Satanism

Satanism, an inversion of religion that parodies conventional faith by venerating evil instead of good. Despite rumors of widespread satanic crimes, organized satanism is rare. For the most part, it appears to pose no physical threat either to its members or to outsiders. The beliefs and practices of ritual satanists are almost entirely unknown because of their diversity and secrecy. Although some organized satanic activities resemble those of witches and neopagans, the latter object to the comparison (see Witchcraft). Ritual satanists uniformly reject the popular association of satanism with child abuse and animal mutilation.

The modern fear of organized satanism can be traced to the wave of panic over witchcraft that swept through Europe from about 1450 to about 1700. Inspired in part by the rise of heterodox (in conflict with accepted religious beliefs) but nonsatanic religious movements, this panic is now recognized to have been groundless. Later it was believed that satanic ritual centered on a so-called black mass, a parody of the Catholic Mass. However, reports of such ceremonies were usually extracted from people under duress or torture and seem to have little basis in fact.

In the 1980s a new satanism scare arose in the United States. This scare was based on rumors of a sophisticated network of ritual satanists engaged in a coordinated campaign of child abduction and abuse, including ritual sacrifice. Although satanic symbols were occasionally found at crime scenes, no evidence for a large-scale, organized network of satanists was uncovered. Allegations of satanic crimes against humans were often based instead on controversial so-called recovered memories, which are recollections brought to consciousness through psychological therapy (see Psychotherapy). Alleged ritual cattle mutilations proved to be the work not of satanists but of animal predators.

The satanic organizations active today are small and are of recent origin. The most prominent, the Church of Satan, was founded in 1966 in San Francisco, California, by American Anton Szandor LaVey, whose philosophy is essentially a form of hedonism (the doctrine that pleasure is the principal good). A group that grew from the Church of Satan, the Temple of Set, was founded in 1975 by American Michael Aquino and others. As of the mid-1990s, these two groups together had perhaps a few hundred widely scattered members. Several smaller groups exist as well.