Hey everybody, welcome to Splintered Spirits Podcast
hosted by me, Gary and my nephew John Santa from Santa Paranormal
where we try to answer the question, what are spirits by
talking to different experts in the paranormal field, mediums,
investigators or evaluating, documenting spirit
communication. Now, if you ever joined our live
stream, you've probably seen the comments turn to Jesus, stop
talking to demons or these are Satan's minions.
Listen, we get it. People are scared.
But scared of what, exactly? This week, I'm diving head first
into the devil's playground, not to summon him, but to understand
why Satan has such a grip on our collective imagination.
Joining us is Doctor Joseph Laycock, associate professor of
religious studies at Texas State University and an expert in what
most of us were told to stay far, far away from new religious
movements, AKA cults, exorcism, spirit possession, and the moral
panics that swirl around them. He's the author of Satanism from
Cambridge Elements, The Exorcist Effect, Religion, Horror and
Demonic Belief, and the upcoming Penguin Book of Cults out this
October. Today we're asking who is Satan
really? Why does this image still
terrify millions? And why do some people think
talking about ghosts is the first step to inviting the devil
into your home? Let's separate the fear from the
facts and see if the devil's really in the details.
Let's dive into the conversation.
Professor Joe, how are you today?
I'm doing great. Where do I find you?
I am in Austin, TX. Is that where you're from?
From Austin, Yeah, I grew up here.
And you decided to Did growing up in Texas have anything to do
with your field of study? A little bit in the, you know, I
was a scrawny, nerdy kid and I like to play Dungeons and
Dragons back in the 80s. And, you know, everybody told me
that this was Satanic and I was going to end up worshiping the
devil and committing suicide. So and, and now that Stranger
Things is out, everybody was like, oh, yeah, that was a thing
in the 80s, wasn't it? That was my life.
Oh my God, that's great. That's funny.
It's let me throw this on here. So I'm getting feedback from all
that Dude, I grew up in, you know, look, I'm, I'm 50 years
old. I grew up in the 80s and in the
90s as well. And we had all of that Satanic
panic and all of that stuff, which is insane.
And it's just, it's hilarious. And, and the reason really, I'm
so glad you, you could, you were able to join me today because
the reason I wanted to talk to you is because ever since I
started this podcast with my nephew, the the comment section,
I think, I guess I'm going to hell, dude, in a handbasket.
I'm going to be delivered there. My nephew gets it constantly.
You know, it's like when he's talking to spirits, It's all,
you know, these are demons. What are you doing?
You're letting yourself in. You know, you're letting them
come into your life. The devil, you're letting the
devil in. And I wanted to get to the
bottom of, you know, basically the devil you know or the devil
you think you know. You know what?
What does that mean? And what do?
Why do we think the way we do about the devil?
Right? So like, so tell me.
Let's just start at the beginning.
What? You know what was the Satan
originally in in text? Right, So you know when I tell
my students in religious studies is I can't tell you whether the
devil is real or not, right? That's up to you.
I work for the state of Texas. We don't want the government
telling you what to believe about God of the devil.
What I can talk about though, is how people throughout history
have understood the devil and that is definitely changed.
So if you read the the Hebrew Bible, which Christians the Old
Testament Satan's basically not in it and and Christians will
say what are you talking about? Satan gives Eve makes read the
apple. If you actually read Genesis 3,
it says the serpent was the cleverest of all the wild
animals. That's what it says.
Nowhere does it say the devil turned himself into a snake and
all this kind of stuff. That was later Christians
interpreted this, the serpent to be the the devil.
And then later we have the book of Job, which is probably where
the devil gets the most play in the Hebrew Bible.
And that starts out in heaven. And Satan just walks up to God
in heaven. And it's pretty clear that he
does this all the time, that he and God are cool, right?
If you read, if you read the book of Job, Satan and God are
basically friends. And they make this bet about,
you know, this Job who's his very loyal follower but has a
pretty sweet life. And Satan says, yeah, but I bet
if I ruin Job's life, he won't, he won't worship you anymore,
right? He's he's just a suck up.
So Satan in this story doesn't like people at all.
He's very anti people, but he's very pro God and and Satan means
the adversary in the sense of like a prosecuting attorney.
Right, right. In in in the story you just
described, isn't that basically then?
You know Trading Places was a a remake of the book of Job were
the 2 rich guys just you know, screwed with Dan Aykroyd the
entire time in that sense to see if he would turn to crime.
Yeah, it is. I mean, it's just essentially.
Because it's the original riches to rags story, right?
And what also gets left, you know, and at the end of the
story, Job has this sort of conversation with God where he
doesn't curse him because why are you doing this?
And God says, you don't ever get to question me.
I'm freaking God. And then he, he restores all of
Job's wealth and his cattle and stuff like that.
But but Satan had killed Job's kids and those kids are still
just as dead. At the end of the story.
Job gets to have new kids, but it's, it's, it's a, it was a,
it's an ancient text and it's from a very kind of brutal time
in, in, in human history, right. Also, at no point does Job say,
oh, well, I get to go to heaven because I was loyal.
They didn't believe in heaven back then.
And he says, I have nothing to look forward to but descending
into Sheol and Sheol is the underworld basically.
You know, people understood that you die and you just sort of
have the shadowy existence in, in, in the grounds, right.
And so when when Christianity comes along, things have
changed. And, you know, Jews are now
living under the influence of the Roman Empire.
They're shaped by Greek culture and Greek philosophy.
And they've encountered a religion out of Persia called
Zoroastrianism. And Zoroastrianism says there's
a God of good and a God of evil. And they're basically both
equally powerful, right? The other thing that's happened
is the the story that the Jews have told themselves is there's
only one God in the whole world, and he only has one temple, and
it's in Jerusalem. That's the only place you can be
worshipped. And a bunch of people who prayed
as Zeus came and conquered it. So, so how does that work?
And they said, OK, well, something God is a God of, of,
of love and he's all powerful. So he must have let something
evil take over the world. So God's not really in control.
He's temporarily put this evil power in control of us.
Who could it be? Who could this evil power be?
Well, when they go and look at the, the Hebrew scriptures in
the, in the Old Testament, they've got two things they can
work with. So they've got Satan who hates
humans but is loyal to God. And then in Genesis 6, there's
this weird passage that says the sons of God saw the daughters of
men and that they were beautiful and they came down and they they
had children and the children were called the Nephilim.
And there were there were giants in the earth.
It's a really weird passage. You see this passage on ancient
aliens and stuff like that all the time.
OK, But so now we have Satan who's loyal to God but doesn't
like people. And we have these these angels
who descend, who like people a little bit too much, actually,
that's kind of their problem. But they're they disobey God.
And you put those together and you have what Satan is in
Christianity, which is a a fallen Angel who hates humans
and hates God. And now we can say This is why
the world isn't working the way it's supposed to work, because
this character, Satan, is temporarily running the show.
That is super interesting. You know, it really is.
It's like I grew up Catholic and, you know, now I would say
I'm an atheist of it. And, you know, my, my
interpretation of the devil is that he inspires the best music
primarily, right. So.
And it's like, you know, yeah. And it's just, it's the coolest.
But, you know, and it's, I never understood that.
Like, wait a minute. If it always felt to me when
they would tell us, you know, these fire and brimstone that
that sort of probably stemmed, you know, come from Dante's
Inferno, that sort of imagery or something, you know, then that
here's this guy who's punishing all the bad people.
And to me, my whole thing growing up in this, in the
Catholic faith was like, well, that seems like he's working
with God in that. And it's, it's like if he's
punishing bad people, that's, you know, that seems like he's
in cahoots. I would it almost be like if he
was luring me in to do bad stuff, I'd be rewarded by that
guy. Why would he make me like try to
trick me and then hurt me later? What what's what?
That's weird. If he's trying to get even with
that guy, I'd be like, hey, come to my house.
My parties are better. Like that's how I always thought
of it. You know, like, so it never made
sense that there was like, and then, you know, like God would
punish you. Well, that goes against
everything that you're taught that what God is about.
So it's like, you know what, you did a bad thing.
Sorry, you're going to you're going to jail run by my guy down
there. But then you're trying to also
tell me he's not your guy. He's your adversary who wants to
be you. So why would he help you with
this prison system? Like I and then I was out.
I'm like, you know what this is this there's clearly just a
scare tactic to try to, you know, prevent to keep me in
control. I just always felt it was a
control tactic and you know, is that did that, when did that
sort of idea? And I'm sure I'm not the first
person to have that idea. So when, when is that?
How did that start to come about, or when did that sort of
philosophy or thing start to breakthrough the system in a
way? Yeah, so, so God has always had,
you know, a big stick, right? And, and the traditional
Israelite understanding of, of course God is going to hurt you
if you don't follow God's laws. Of course he will.
And he probably won't do it in person.
God has all kinds of monsters that will, that do his bidding.
God has hit men. He'll have you swallowed by a
whale. He'll send flying venomous
serpents at you. I mean, he'll do all this awful
stuff. He's he's got it's.
Quite the video game, isn't it Joe?
It's quite the video game. Yeah, there's a book that just
came out by Esther Hamori called God's Monsters, and it describes
all these like messed up creatures in in the Hebrew
Bible. And basically, you know, God is
king of the monsters. You know, God made all these
things in case you ever cross him.
And I think if you went to the ancient Israelites and you said
your God sounds really cruel, they'll probably say, yeah,
yeah, he's cruel. Like, So what?
He's powerful. He's the most powerful thing in
the universe. So we're going to follow him no
matter what he says. I'll kill my own kid if he tells
me to. It's only later when when you
have this idea of God loves us. God doesn't want anything bad to
happen to humans. Now we have a problem right now
we have to find some way to justify what in in religious
studies is called the problem of evil, right?
Why is it so terrible to be a human being with all the stuff
we have to deal with? If the world is being run by
this all powerful, all loving God and an attempt to solve that
is to say, well, there's this figure, the devil.
The devil causes all the bad stuff.
God causes all the good stuff. That's crazy.
That's right. You said earlier you mentioned
like you described him as a prosecutor or like an attorney.
Is that like the? That's what the word means?
Yeah, it's it's in the sense of like one who is accusing you,
right. And and not like accusing you in
like, like a mean girl making up a rumor about you, but really
trying to say like you haven't done what you said you're gonna
do. Like you're in breach of
contracts, right. You had a covenant with God.
You didn't keep it and, and maybe Satan is right and you
really actually deserve to be punished.
And maybe Satan's doing his job a little too enthusiastically
and you actually deserve some some mercy.
But that's what the word Satan kind of originally signified.
It's fascinating. So what?
So as I said, like in our in our chat, in our podcast and in the
chats in our live streams, we get a lot of people telling us
to turn to Jesus to rebuke singing, right?
What do you think it is about the paranormal, you know, that
triggers this like evangelical panic in people who are super
religious to do that to us? Yeah, it's, it's really
interesting. So we know sociologically from
sociologists who study paranormal beliefs, if you
believe in God, you're more likely to hold a paranormal
belief. And they define paranormal
beliefs as believing in ghosts, believing in UFOs, believing in
psychic abilities and things like this.
But they also found that if you go to church services every
week, you're less likely to believe in paranormal things.
And what they attribute that to is you have pastors and priests
saying all this stuff. It's it's demonic, it's of the
devil, right? And, and to some extent,
sociologically, this is about brands, right?
If you're telling people our church and our Bible and our
tradition, we know about the supernatural.
We know about all the secret forces in the universe.
You don't want people then going and talking to a psychic, right?
Or talking to a medium. You want them to be coming to
you and kind of getting all of their truth from you.
And so very early on in the history of Christianity, by
about the 2nd century, there was this idea of, well, the other
gods that people pray to, Zeus and the gods of Rome and all
this stuff. It's not that they aren't real.
They're real, but they're actually demons.
These are actually fallen angels who have tricked humanity into
thinking that they are gods of Thunder and love and war and
wisdom and so forth. And what they really want humans
to do is first of all worship them instead of the one true
God, and 2nd to give them blood sacrifices because that was a
common practice in the Roman Empire when Christianity was
beginning as you would make animal sacrifices to the gods
and Christianity. Christianity.
Christianity not make animal sacrifices.
I mean, that's one reason why Christians were kind of singled
out, as they said you. Know because it wasn't doing
what the Romans were doing. Like the Romans were into it.
Christians were like, no, OK. Exactly.
And the pagans would say, look, you know, look at all the
wonderful things that Rome has done and and the gods have given
us victory over enemies and you won't sacrifice like a dove.
You know what's wrong with you? Right, but.
The Christians would say, because you're not giving that
bloody animal to, you know, some, some benevolent God like
Zeus, you're giving it to a demon.
You're giving it to someone who lost a war thousands of years
ago in in heaven. And that idea is pretty firmly
established in Christianity within only a couple centuries.
That's OK, right? It's so, it's so amazing.
What are some of the most comparable, you know, in other
faiths? How does that all tie into this
idea of Satan and Jesus? And it's like when you start
looking at like, yeah, this this guy over here had 12 apostles.
And this person here had like, where does the devil rock, you
know, sit in other faiths and other practices?
And how does that compare to what we all know?
You know what these other people believe is the devil today?
Yeah. So, you know, most, most Jews
don't really believe in a devil, right, Because they would say
it's really not in our in our sacred texts.
There are Judaism's a very old diverse religion.
There's lots of different forms of Judaism.
And there are things like the Dibic, which is a possessing
spirit that appears in Jewish folklore and things like that.
There are stories of the rabbi's who are exorcising demons.
The other religion of the book is Islam, and in Islam the devil
is called Iblis, which means the whisperer and pretty similar to
the devil in Christianity. But the difference is that the
devil is either an Angel or something called a jinn, and the
jinn are made from fire and they're like human beings.
Angels don't really have free will in Islam, but Jin can
choose to be good or they can choose to be evil.
And so Iblis is told by God, I've created this thing.
It's called Adam. It's a human.
It's awesome. I want everybody to come and bow
to and it's my best creation. And Iblis refuses.
He says, I'm not going to bow to this thing that you made out of
dirt because that would make me a bad Muslim, right?
Muslims are only to honor God. I'm not going to honor something
that's that's not yours. And they get into this arguments
and IBL says, I'm going to show you your creation actually isn't
that great. And so IBL means the whisperer.
So the idea is IBL is constantly kind of tempting us to to
disobey a God, to choose our own path instead of what God wants
for us. And there are traditions in
Islam that eventually this this squabble between God and IBL
will be will be reconciled. So it's a somewhat more
sympathetic view of this figure than in Christianity, where it's
really just absolute evil and has to be destroyed.
And then other religions also have to explain the problem of
evil. And so if, for example, in
Buddhism, we have this figure called Mara, who's often
associated with the devil by Christians when they look at
Buddhism, and Mara is basically the God of reality as we know
it, right? So Buddhism says we're kind of
living in the matrix and we have to become enlightened and sort
of transcend the cycle of death and reincarnation.
And Mara doesn't want anybody to do that.
And so when Buddha is about to become enlightened, after years
of meditation, Mara sends like sexy, like nymph women to try to
distract him. Mara unleashes an army of demons
on him and the Buddha turns their arrows into flower
blossoms just like we see in in the Matrix.
So it's a different, it's a different tradition from a
different part of the world, but there are some similarities of
there's kind of this invisible force that controls the world
and our religion is helping us to to fight back against it.
So it sounds like every person or religion needs a scapegoat
and escape. The easiest one is Satan.
Is that fair to say? It's like we have to figure out
how to. Yeah, everybody wants to explain
the problem of evil. Right Now, if you have a
religion like the Yoruba religion of West Africa where
you have multiple gods and goddesses, you know, they might
just say, well, some of those gods are jerks, right?
So that's why bad things are going to happen.
But if you have a religion that says, well, kind of there's this
order to the universe, right? Or especially there's an all
powerful, all loving God. Well, now the problem of evil is
much harder to solve. And the sort of Christian
version of, well, God caused all the good stuff, Satan caused all
the bad stuff, doesn't act from a philosophical perspective,
does not fully solve it, right? Because Christians say, well,
God will punish Satan though, right?
Jesus will return and Satan will be cast into a lake of fire.
God's only allowing us to go on for a little while.
But a philosopher might say, OK, but if I have a vicious pit
bull. And I just let it loose to the
park and it starts mauling children and I say don't worry,
in 5 minutes I'm going to leash my Pitbull and it won't maul
children anymore. Well, I'm going to jail for
that. Right, right.
I'm not, I'm not innocent of the damage that my pet Pitbull that
I've unleashed is, is, is doing. And Christians might say, well,
but that's trying to judge God by the standards that we would
judge a human or, or whatever. But you know, in in philosophy,
when you really get to questions like why are some babies born
with leukemia? Yeah, right.
It's really hard to say that that that fact of our life can
be reconciled with this idea of an all powerful, all loving God.
It's hard. Yeah, for sure.
It's like I think my thing in my philosophy class back in the day
was, you know, if God is all powerful, can he create a rock
so heavy that even he can't lift it right?
Like that was the that was the fun game.
So as this, how was the start Satanism or the Church of Satan
or these sort of like as a religion, How far back is that?
Can that be true? Is that like the late 60s or is
it even earlier? And then what is, you know, how
did that come about in the in this whole, in this thing?
Right. So this is this is contentious
history, right? Well, we can all agree on is in
1966, Anton Lavey creates this religion called the Church of
Satan and it's an above ground religion with members.
And there's people who are saying I am a Satanist, here is
my membership card and so forth, right?
Did, did Satanism exist before that?
It's pretty murky, right? I mean, there are conspiracy
theorists who will actually say, well, Satanism is older than
Christianity, which historically speaking, that doesn't make any
sense. But those kinds of claims are
out there that this is this ancient, a cult that goes back
to, you know, child sacrifice in the Old Testament, stuff like
that. The word Satanism appears in the
1500s when we have the Protestant Reformation and
Europe enters 200 years of wars over religion, Right.
So prior to that, the only church in Europe was the
Catholic Church. Now you have Catholics and
Protestants fighting each other. And pretty quickly these
accusations get made of you say you're a Christian, but you were
actually a Satanist, right? You actually worship Satan.
And then the Catholic Church says, well, we believe in
transubstantiation. So when we do communion, we
believe that the bread and wine. So transubstantiation, Catholics
begin to say, but when we do communion, the priest has the
power to miraculously turn the wine into Jesus's blood and turn
the the wafer into Jesus's flesh.
And these rumors start to form that Satanists are sneaking into
Catholic churches and they're trying to wait until communion
when those those holy wafers are passed out and sneak them away
and take them home because that's actually Jesus body.
And now the Satanists, because the Satanists know that
everything the Catholic Church does is really true, can now
stomp on that wafer in a black mass and basically torture
Jesus, right? And let me tell you this real
quick. When I was in, I went to
Catholic school for eight years. A lot of the kids in my class
were altar boys. They would constantly sneak into
the rectory and steal the wafers to keep them in their pockets to
have a snack in class. And it was like some of the
unused ones that were blessed, you know, during the, the daily
masses that didn't get to, you know, it's like they would just
take those, they have them in their pocket and they're just
sitting there snacking during the, you know what I mean?
It was like, it's sickness, a lot of them.
So if it hasn't been blessed, it's just a cracker.
But once it's blessed, that's actually these, they are
blessed. But what's important here is as
far as we know, there, there were no Satanists, right?
Nobody was coming to steal these, these, these wafers.
This was an argument that they were using against Protestants,
right? And it was basically the logic
of like the old cereal commercials with like lucky
leprechaun, the tricks rabbit and stuff, right?
The cereals got to be good because all these cartoon
characters are trying to steal it all the time, right?
Our, our, our interpretation of communion must be true because
why the Satan is coming for it all the time.
So, so beginning in the 1500s, we have all these people being
accused of being Satanists. We even have some people who are
put on trial for basically holding black masses and are
executed and stuff like that. What's not clear, though, was
any of this ever real? Was anybody ever actually doing
this? And some historians disagree.
Most historians, I think, would say probably not, right?
Probably these were just sort of urban legends.
Some of them say, well, well, maybe there's a little grain of
truth to this. And, you know, if you tell an
urban legend, enough, people will kind of act it out.
So we don't really know if there were any Satanists before Anton
Lavey. But Anton Lavey sort of took all
these rumors, which he learned about through novels and horror
movies and said, I'm going to do this in real life.
I'm going to take the parts of Satanism I saw in these horror
movies that I think are cool and which is the rebellion and the
kind of, you know, resistance to authority.
And the parts about, you know, killing babies or whatever that
I'm just going to leave behind because I'm making this up
anyway. So I can just use the parts that
I like. Right.
I mean, he, he had a lot of inspiration from like, you know,
Crowley, like Aleister Crowley and stuff like that.
Isn't that part of his whole? Yeah, I mean.
And that's like the early, that's, isn't that the early
1900? Like, what's Guy Aleister
Crowley? The 20s?
Yeah, Aleister Crowley's payday was, was was basically the 20s,
right? Yeah.
So Crowley definitely studied Aleister Crowley.
He said that he didn't take anything from him, but he he
definitely did. If you read the Satanic Bible,
which which by the way, the Satanic Bible came about because
of the movie Rosemary's Baby in 1968.
And that was a that was a novel first.
It was a best selling novel. So Avon came to Anton Levae and
said, could you write something? It could be really anything, but
as long as it mentions like Satan and witchcraft, we can
sell this book. There's a huge market.
So Levae kind of slammed together the the Satanic Bible.
And so for parts of it he took the the so-called Enochian keys,
which are part of kind of ceremonial magic that he would
have learned about through studying Crawley.
So that's part of the contents of, of of that book.
So Crawley was an influence. There was a French novel called
The Boss, which describes a black mass in Paris.
And he took that and kind of used the novel to kind of make
a, a black mass a ritual. There were movies from the 30s
and 40s, old black and white movies that depicted satanic
cults. So he drew on that as as well.
And, and so he was just really good at kind of taking bits and
pieces from all over the place and putting together a, a
religion and also a kind of philosophy, a kind of humanist
philosophy of trying to be your best self and kind of have the
most fun. So, and unlike L Ron Hubbard, he
really couldn't figure out how to make that kind of money out
of it either. So unfortunately, so it's like,
which is fat. That's amazing to me.
So you know that. So if you started that in around
the 60s, I guess then that would lead you to like the 80s, which
is that Satanic Panic, you know, And I'm actually, I think I
mentioned you, I have another project, documentary project I'm
working on about the West Memphis 3.
And I know the one of the attorneys from that case with
those kids, those teens were railroaded and it was due to the
Satanic panic of the, of the late 80s, early 90s.
What, what again? Does it just still come down to
the same thing is it's just the the unexplained and just finding
a reason to hate and it must be sane.
I mean, is that really what the Satanic Panic was all about back
then? Like in that level?
Well, it's, it's interesting because Christianity has always
taught that there's a devil, but in certain periods in Christian
history, the idea of the devil has been very much downplayed.
And other parts it's, it's been really amped up.
And occasionally you get not only is there the devil, but the
devil has human agents, which in early modern Europe, they would
have said are witches, right? They would have gone on witch
hunts. And, and the 80s was basically
just a witch hunt, except now we're calling the witches
Satanists. So the question sociologists try
to answer is what, what is it? What's going on in the culture
where this this flares up? What causes it to flare up?
And one interpretation I think is plausible is that when
society starts to change too fast, some people freak out and
start basically accusing their neighbor, right, of being a
witch or a Satanist or something like that, right.
So, so the dark ages in Europe really didn't have a lot of
witch hunting. People believed in witches, but
they generally were not burning people at the stake.
And then once the wars of religion start and, and people,
things start changing very fast. Now I have thousands of people
accused of witchcraft. SO1 interpretation is the 60s, a
lot of change real fast, a lot of changes to the culture.
And the 70s, which is really where the Satanic panic begins,
is kind of the hangover. It's for that that that
revolution of the 1960s. And so you get you get very
early on Christians kind of making these wild claims about
satanic conspiracies. And then the 80s, it really
explodes. And there's a couple of reasons
for that. But, but one thing that people
have noticed is it was mostly daycare providers who were being
accused of being Satanists. So they would say, you know, you
drop your kid off at daycare, you pick them up at the end of
the day. Well, the daycare provider is a
Satanist and they were like torturing your kid and things
like this all day. And they have them cleaned up
when you when you pick them up from from school.
So the the longest, most expensive trial in American
history before the OJ Simpson trial was the Mcmartin preschool
trial where this whole family was accused of basically running
a satanic daycare center. And of course it was all it was
all made-up. So here's the thing.
Why, if you if you said someone in your town is a Satanist, you
probably wouldn't think it must be the preschool teacher, right?
Not today for sure, but was that because people started to work
or when people started to use daycare more?
Exactly, exactly because in the 80s we switched from the kind of
Leave it to Beaver family where dad goes to work and mom stays
home to now the norm is the 2 income family.
So what sociologists think happened is a lot of parents
felt I'm forced to send my kid to all these people that I don't
know, these strangers. And so it felt like there was
this evil force trying to, you know, undermine your authority
as a parent and mess up your kids.
And the claim of the daycare is run by Satanist.
It kind of gave expression to that, to that frustration.
So. So we don't really know quite
why Satanic Panic got so bad when it did in the 80s, but
definitely changing economics was a factor.
The realization that child abuse is a thing, that there really
are people who abuse children, was was probably a factor as
well. And then repealing the Fairness
Doctrine in media set the stage for things like the Geraldo
Satanism special, right? Which really scared the hell out
of a lot of Americans. So sensational media was part of
it too. It's amazing how many things can
be traced back to Geraldo, by the way, when you really start
to dig into it, like some of the stuff that he that he discovered
and and stories he broke and and culturally changed.
Fascinating to me. Well, I was on Geraldo in in
2009. I had lunch with the guy who
produced that Satanism special in 1988 and he just said our
ratings were so good we just killed it with a Satanism
special. He was so proud all these years,
right? So many people's lives have been
ruined by it. So thank you.
I'm so glad the ratings were so high.
Poor kids. You just like heavy metal music.
You know, how does this lead to, you know, this belief and you
know, whether the psychological aspect of Satanism or believing
in saying, how does that play into possession as a religious
concept and as a psychological or cultural phenomenon?
You know, like when you're talking about possession and it,
and if you're possessed, it's never by anybody cool.
It's always by the devil. It's like, you know, it's just
like, it's not, you know, Frank Sinatra isn't possessing me.
I didn't learn to sing really well and start picking up chicks
at every bar. It's like, no, it's the devil.
You know what I mean? It's like, what, what's the
deal? What how does that?
How did that roll out? Yeah.
So possession is also, it's one of these things where there's
really no possession in the Old Testament, no one's getting
possessed by demons. If they are, it actually says
it's an evil spirit of the Lord, right?
So God wants you to be possessed and, and, and freak out.
In the New Testament, though, first of all, people are getting
possessed everywhere. Everybody's possessed.
Jesus has to cast out demons as apostles has to cast out demons.
And these are demons, right? And it's not quite queer.
It's not quite clear what people in the 1st century understood a
demon to be, but they're definitely not from God.
These are these are kind of evil things.
And the way that we know Jesus the Messiah is, he has this
ability to to to command them. So that's really baked into core
Christian texts, right? People get possessed by demons
and Christians are the true religion because they have the
power to cast this out, right? And, and in other religions,
there is also spirit possession. But in most cultures that are
not Christian, like you said, it's a little bit more neutral.
So if you're getting possessed, it could be, could be something
really bad. It could be something that's
fairly like neutral. We just have to figure out why
the spirit is here and make it move on.
It could even be good, right? You could be like a shaman and
you're being possessed by helpful A a a spirits, right?
Or it could be Apple, It could be undiagnosed epilepsy as well.
Is that that right? Well, absolutely right.
You know, possession is it is a way of diagnosing something is
wrong with somebody. And actually in the Gospels,
most of the people that Jesus is casting spirits out of, they're
the symptoms that they are possessed are things like they
are deaf or they they are lame. They can't walk.
It's a disease of the body, right?
It's, it's later that we come to think of possession as being a
disease of the soul, right? Where you, you act like a
different person, right? Or a little girl, you know,
browse in a man's voice, right, that she's Pazuzu or, or
something like that, Right, right.
So, so then once people are possessed, well, the one
question is, well, why is this person possessed?
And the church has had different thoughts on that over the years,
but, but very early on they said, well, it could be that
someone cursed you, right? That someone used magic to
basically get a demon to attach itself to you.
So very early on, there's a connection between basically
witchcraft or Satanism and, and possession.
And in the era of witch hunts, if, if people thought you were
possessed by a demon, you could freely say, you know, Billy over
there is the person who sent this me into this person,
They're a witch. And if you that Billy is
probably going to die. So.
So being possessed actually gives you a lot of power within
this culture. Oh my God, that is awesome.
I mean, it really is quite it's it's really, I mean, they really
did right. They really used it.
It was a it was a useful tool tool to get rid of your your
enemies or adversaries or people you might have been jealous of
or. Yeah, absolutely.
And and, you know, we don't think of the Salem witch trials
as a possession story, but really it was right.
The the Puritans understood to be bewitched, right?
To have these spasms and things like that.
That was because a witch had sent a demon to basically attack
you, right? And so once these girls are
diagnosed as being bewitched, they can pretty much accuse
anybody of being a witch, right? And a lot of people are saying,
Oh, well, there was Hallucinan genic fungus.
It's I don't believe that that was true.
Those theories were were pretty much all debunked very early on.
I think that most of these girls were just doing this.
One of them even said, well, we did it for the sport, right?
It was fun to act possessed. And then once somebody's dead,
you can't really say, oh, gosh, I was just kidding.
I didn't really want you to hang somebody.
Now you've got to you've got to ride this out, right?
So that that seems to have been what was happening.
Right. Oh, oops, yeah, you can't really
do it. That's funny, man.
What? So in the in the Bible, how many
actual, as you were saying, it's primarily what it's the New
Testament where the devil is around like, so I'm just trying
to think of the stories that I can remember, you know, from
from growing up. Obviously like Revelations,
there's references to the to the devil, Jesus in the desert,
right? That's like the big one, right?
Like Mr. Temptation himself. And what's the, what's the
biggest misunderstood thing about, you know, those two
stories in regards to the devil that might not have been lost in
translation? Right, so, so the logic of both
of those stories is the devil is running the show, right, That
God is sort of temporarily left the building and or is asleep at
the wheel sort of. And the devil is running
everything. And the arrival of Jesus means
that this is about to end, right?
That the Kingdom of Satan is about to come to an end.
And Jesus as the Messiah is, is, is going to sort of restore the
world to the way that God meant it to be.
So all the demons recognize Jesus before the humans do,
right? So with the story of the, the
Garrison demoniac, which is where our modern ideas of
exorcism come from, where this guy is living in a cemetery and
he can RIP through chains because he's super strong.
And Jesus ends up sending all of the demons out of him into pigs.
You know, those demons recognize who Jesus is immediately before
the humans do. And so Satan coming in and sort
of confronting Jesus in the desert.
This is also kind of signifying that Jesus arrival has cosmic
significance, right? This is going to change the
order of everything. And then Revelation, which is
the last book written of the Bible.
This is kind of the early days of the church where, well, OK,
Jesus has come and gone and things actually are are worse
than before, right? Because because not long after
Jesus's crucifixion, there was an uprising against the Romans,
and the Romans came in and destroyed the temple in
Jerusalem, and they crucified everybody trying to defend the
city. And it was really, really brutal
and awful, right? So clearly, if you think all the
bad stuff is coming from Satan, Satan's still very much in
power, right, By 70-CE. And so Revelation is saying,
yeah, but actually we're we're basically, we're going to get
our revenge, right? We're going to, we're going to
things are going to get really nasty and terrible, but in the
end, we will be avenged. And everyone, whoever persecuted
us, including Satan, they're going to be cast into a lake of
fire for eternity. And when they actually sort of
decided what books are going to go in the Bible, there were
early Christians who said Revelation is this really nasty
book. Like, I thought our religion was
about love and this is all about punishment and war and lakes of
fire. But they decided that, you know,
it was important enough that for this sort of vision of where
history will end according to Christianity to include it.
And then today we have Christians who are totally
obsessed with Revelation and read everything that happens in
the news as sort of, you know, the next step in this, this
ancient book, which of course is written in symbolic language so
it can be interpreted kind of however you want.
Right. There was a great meme that was
travelling around a few years ago.
I'm sure if you saw it, it was like a guy, he travels through
time, he meets up with himself and he's like, what?
What's going on? And he's like, you know, it's
like, Nah, dude, everything's great.
He's like, you know, the world is safer.
It's better. It's like, you know, was what
happened? He's like, well, you know, a
couple years ago, Jesus came back.
He's like, oh, that happened. He's like, he's like, Oh my God.
So everyone was saved, like, well, no, you know, it's like he
took all the Christians away. And once they were all, once
they like he promised and he left us here.
And it's like once they were gone, we started to, you know,
really focusing on science. We sort of came up with real
rules. It's like we didn't have any of
the problems. And it's really, he's like,
well, I'll be damned. He's like, you kind of are.
But it's great, you know what I mean?
It's a really funny sort of thing.
And I'm not doing it justice. But it was like that whole idea
of revelation in a new way of like, yeah, finally get rid of
these people are holding us all back from civilization.
What would you. So look, you know, what would
you recommend? How would you handle other than
just ignoring them? But like, what's the message to
somebody who's like, says John and I are talking to the devil
or we're doing the devil's work or like, what is that sort of
like, listen, you know, like, how do you, I don't even know if
you can ever change someone's mind these days.
But is it? What's the messaging on it other
than mocking them? Yeah, I, I, I don't know.
I mean, I, I, I study religious cultures.
I don't really try to, to, to change them so much.
And I, I am like you said, I'm, I'm pretty dubious that anything
that you say would make them be like, gosh, you're right.
I guess I was being a little bit no.
You. Can't.
You can't. Those days are over.
I will say, though, that William Peter Blatty, who wrote The
Exorcist, he was Catholic and he believed in demonic possession.
And he in his last book, he said, you know, the more I look
into this, the more I think that these are not demons.
These are spirits of the dead. And these are, these are in some
cases spirits of the dead behaving very, very badly.
But I actually think that these are the dead and these are not,
you know, fallen angels or beings of pure Hellfire and evil
like like my church taught me. So he made that change.
I think he made it himself, just sort of being thoughtful about
the evidence for a long time, but I find that significant.
Yeah, that's pretty wild. That's a pretty wild way to
think about it, for sure. Let's see over here.
I'm just looking at my I have so many questions for you, dude.
I'm not going to be able to. I'm sure I'm not going to be
able to get through them all. Do you find that the that
people, the more intense that people believe in Satan is how
intense they are in their belief in God?
Is it like an equal sort of, is it a coin?
I mean, is it really like the other side of a coin for them?
Yeah, I mean, I think you can definitely have people who
totally believe in God and don't believe in the devil at all,
right? The the Nicene Creed doesn't
actually say anything about the devil, right?
Nicene Creed was composed as sort of the official version of
Christianity when the Emperor Constantine convened a council
of bishops. And there's a lot of stuff you
got to believe according to Nicene Creed, to be a good
Christian, right? You got to believe in the
resurrection of the dead. Jesus was born of a virgin,
spoken of the prophets. Also, you don't have to believe
in a devil, right? So there are some Christians who
have said you can have Christian without the devil.
Now, if you believe in the devil, you're probably also
gonna be a very religious person, and you're gonna also
believe in God. The sociologist I mentioned
studied who believes in demonic possession and the devil the
most, and they map this out by by cross referencing that with
things like your age, your education level and so forth.
And they found out, well, first of all, they found out if you
believe in the devil and demonic possession, you're more likely
to live in the South. If you live in the United
States. That was one big pattern, right?
And you're more likely to be screwed by society, right?
You're more likely to make less money, have less education and
so forth. So one thing that they kind of
postulated is if you have kind of been sort of left behind by
society, you are more likely to adopt A view of, yeah, my life
could be a lot better. But I know that this is all
because of the devil, right? These are the forces of evil
doing this to me. Have they?
You know, I'm a other people have said this and I'm tend to
believer in it that in every accusation is a confession.
And has there ever been any studies about from people who
are, you know, this is not the right word, but you know,
Satanic zealots, people who who, you know, proselytize about
Satan at you and like you're with the devil that they've
either had some history of doing wrongdoing or something bad in
the past. You know what I mean?
Are they more likely? Is there any correlation or
connection between people who have done some pretty bad shit
who then accusing people of being Satanists themselves?
Yeah, I think there is. So I wrote a book called
Dangerous Games which was about Christians attacking Dungeons
and Dragons in the 1980s, which was this huge thing back in the.
80s I remember dude, I know it well.
For sure. Yeah.
So, so the people at the core of that, like, one thing that they
were saying is, well, when people play this game of
imagination, they basically make themselves insane and they can't
distinguish fantasy from reality anymore, right.
But if you look at the people making those claims, they were
the ones who had a very weak grasp on reality, right?
They were the ones saying stuff that was totally bonkers.
So for example, there was a there was a, a chick track.
And for folks who don't know chick tracks are these little
comic books smaller than a postcard, And they usually have
some story about someone going to hell.
And this guy Jack Chick made them and you're supposed to
leave them at bus stops and, and things like that to evangelize
people. And there was one about Dungeons
and Dragons called Dark Dungeon. And you can Google Dark Dungeon
and you can go find this. And at the end of it, there's
this, there's this pastor with his handlebar mustache.
And he says we're going to burn all of our DND books.
Well, that guy with the handlebar mustache was named
John Todd. And John Todd said that he was
raised in a witchcraft family in New England and that his
witchcraft name was Lance Collins.
And he was part of the Illuminati that controls the
whole world. And he would go to churches and
he'd say, I'm raising money to help other witches come to
Jesus. But it's going to take a lot of.
Money, always. Happen.
Takes money dude. Takes money to get people to.
Jesus. And then and then people said
this is the 70s. So people said, you know, your
name was Lance Collins and you're from a witch family in
New England. Everything you're saying sounds
a lot like the soap opera called Dark Shadows.
That was really big back then. And and he said, well, you see,
when I was a witch, I went to Hollywood and I showed my family
diary, these Hollywood producers.
So actually that the show is ripping off my life.
I'm not making up this bullshit story based on a on on ATV show.
And then he eventually like sexually assaulted someone and a
child was declared basically too mentally ill to stand trial and
died in a in a mental institution, right?
So you'll talk about someone with a poor grasp on reality,
but this was the guy telling everybody, right?
Witches are everywhere, you know D&D will will cause people to
worship the devil. And most of the people that I
found making these claims were like this.
I found so many people making utterly insane claims.
There's this guy William Schnobelen.
Big anti D&D guys said that he literally was a vampire and fed
on human blood exclusively of course.
Just just. Absolutely bizarre stuff.
Mike Warnke said he was in charge of 5000 Satanists in Los
Angeles. This was all debunked by an
evangelical magazine. So yeah, all these people are
big, big liars, and some of them are also doing pretty nasty
stuff when they're not making these accusations about others.
Right, you know, it's right. It's like, that's sort of the
thing to me that I, I, I feel like when someone accused us or
in the, in the chat of, you know, being Satanist and like,
dude, there's something going on with you that you don't like
about yourself that I worry about, You know, that, that it's
really, it's fascinating. Well, and one of my mentors was
David Frankfurter at Boston University.
He wrote a book called Evil Incarnate.
And that book is basically saying, how come throughout
history we have said, you know, all our problems are caused by
this. This group of people, they look
like everybody else, but they're actually pure evil.
And they do these evil rituals and they they eat babies and
they do weird sex stuff, right? These were the claims made in
the 80s. But but going back in time,
these claims were made about witches and Jews.
And now it's Democrats. Right, Democrats, I know it's.
Now it's Democrats. Crap.
Yeah. And, and this was the same stuff
that the early Roman pagans said about Christians.
It's like Christians eat babies and they do weird sex stuff,
right? That's.
Interesting. So, so Frankfurter says we seem
to be kind of hard wired to do this.
And he says, I think this is a form of intellectual laziness,
right? That when you have a problem,
you could think really hard about what's actually causing a
problem, maybe think of some ways to try to solve it.
Or you could just say it's my neighbor, they're a witch.
They're, they're baby eaters, right?
Blame them for being babies. It's what's the, you know, we
talked a lot about it, but what would you say?
Thank you so much for your time. I, I really do, but I love it.
I think it's, I think it's wonderful.
I think ROI is going to love hearing all of this.
What are What are some of the biggest myths about Satanism
that should be debunked? What is the what and Satan and
Satanism when they use these phrases?
What are which? What are the the biggest ones?
Yeah, so I mean, Satanism, it's a very nebulous word.
It doesn't really mean very much.
So in 1992, the FBI looked into claims of satanic child abuse.
And what the FBI agent said was, you know, it seems to me that
Satan means something different to everybody, right?
And this was they said, you know, the Ayatollah of Iran says
we're the great Satan. You know, that the entire United
States is, is, is Satan. So it doesn't really help us
solve crimes to focus on are they Satanic or not?
Because that word doesn't really mean much, right?
So that's the first thing to understand.
The second thing is that most people who say I am a Satanist
do not believe in a literal Satan, right?
They are, they are atheist. Anton Lavey was an atheist
so-called non theistic Satanist. For these people, Satan is kind
of like their favorite fictional character that inspires them,
right? So one way I explain it is like
if I have to go to the gym and it's leg day and I don't wanna
do leg day. But I think that like Batman's
really cool. I might be, you know, Batman
wouldn't skip leg day, right? Doesn't mean I think Batman's
real, right? And the other thing is they do
not understand Satan as being the Satan of the Bible who hates
all mankind. Their idea of Satan comes much
later from the Romantic poets of the 1800s.
So people like Lord Byron and Percy Shelley and they kind of
reimagined Satan as being kind of the, the ultimate rebel,
someone who won't back down to authority, someone who believes
in, in injustice and, and, and so on.
So that's the Satan that they are kind of looking to as a role
model, not the Satan that Christians know of being sort of
pure evil and, and and hating humanity.
Now when Now when did the idea of?
I think I might know the answer, but you can just confirm it for
me. Like the idea of, you know, this
horned demon Satan verses isn't he supposed to be like super
good looking and charming, right?
Like what's the when did that sort of and how do we take hold
of those two versions of him? Yeah, so the Bible never really
says what Satan looks like, right?
And there are passages saying, you know, Satan can appear as an
Angel of light. Most people think that the the
images that we associate with the devil today are because
early Christians were interacting with pagans, right?
And so it comes from Pagan gods. So the God Pan had horns and
goat legs. Hades, the Lord of the
underworld, had a pitchfork, right?
It was actually called a Bidens because it has two prongs and
instead of three. So Satan gets a pitchfork.
But there's also an idea that, you know, Satan's a spirit.
Satan can have whatever body he wants to have.
He can look however he wants. He can appear as a snake, for
example. And in the Middle Ages, Thomas
Aquinas, the Catholic theologian, said, I think that
what happens is spirits, they don't have bodies, but they,
they, they're super fast. So they can like, they can like
smoosh together, air real fast and condense it into whatever
body they want. And, and so really they, they
can appear however they want to look.
They don't have a true form. So where does that, where does
that idea of like the Super good looking St. in their Lucifer,
you know, come from versus, you know, I I totally get like, you
know, Pan and the half goat thing, you know, and the and the
and that image of him, but where did the like the handsome
Lucifer come from? I mean, probably the earliest
roots of it are in that passage in Genesis 6, which describes
angels taking human women and having sex with them and, and
getting them pregnant, right. And I guess the angels could be
really ugly. But I think when people hear
that story, they think, well, these probably, you know, these
were probably says they were beautiful women in the text.
They probably took the form of of of beautiful humans.
And then in the New Testament when Satan appears to Jesus in
the desert, he takes the form of a tempter.
So he is probably trying to appear in a way that will at
least make you a lower your guard.
And then in the early modern period, part of the lore becomes
that a demons are having sex with humans all the time, right?
This is where we get the idea of the incubus and the succubus and
so on. And in witch trials, people were
basically being tortured and made to confess you had sex with
the devil, right? So we get all these images of
sexy demons and devils. And some people have said, you
know, it really seems like it was the religious people
interrogating these accused witches who were preoccupied
with the devil and, and literally asking these these
women accused of witchcraft questions, like was the devil's
penis bigger or the same size as a human?
Right? These really these really kind
of salacious questions. And they seem to have kind of
dirty minds. And, and one theory of this is
there was sort of an idea of maybe this isn't even real.
Maybe these people aren't really witches, maybe there aren't
really demons and so forth. But there was an idea that if
you have sex with something, it's definitely, definitely
real, right? This is like to know something
in the biblical sense. So, so that by creating this
archive of all these witches have admitted that they not only
saw demons, they had sex with them.
This is sort of helping to prove that this sort of supernatural
worldview must be really real. It can't just be a a rumor or a
hallucination or something. And then again, it goes back to
like, you know, every accusation is a confession where that guy
who accusing that poor woman was probably it was just coveting
her and jealous of her. She was probably sleeping with
somebody else. And he's like, did that devil
have a you know, is he bigger than me?
Is he like, you know, I just want to just before we bury,
burn you alive for, you know, if I can't have you, no one will
sort of thing, which is, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if
that's how it went down, right. And of course these women will
say anything because they're being tortured.
So it's like, yes, the devil has this huge barf penis and.
But not as big as yours. That's, you know, brother,
brother John. It's like, you know, it's like
just in case, you know, just is that get me off the stakes.
I don't, you know, it's like, what do we do here?
Joe? I, I can't thank you enough.
I, I find this conversation super fascinating.
You make me want to go back to school.
I bet your class is a blast. I mean it really, I mean, it's
super fun because these kind of myths and this kind of the
constant, you know, religious implications of paranormal that
we deal with. Like my nephew and I were I, I
tend to believe in what my nephew believes.
If you if you do believe in spirits, and do you, do you
believe in spirits? So I am, I am agnostic about all
of these, these things, but I will say that some of the text
that I have found in my research are so weird that I, I'm really
flummoxed to think of any explanation for what, what,
what, what they could be describing.
So I teach my students, when we look at these things, to have
modesty, right? We weren't there when these
things reportedly occurred. So yeah, it could be things like
undiagnosed mental illness or something, but we don't know
that, right? So if we weren't there, I think
that we shouldn't rush to assumptions one way or the
other. My nephew's over the belief that
he, he believes that spirits are because we all have energy in
US, right? Brain synapses, literally
literal electric energy that cannot be created or destroyed.
And he just is of the mindset and the belief.
And I tend to, based on the things I've seen and heard these
days being around him, you know that when we pass, that energy
is dispersed. So spirits or ghosts are the
memories of the living that is attached to this energy that is
dispersed because we nobody really knows what's going on or
how the mind works and what happens to our energy.
It has to go somewhere. And it's a fun thing.
And also, it's a fun sort of theory to prove and try to talk
to other people about it from all different aspects from like
yourself, from a very religious and, you know, based on the
accusations we get. I want to answer these people
somehow about what this is versus, you know, pure
scientists who are like, you know, it's nonsense.
But again, Joe, thank you. Thank you so much for your time.
It is, it is incredibly enlightening, you know, to to
get into all this because it's like, you know, like I love to
taunt the audience a little bit with a, with a good hail Satan
every now and again. Like, you know, if you put an
Aussie picture up here, it's like that's that's how I grew
up, you know, and I love it. It's like it means nothing to me
one way or the other, other than had the coolest music, like I
said before. Yeah.
And the people that are get scared by it, man, they get so
scared, they get so scared. And it makes me wonder like,
well, what's going on in your life that this is, this is what
you're worried about? Me talking to a spirit and
accusing me and pulling me away from it.
But that's it, man. That's all I got for it.
And I, I really appreciate your time and I will certainly point
everybody to your books. They should read them.
I registered the one that the Cambridge books on saying, which
is it's awesome. It's just great.
It's just a wake up. It really is.
It's just like, get educated, you know what I mean?
It's like, it could so easily have been Mother Goose that it
could have been the Bible and those stories, you know what I
mean? It's like, let's just wise up.
But that's it, man. Thank you so much, Joe.
I appreciate your time. All right, thanks for having me,
this was fun. Good.
Thank you. Take care, man.
All right. Thank you all for listening to
this episode of Splintered Spirits.
Be sure to like, follow and subscribe to our YouTube channel
and wherever you get your podcasts.
Now go put on that Aussie record, even that Beatles
record. Maybe even play it backwards.
See what happens. I bet nothing does.
You just have some fun. Have a good one guys, see you
next time.