question your commitment to Sparkle Motion for sure.
posted by Rykey at 5:55 AM on June 30, 2021 [6 favorites]


There's a theory that some people who claim to be abducted by aliens were actually molested (as seen in the film Mysterious Skin). Given how weirdly sexual some alien abduction stories are, it does seem likely. Maybe it's easier to believe in Greys doing experiments on you than to believe a beloved family member sexually abused you.

This sort of thing was likely happening once the satanic panic gathered force--memories being retrofitted to this narrative that was popping up all over. There were therapists who were leading people to it.
posted by LindsayIrene at 8:35 AM on June 30, 2021 [6 favorites]


On the morning of 9/11 I had a dream I took to be about 9/11, and that's one of many experiences which predispose me to that kind of thinking.

I'm agnostic about the possibility of prophetic dreams, but it's also possible that, out of 320 million Americans, you're one of the statistically-certain number who had a dream remarkably similar to the events of 9/11 that morning.
posted by straight at 8:58 AM on June 30, 2021 [4 favorites]


a line of thought I try to keep under tight control, to the effect that there is a Collective Unconscious, and it isn't necessarily restricted to modes of communication we have been willing to invite into our parlors of Scientific Rationalism up to now.

If there is, it really isn't worth much. Let's assume you had a dream warning you about 9-11; there were 3000+ people who didn't that day. So if it existed, the CU is singularly useless.
posted by happyroach at 1:13 AM on July 1, 2021 [1 favorite]


« Older A path to plurinationality in Chile   |   Gun-Surrendering Criminal Mark McCloskey's Very... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments