Hollow Throne: Satanic Panic & the Post-Modern Lucifer

Satan’s most enduring cultural legacy is one from which he is puzzlingly absent

by Kurt Schiller // Illustration by Sam Hindman

In the winter of 1980, Satan was making a comeback. And it all began with a book.

Written by Canadian psychologist Lawrence Pazder, Michelle Remembers was a bestselling  firsthand account of Pazder’s work with long-time patient (and later wife) Michelle Smith. Through long sessions of hypnosis and recovered memory “therapy”, Smith had allegedly uncovered a history of intense abuse dating back to the forties and fifties—memories that had lain dormant and forgotten in her mind, and which had been unlocked and resurfaced by Pazder’s treatments.

But Smith and Pazder’s claims went far beyond the normal psychosexual sensationalism of the late 70’s and early 80’s pop psychology boom. According to Pazder, Smith’s recovered memories revealed that she had been victimized not by mere run-of-the-mill child predators, but by a vast and insidious Satanic cult that had trafficked her across the country as a child. She had been abducted and tormented alongside hundreds of other children in a secret history that consisted of long periods of imprisonment, kidnapping, and sexual violence, ultimately culminating in an intense 81-day sexual ritual designed to summon Satan himself. To protect herself, Smith and Pazder claimed, she had suppressed these memories through a combination of force of will and divine spiritual intervention.

The claims quickly took root in the American consciousness, receiving breathless coverage in scandal rags like the National Enquirer as well as more mainstream publications like People magazine. Shortly before the book’s publication, an interview with Smith’s father in Maclean’s magazine debunked many of the duo’s outlandish claims—demonstrating, for instance, that Smith was well-accounted-for during the alleged 81-day kidnapping and ritual—but it was no use. Pazder’s book would soon be a national bestseller, welcomed by the then-nascent Christian conservative movement as well as a reactionary middle-class that had begun to see subversion and degeneracy lurking in every shadowed corner of their upscale suburban enclaves.

Of course there were secret cultists lurking in the shadows, preying on children. How else could you explain the depravity of modern culture—the rise of heavy metal, drugs, and occultism, and the abandonment of good Christian values? For a generation of newly-minted suburban nouveau riche eager to carve out a new American reawakening, it was the perfect capstone to a decade-long repudiation of the triumphant youth culture of the Sixties. 

Within a few short years, a series of headline-grabbing court cases directly modeled on the book’s account would be making waves across the English-speaking world, generating dozens of allegations in the U.S. and Canada, as well as far abroad in Australia, England, and New Zealand. Satan and his cultists were suddenly potential culprits in any unexplained abuse, kidnapping, murder, or disappearance case, a wildfire trend that quickly spawned an entire industry of therapists, researchers, counselors, and speakers catering to a vast and growing shared cultural delusion.

The Satanic Panic had begun.

* * * * *

It’s easy to forget that Satan once held real and lasting fear for much of the Christian world. Late Medieval Christianity saw the clawed hands of Satan everywhere—from witchcraft to the Reformation, Satan had been transformed from the metaphysical interrogator of early Christianity into an actively malicious agent, one whose earthly influence could be felt through the hands of his co-conspirators. Heretics, witches, warlocks, and demons; these were the tools of Satan, and he was abroad in the world.

This belief in an active, seductive Satan persisted, and found new and fertile ground on the American continent with the arrival of the Puritans and other early colonialist incursions. Satan’s presence and activity were also felt in this strange land, and new and devilish portents soon arose in the eyes of the faithful. Pagan religion and strange wisdom were his bread and wine, and in this new and divinely-ordained Promised Land they threatened the souls of the holy as surely as any war or famine. 

But here in 2022, Satan has been transformed. In the decades since those early days of widespread media panic, the once-terrifying Lord of Darkness has gone from sinister lurking fear to a charming, ironic figure in the eyes of most—at once a puckish counter-culture symbol and a totem of sincere belief for a new generation of occultists. He is more likely to be invoked through cultural touchstones like Lil Nas X’s MONTERO or the fevered cries of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady than as a real figure of temptation and damnation. There are still those who fly into a panic at the mention of his name, but they are increasingly marginalized; a joke for those in the know.

In 1980, things were different. Arriving at almost the same moment as the rise of the modern religious right, Pazder’s book tapped into a lingering primal fear, one stoked by a century of Christian revivalist movements that spoke directly to America’s origins as a colonialist haven for European religious extremists as well as a growing fear of cultural modernity. Gone were the Medieval inquisitors, replaced by red-faced televangelists scolding the nation’s parents about the dangers of Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne. The buttoned-down descendants of 1920s radio preachers tied his face to figures ranging from Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley to John Lennon, JFK, and a litany of others.

Modern Christianity has reduced Satan to an all-purpose rhetorical tool.

Satan is a curious figure in modern Christianity, one caught in the throes of a shift in orthodoxy as Christianity itself pivots from a religion of spirituality to one of the material world. Is he a mere metaphor that represents self-pollution and moral decay? Or is he a literal red-suited subterranean pitchfork enthusiast, tormenting the damned in lakes of fire? Modern Christianity demands that he be both and neither, and so has reduced him to a non-specific antagonist—less a defined character than an all-purpose rhetorical tool, representing whatever ails true believers at the present moment. Defined as he is by his detractors rather than his adherents (who, like the similar figure of the witch and warlock, only arrived in their literal forms centuries or millennia after the fact), the Satan of modern Christianity has become a sort of protean mirror god—a being of pure antagonistic belief with no specific life or desires of his own, reshaped constantly in opposition to the norms of modern Christianity and conservative culture.

If homosexuality is the puritanical fear of the day, Satan takes on the guise of rapacious seducer and pervert. If it be heresy, he transforms easily into a dark teacher whispering sinister doctrine in the ears of would-be scholars. And when the ire of modern believers turned to youth culture with its loud music and frivolous games, then the ever-shifting figure of Satan was more than capable of adopting the guise of devilish deejay and demonic Dungeonmaster, too. As an inherent rule breaker, he can exist only as a reflection of dominant cultural mores—with no rules to defy, there is nothing for the modern Christian Satan to do or, indeed, to be. Without something to stand in opposition to, he would simply cease to exist. It’s fortunate, then, that the underpinnings of modern Christianity have expanded to encompass everything from Lebensraum-style dominionism to capitalist prosperity gospel—these days, the things to which Satan might stand in opposition are practically limitless, and constantly changing. Idle hands may do the devil’s work, but it’s hard to imagine hands less idle than those of the modern devil.

* * * * *

A few short years after the publication of Michelle Remembers, the Satanic Panic was in full swing. The detection of unseen cults and recovered memory “therapy” had grown into a cottage industry—one propagated through seminars, VHS tapes, talk shows, and Christian revivalist groups. For their part, Pazder and Smith made the most of their newfound celebrity by appearing on daytime talk shows (including Oprah, who invited the pair on her show in 1989) to re-tell the story. Pazder in particular began positioning himself as an expert in Satanic abuse, a reputation that brought him a steady stream of work advising police departments on a wide variety of manufactured abuse scandals—including the infamous McMartin preschool abuse case.

The McMartin case—in which the staff of McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, Calif., were prosecuted for alleged occult sexual abuse—is both a perfect demonstration of the cultural penetration achieved by the Satanic panic and a chilling example of the way the elusive pop-culture figure of Satan can be turned against the powerless. Beginning with a single unfounded accusation from the mother of one of the school’s students, the case quickly grew to include hundreds of potential “victims” and resulted in the long-term imprisonment of multiple members of the McMartin family, with a particular focus on the McMartin’s son-in-law Ray Buckey as alleged Satanic high priest and ring leader. At the hands of police and scandal-hungry state social workers, dozens of children were pressured into concocting outlandish tales of secret underground tunnels, international occult flights, and even hot-air balloon rides in service of the same sort of ritualized “Satanic” sexual abuse recounted by Pazder and Smith.

Because the notion of Satanic abuse was all-encompassing and non-specific, no concrete evidence was needed or, indeed, possible. It didn’t matter in the slightest that neither the McMartins nor their staff had any history of misadventure or occult tendencies—that was just proof that appearances can be deceiving. When the grounds of the preschool were excavated and no tunnels were found, it merely indicated the cunning and secrecy of the alleged cabal. When the accusations became so outlandish that they could not be credibly presented to a jury, it was put down to the severity of the trauma, and the testimony was “massaged” appropriately. Buckey and the other accused in the McMartin trial could no more prove their innocence than could Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne—the difference being that Cooper and Osbourne were able to profit off the appearance of ambiguous and unspecified danger, whereas the McMartin family and a dozen other defendants in similar cases around the world languished in prison for months or years. Satan was never really expected to appear, and so his absence was neither mystery nor alibi. The air of disrepute was more than sufficient.

(It’s surely no coincidence, either, that many of the abuse scandals targeted older women, men in traditionally “unmasculine” jobs like childcare, and—in at least one case, New Zealand’s Christchurch Civic Creche—openly gay men. Their existence was already intolerable to polite society, and so all that was needed was the pretext.) 

It would later come out that many of these cases, including both the McMartin case and an earlier case in Kern County, Calif., directly relied on the curious orthodoxy laid out by Pazder and Smith. As already mentioned, Pazder was brought in as a special consultant on the McMartin case in 1984. But his presence was felt even without direct intervention; the social workers responsible for interviewing the ostensible victims of the Kern County case had received child abuse identification training through a seminar that used Michelle Remembers as a key text.

In this light, the imagined faux-Satanism of Pazder, Smith, and their many contemporaries takes on the appearance of a pseudo-doctrine in and of itself—a quasi-spiritual world that extends beyond the real, taking on both a mystical and conspiratorial character, like a sort of modern Mystery Cult. No evidence or detection of this world is necessary; the banishment of illusion itself can bring one closer to godliness, and the consequence of revelation into the mystery is recruitment into an ongoing, non-specific war to “save” children from invisible abuse at the hands of mysterious predators, who might take on any guise that is convenient.

It’s a pattern that one can find repeating itself in the modern QAnon conspiracy movement, a similarly-leaderless, equally-nonspecific, and frequently just-as-mystic belief structure that purports to reveal the existence of a vast child abuse conspiracy perpetuated by the invisible power structures that rule our lives. It’s no coincidence that figures like Hillary Clinton and Ilhan Omar have been accused of vague and unprovable Satanic acts in furtherance of this grand cabal—the long and amorphous shadow of Satan yet lingers over American politics.

Many of the accused in Satanic abuse cases were already intolerable to polite society.

And as for Pazder and Smith, the influence of their Satanic ritual abuse theories was brief, but devastating. By the late Eighties, a series of further investigative reports both fully debunked the central claims and exposed the law-enforcement malfeasance behind their actual role in prosecutions, including the widespread manipulation of children through dubious testimony, extensive pre-trial coaching, and careful manipulation of statements. The runaway McMartin pre-school trial closed in 1990, with no convictions—but not before becoming the longest and most expensive criminal case in American legal history, and leading to the five-year imprisonment of primary defendant Ray Buckey.

But even after the McMartin case ended in failure and Pazder’s claims were revealed as pure fraud, similar Satanic abuse cases cropped up throughout the early- and mid-90s, with several leading to actual convictions. In 1991, Fran and Dan Keller were convicted of similar abuse allegations, based in part on the testimony of a supposed expert in “Satanic ritual abuse.” More well-known is the case of the West Memphis Three, in which a trio of teenagers were convicted of multiple child murders that the prosecution claimed were part of a Satanic ritual. (The West Memphis Three were finally released in 2011, while the Kellers’ convictions were overturned in 2013.)

* * * * *

While this pervasive Luciferian fear has diminished in the mainstream, the figure of Satan remains just as widespread and just as motivating within the culture war of American conservative Christianity. In fact, one of the best demonstrations of the protean form of our modern Satan comes in the form of a 2014 viral video featuring Christian extremist Christine Weick. In the video, Weick holds up a can of Monster energy drink and runs through a litany of symbolic interpretations of the can’s design and branding that, she says, link the product to Satan: the three M-shaped hallmarks are actually the Hebrew letter vav, spelling out 666; the slashed O of the word Monster resembles the Christian cross; the very word “monster” is synonymous with “beast”; and so on. Weick concludes her talk by pantomiming a long swig from the can, before ominously intoning, “And the Devil laughs.”

That Weick’s paranoid semiotics are nonsensical to non-believers is of little consequence; more than anything, they are themselves a symbolic gesture, linking the fear of Satanic influence to an icon of modern culture which, in the eyes of Weick and those who share her beliefs, is already inherently ungodly. The main purpose of her demonstration is to provide a religious framework for existing cultural revulsion, however tenuous. It exists to elevate the fear of social corruption—the fear that your children and family will be polluted by modern society—to a sacred one, in which not just manners and good hygiene but their very souls are at stake.

The same can be said of the all-powerful phantom “Satanists” once imagined by Pazder and a host of imitators—not to be confused with literal Satanists, who whether sincere occultists or ironic tricksters in the LaVey / Crowley mode generally have little interest in personally leading the worthy astray. As an imagined fifth column of cultural degeneracy, the interests of Pazder’s purported diabolists range from horror comics to heavy metal, from child abuse to animal vivisection, political and financial manipulation, and even consumer brands. They are whatever the current moment demands—nothing more, nothing less.

Through this reactionary traditionalism, modern Christianity has gradually adopted a sort of cultural Gnosticism, one that views modern culture as an inherently evil and depraved place—one in which we have been placed as a sort of spiritual test, with Satan as both demiurge and jailer. But where the Gnostics sought escape from the prison of the real through enlightenment and spiritual revelation, reactionary Christian traditionalism seeks to reclaim it through a sort of cultural Reconquista; overthrowing decadent modern culture and restoring “traditional values,” throwing out Satan and his vast cultural influence once and for all.

There’s a flipside to this all-encompassing, yet non-specific cultural fear, of course: the same protean omnipresence that makes Satan such a convenient motivator for a large and well-engaged subset of the conservative mainstream makes him an equally fertile ground for counter-culture. Bands like Black Sabbath, Pagan Altar, Coven, and Judas Priest need not demonstrate any particular sincerity or specificity to earn a reputation as dangerous, subversive influences—they could simply invoke the name and aesthetics of The Adversary, and mainstream culture would do the rest.

The same is true for organizations like the Church of Satan—a religion (if it can be called such) consisting not of belief in the figure of Satan, but merely in his utility as a rhetorical and analytical tool, and in his ability to freak out the squares. This is the power of the absent adversary: a shape that can invest any scenario, any idea, any concept or movement or rhetoric with a strange sort of deep power, ready to be invoked at a moment’s notice. And it’s as true for benign culture jammers as it is for dangerous charlatans with books to sell.

One need only say his name, and he will appear.

* * * * *

What, then, are we to make of the figure of “Satan” in all this? After all, the Satan of QAnon and the McMartin abuse trial has little to do with the Christian figure of scripture, or even his more mystic occult counterpart. But there is no scripture to this new Satan—no definition, no shape or ultimate meaning, only reference and reaction.

Taken from a sociological lens, this increasingly post-modern Satan resembles nothing so much as Umberto Eco’s ur-fascism; an enemy both strong and weak, both all-powerful and powerless, representing the frustrations of the chosen and the desperate need for a return to traditionalism from our world of sickening modernity. This new Satan can justify a boycott of Monster energy drinks as easily as it can justify digging up a preschool in search of buried tunnels or imprisoning innocent child care workers for the better part of a decade, and belief in him remains inexhaustible even in the face of outright absurdity—because this Satan is not a person, not a fallen angel or would-be God, but a reaction to the perceived iniquities of modernity. No scriptural justification or agreed upon doctrine is needed, because the only required doctrine is reactionary cultural conservatism.

Satan in this form—the Empty Satan, the Protean Satan that takes any shape and volume required, that hides in shadows and crevasses wherever and whenever it is convenient to find him—is ultimately a devil entirely of our own creation, a reactionary tendency that drives the faithful to acts of evil through their own worst urges, sublimated into supposed godliness. Rebel angel no more; in the hands of conservative Christianity he is only and ever the half-glimpsed shadow at the edge of the firelight, the amoeboid shape of a thousand enemies of the culture war.

No proof can banish him from the eyes of believers. His absence is total, and yet in this absence he has found strength and a way into the hearts of those most desperate to defeat him. He is a fully post-modern creation, a victim of the future; a being that can exist only in reference to other things, a symbol rendered simulacrum—an empty void at the heart of belief, waiting for our own worst natures to fill it.

And fill it we shall, over and over, again and again—knives held ever at the ready, constantly searching for the next foe, for the next imagined threat, the next unexplained murder and plaintive cry of a child in the night. In his absence, this modern Satan has succeeded exactly where his traditional counterpart never could; an undefeatable enemy, who only grows more powerful as the faithful strengthen their efforts to root him out.

And the Devil laughs.

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