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HITLER AND THE OCCULT: NAZISM, REINCARNATION AND ROCK CULTURE by Suzanne M. Rini In a headshop-boutique window downtown, a t-shirt dangles on a wire hanger. None other than Adolf Hitler, looking disconcertingly urbane, is silkscreened in the center, a mocking, euphemistic phrase underneath: "Hitler's European Tour: 1939-1945." On-a garage wall in the university section of town, a crude, misspelled, "Sieg Hail!" is scrawled, replete with swastika. Three blocks away, a record store window puffs a heavy metal band's abrasive song titles: "Never on Your Knees," "Witchdoctor," and "Scream Bloody Murder." If we have eyes to see them, the signs of the rise in Satanism and its conflation with neo-Nazism are fairly commonplace and even rife. Unfortunately, in the U.S. information culture, nothing exists until it can't be ignored any longer, until the causes and proportions are irremediable. Undoubtedly, I myself only noticed the props of what Cynthia Kisser, Director of the Cult Awareness Network, calls a "growing social movement" because I'd received a copy of Satanism and Occult-Related Violence: What You Should Know by Michael Langone, Ph.D. and Linda O. Blood, of the American Family Institute, a consortium of professionals who have been tracking cults and logging cult information since the 1970s. The above book's startling documentation piqued my awareness from an intellectual and journalistic viewpoint. But soon after I'd read it, I visited an old high school friend of mine, now a pastor at a suburban Pittsburgh parish. One of his teenage parishioners had recently committed suicide; Nazi and Satanist paraphernalia were found at the scene. In this context, however, the word "suicide" has to be a matter of caution, for those paying homage to the Devil kill themselves as "sacrifices" to their nether god, believing that with promised reincarnation, Satan will reward them with another, more powerful existence. The young Catholic boy's suicide may reflect a point reported by Langone and Blood. According to the Gallup Youth Survey Release of May 10, 1988, "Approximately one- third of teens who are regular attendees at Protestant or Catholic churches believe in reincarnation, a belief rejected by Christianity but upheld by most Eastern and New Age religious philosophies." "A large minority of teens," the authors continue, a) are not very well grounded In their religions b) believe In witchcraft and...the Devil, and c) are attracted to heavy metal music. If even one or two percent of these teens were seriously Influenced by Satanism. the total number would be in the tens of thousands.Reincarnation, in a materialistic culture, feeds the fires of wanting power both in the here and now and in an second, more powerful one. It is a belief to which teens in the present social context are particularly prey. Reincarnation can, in turn, become the aperture to belief in the Devil. This brand of belief in the Devil is not the usual Catholic one in which Satan is an ontological, personal force who preys upon and tempts even the best persons, who must practice virtue and pray for grace in order to resist. This traditional Christian approach to the devil was, according to some professionals working in the fields of Satanist cases, effective yesterday, but today is a largely vanishing artifact of a receding Christian culture. For instance, Louise M. Edwards, a Canadian social worker with much experience treating ritual abuse cases, terms the Catholic catechesis on Satan as dearly a bygone, "European" one. The awareness of ritual or Satanic assaults," she writes in "Differentiating Between Ritual Assault and Sexual Abuse" (Journal of Child and Youth Care, Special Issue, 1990), is fairly new to North America, but to those of us with roots in Europe it Is something taught at the earliest ages.... The Catholic Church taught that the Satanic cults do the reverse of the church .... It was presented as the battle of good versus evil. [A] catechism book used by the Catholic church In 1955... clearly spells out the obstacles to happiness and Indicates that there Is such a person as the devil who tempts people to do wrong.In a post- 1955 world bereft of Catholic catechesis, reincarnation initiates the psychologically vulnerable and theologically ignorant into homage to the devil in exchange for the goods of this world and power beyond the grave. For the more "sophisticated" neopagan, there is the paying of homage to a god who has both a light and dark side, but who shares enough conventionally Christian-defined satanic properties to pass for Satan. One popular neo-pagan deity such as this is Baphomet, who, via the "theology" accompanying the belief, demands blood or symbolic sacrifice, or burnt offering. These sacrifices are "Dionysian" at base, in other words, geared to ensuring "renewal." In The Return of the Goddess (Crossroads, 1982) Edward C. Whitmont, a New Ager, advocates worship of the goddess, who was the consort of Baphomet. He also believes that the Grail legend is the belief for our time, which he calls "the post-Christian era." Feminism is duly accommodated in Whitmont's system, for the "restoration of the Grail (will occur) by honoring the Feminine aspect of existence." "The Grail myth," according to Whitmont, has replaced the original form of Christian messianism in terms of psychological effectiveness. From the late Middle Ages on through our present post-Christian days, It has had a most powerful effect. It is also an integrative myth. It unifies preChristian with Christian and modern post-Christian elements. The ancient cauldron of the Great Goddess is filled now with the blood of Christ and awaits redemption of the redeemer through human search, through the conscious effect of a seeker who dares to ask the socially forbidden question "Where or what does It serve?" and "What is the meaning?"Proponents of witchcraft, especially among "Catholic" feminists, usually insist that belief in "The Goddess" has nothing to do with Satanism. Whitmont, however, indicates that this "benign" witchcraft has a darker side, noting: that the horned god, the consort of the Great Goddess, is an integral aspect of the Grail dynamic .... In medieval witches' cults this figure appears as the horned attendant of the goddess. Called the Devil by the church, he was known as the Lord of Reincarnation by the witches. As with Dionysius's death and renewal, blood rites were undoubtedly associated with this figure in pre-Christian pagan cults.Whitmont recognizes, as we shall see, that both Goddess and Grail were intrinsic to Nazi religlo/ philosophy. However, Whitmont takes pains to separate his New Age cleavage to these myths from Hitler's attraction to them by castigating the latter's overlaying both with racial hatred. However, any resurgence of Grail/ Goddess belief must be seen as direct opposition to Christianity, which was the first principle underlying Nazi philosophy and policy. Certainly, the Jews were hated on a racial basis; but much more, they were despised, in the gnostic sense, for the 'bad conscience" they brought to Christianity and to the person of Christ, through Judaic foundations. Jehovah, the God of the Jews, is responsible for Genesis, for material creation, and for establishing the concept of sin. Thus, the charge often leveled against the Jews, that of materialism, traces back to the gnostic antipathy to matter. This deeper reason for hating the Jews, from whose law and morality Christ emerged, is neglected by contemporary historians. As Whitmont demonstrates, denunciation of Judeo-Christian hierarchic principles and doctrine, and thereby of its believers, is de rigueur for gnostics, whose heresy must be seen yesterday and today as a form of protest against established religion. Whitmont, who believes we should be able to live totally by trial and error, by experiencing both sides of our nature, and especially the Shadow side, regrets then the loss of the Dionysian offering. For Dionysius is the "god of wildness and spontaneity," and the blood offering to him is "to be presented before the Lord and atoned for, but sent away alive." So, in combination, we see that in the U.S. today we have the frontal aspect of Satanism as represented by teenagers' increasing attraction to it, and we see the more subtle form emerging from out of the goddess regions of neo-pagan New Age. For both, the bottom line, whether one dresses it up in Jungian terminology, or scrawls a pentagram on an underpass in the suburbs, is the Satanic commandment to do whatever one wants, and to experience everything, extolling personal power and its final agent, the Devil, aver submission to moral law. Refusing to consider oneself a sinner is the common ground of both. And both varieties, as witnessed by the suicide related above and Whitmont's colloquial and knowledgeable references to nazism, are no more or less than the current blossoming of the Nazi legacy, come home to roost in the good old U.S.A. not quite 50 years after its defeat in Germany. One could run about warning that the Cathars are coming, but even this is not exact. For what were the Cathars and the Albigensians but the reiteration and transmogrification of the old, pagan Teutonic religion, never quite eradicated with the coming of Christianity, and ever at hand in any anxious or defiant age. After the suicide/sacrifice event, my priest friend decided to hold a workshop for religious educators in the area, especially as he-d unfortunately learned from the police that his bucolic suburb is prime territory for Satanist activity in the county. (As per my friend's police information, Satanists will sometimes put a pentagram over a local or national map, choosing spots for rituals where the points of the pentagram fall.) Invited to this workshop were specialty task force police and a local psychiatrist, Dr. Earl Hill, the Director of the Adolescent Drug and Alcohol Unit at St. Francis General Hospital here in Pittsburgh. He told the group that an increasing number of teenagers admitted there for alcohol and/or drug dependency were reporting involvement in Satanism. At first, Dr. Hill was skeptical, "blowing it off" as peripheral or perhaps a delusional effect of the alcohol or drug abuse. But at last he could no longer ignore it as merely incidental. The kids were talking as much about belief in the Devil as they were reporting partaking in Satanist activity. Out of his realization, Dr. Hill has become an expert, and not, as with many other professionals-including journalists--skeptic who categorizes the adolescent "dabbling" in Satanism as merely a new evocation of teenage rebellion. The term "dabbling is belied by some of the recorded cases. In 1988, Tommy Sullivan, of New Jersey, killed his mother with a Boy Scout knife, attempted to kill his father and brother, torched the family home and fled, finally committing suicide by slashing his wrists and throat. "An investigation revealed that Tommy's interest in Satanism had escalated after he began reading about witchcraft for a religion report to the eighth- grade class at the parochial school he attended. His friends reported that he told them that the devil appeared to him in a vision and ordered him to kill his family and preach Satanism." "Dabbling" implies that there exists some type of consecutively empirical stages in Satanic belief and resulting action. This hypothesis, which can be neither verified nor quantified, should be dismissed as overloading hyper-rationalism and skepticism onto the real supernatural forces at work in Satanism and in the individuals it ensnares. In fact, this hypothesis boldly demonstrates a kind of opposition to grounding the discussion of burgeoning U.S. Satanism in matters religious. And pushed further. it encourages seeing such a view as an enabling factor of Satanism because the seriousness of the phenomenon is undercut by using Satanism for a certain kind of secularist propaganda. Tommy Sullivan's fatal opening to Satanism was, amazingly, a school report on witchcraft assigned at a Catholic school. But a larger number of teenagers are initiated into Satanist beliefs through the skinhead and heavy metal music movements, often one and the same thing. According to Langone and Blood, "Some satanist cults are suspected of recruiting at heavy metal concerts .... They may employ teenage members as recruiters or to lure other teens to rituals where they are seized, forced to participate, and threatened with death if they leave the cult or tell anyone about it." Of course, not all skinheads or heavy metal music fans are satanists. But both are at high risk. The skinhead thrives on violent motifs that are highly likely to spill over into actual violence. The lyrics to heavy metal music abound with vivid images of rape, murder, suicide, Satan, blood and mayhem, and even necrophilia. If some writers are willing to mitigate the possible effects of heavy and dead metal bands' influence on the spiritual state of fans. the police are not. The above-mentioned police documents on ritualistic crime mentioned above contain pages of the abominable lyrics. Detective Richard Mihalic, part of an intra-professional task force based in Pittsburgh, told this reporter that Michael Aquino, a nationally known, avowed Satanist and Nazi devotee, recently said on a BBC broadcast that he is actively recruiting skinheads. This means that the skinhead cum heavy metal music "movement" may be the hiring hall for a new phase of formal organization by "professional" Satanists like Aquino. Carl A. Raschke, in the 1989 book, Painted Black, alleges that Aquino also reports having visited Wewelsburg Castle, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler's luxurious and gothic Third Reich outpost where Himmler initiated and educated his vicious corps in the "lost knowledge" of many offbrand occult traditions, as well as in absurd historical. cultural, and even geographical theories put forward by a host of revolting quacks who were actual professors at the time. Although Aquino recruits skinheads, who are walking time bombs of violence, he demurs on the issue of his agreement with Nazi racial hatred and anti-Semitism. (Of course, who can trust him to tell the truth?) Rather, writes Raschke, Aquino says he went to Wewelsburg to exploit the "working" there that is, its evil. As a devoted, believing pilgrim, Aquino expects the evil that was wrought at Wewelsburg to surge into himself, broadening his own "powers." Obviously, the most paradigmatic evil wrought by Himmler and the SS involved the extermination of millions of people. Thus Aquino begs the question when he publicly plays down any personal, Satanist antipathy toward Jews, Catholics, and Blacks; for Satanism's first law is preying upon the "weak," and using others ritualistically to gain power for themselves. From the evidence, then, of the convergence of contemporary Satanism with neo- Nazism, it can be said that Nazism, and within that, the person of Hitler, and the dramatis personae surrounding him, provide a demonology for today's devil- worshippers. They can look into the totally accessible film of history in their own century and see a living hell led by Hitler as Satan and his totally subservient legion, who were, above all, "obedient" to his dark. predatory will. Hitler, however, was only making use of symbols that were already familiar in occult circles. The SS characters were resurrected from Germanic tribal runes. The swastika was originally a Sanskrit sun symbol, denoting a heliocentric cosmos ordered by an Aryan nature god who became the reinterpreted "God" of the Nazis. Before Hitler's rise, many German racists had adopted the swastika as the emblem of their several quasi-political movements, and the occult societies which often lay behind the public, political constructs. The most relevant of these was the Thule Society, whose meetings Hitler attended while in the' German Army during World War I and after., It was there that he met Rudolf Hess, as well as his future "philosopher/intellectual," Alfred Rosenberg. The Thule Society was the quasi-secret gnostic society behind Munich's tiny German Workers Party which, in turn, provided the philosophical basis and early membership for Hitler's German National Socialist Party. Dusty Sklar, in the very well-researched Nazis and the Occult, establishes that Hitler took many ideas and props from the Thule Society: the fuhrerprinzip, the swastika (which a dentist who was a Thule member ultimately designed into the Nazi flag), the idea for the stormtroopers, and the very salute, "Sieg Heil!" But at the bottom of alt of these lay a barbarian's antipathy to none other than Christianity, as well as to Judaism, and especially to the Catholic Church. Had the war been won by Germany, the Church would have probably been pandemically persecuted. Thus, the swastika and the SS runes are historically the symbols of satanism and beneath them lay visceral hatred of Judeo-Christian civilization. Whitmont claims that the lore of the swastika traces directly back to the Knights Templars, who were routed by the Church for allegedly satanic-like practices. The Templars were also affiliated with the Grail myth, a major element of which was worship of an ancient, Celtic/Teutonic god involving prescribed rituals and prayers: "All this purportedly constituted a Grail liturgy dedicated to reviving the ancient forgotten mysteries of the old sacred tradition (ascribed to a legendary Aryan Thule) from which the whole Indo-Germanic culture was supposed to have originated."Of the Nazis, those "new Templars," Whitmont says, "This emblem was now said to be the most secret symbol of the Armanentum Armandom, the name given to the order by its high priests and spiritual directors. These new Templars claimed to guard and serve the Grail of the racially pure blood and the Thule mysteries of the ancient Aryan root race." Thus, the old god Cerannus would have had to be propitiated with blood rites, upon which pagan renewal was always based. Hitler, when he came to power, often had himself pictured in Grail regalia, and set up some of his forces as "orders" of knights. It then becomes possible to hypothesize that perhaps the ritual murders which took place in the German concentration camps were seen, not figuratively as they are by some historians, but literally as blood sacrifice. Hitler as Fuhrer was but the reflection of Hitler, the down and out student in Vienna, the occult aficionado. In those years, he was the reader of spoiled monk turned occultist and racist Lanz von Lebenfels' Ostara, the anti-Jewish, prurient publication whose name is a pagan forerunner, it is said, of the Christian "Easter." Although Hitler went far beyond the Thule society, some of his old associates from it joined him when he acceded to power. Just as the Thule Society was the gnostic secret society behind the early German Workers Party, so too its beliefs and rituals may have continued to be practiced behind the political/philosophical facade of Nazism, and the god Cerannus may have come to be bloodily propitiated in the name of renewing Germany. But were the Nazis practicing Satanists? Here again, the answer depends on the definition of Satanism. If one means organizing covens-or "ghettos" as Church of Satan founder, Anton LaVey calls covens nowadays-the answer from history is a probable no. But if Satanism is defined as an occultist, pagan legacy of something like the Knights Templars, the answer would be yes. Some writers have drawn on the rich historical evidence of Nazi occult belief, extending these to imply Satanist activity of the traditional 'coven kind. But unconvincingly so, although there are some incidents which do seem to reek of that type of Satanism, such as Hitler's ritualistic suicide on Walpurgis Night, the eve of the Satanic high "holyday" of Beltane. Other historians leave the question open, or treat it in a lefthanded way. They exhaustively chronicle Hitler's excesses, his politics, and his character, but finally they admit that they cannot explain him. That is, they concur that his evil was too great to be defined in merely human terms. But what is ignored by nearly all of the writers is that Hitler clearly defined himself as a messiah, and his most important henchmen and major ideologues were self-proclaimed heretics, both of which distinguishing marks wind better into the Templar/Thule skein.
The Nazis do seem to qualify as Satanists in spite of the seemingly
paradoxical fact that they professed belief in God, but much, much
mitigated. In other words, unlike today's Satanists and other
historical ones, they did not denounce God out of hand. But they did
totally reject His teachings, especially as taught by the Catholic
Church. For instance, Himmler's SS men, at their initiation rite,
were asked a first question: "Do you believe in God?" The correct
answer was "yes." However, SS officers in carrying out Himmler's
depraved family policy of Lebensborn, replaced priests at baptisms
and marriages of fellow SS men, and were charged by Himmler to couple
anonymously with German "maidens" as much to insult the Church as to
produce children for the
The German people were ripe for the Anti-Christ figure of Hitler. "By
the turn of the century," writes James Webb in his book The Occult
Underground,
Rosenberg must have also known that the Cathars are credited, even by
the most Inquisition-hating historians as having been the first
heretics to propitiate Satan as the god of matter. They are credited
too, with being the first to celebrate the Black Mass and to offer
human sacrifice, both of which were drawn upon by 19th Century
Satanists. It was the 17th century Cathars who introduced to
devil-worship the ritualistic elements today passed off as ancient
but which were unknown in both the early Christian centuries and in
the Renaissance, when black magic became influential through the work
of Pico de Mirandola, who believed that white magic was not efficient
enough for the matters at hand. It was the ritualistic, propitiatory
Cathar "tradition" which was adapted by the surge of Satanism that
took place in the 19th century, well-described by Huysmanns in La
Bas.
Raschke nails down the Cathar-Nazi convergence and its connection to
contemporary Satanism. Donald Nugent in "Satan is a Fascist" (The
Month, April 1972) analyzes the "unholy Trinity of Adolf Hitler,
Charles Manson ... and Anton LaVey;" For all three the "satanist and
the 'superman are one," Nugent writes. He also points out that
mysticism and humanism are "the two routes to satanism." Catharism
mixed with the secular ideology of state control became Hitlerism.
German mysticism mingled with LaVey's libertarian philosophy of
laissez aller, or "let anything pass," becomes the nine satanic
statements [of LaVey]."
All of these cultural signs point to the gnostic/ Cathar hatred of
the world of matter, which leads inexorably and logically to blood
sacrifice to the god of matter, that is, to Satan, whether he is
propitiated by that name or another. Sexual perversion, an intrinsic
feature of the war between body and spirit, was as rife among' the
Nazis as it is in the U.S. today. Norbert Bromberg, M.D. and Verna
Valz Small in Hitler's Psychopathology claim that no less than
eight women who underwent sexual perversions with Hitler, during
affairs with him, committed suicide. Hitler cryptically described the
"suicide" of his niece/lover, Geli Raubel as a "sacrifice to
Germany," a fact which historians glide over as merely figurative.
In the Nazis' case, the image of the mental hospital is no less apt.
Their Gnosticism mandated a frontal assault on western Christian
civilization. They rowed energetically backwards to traditions like
Atlantis, to legends of a superrace in ancient India whose deposit of
lost knowledge they thought they could resurrect through mere desire.
This caused the Nazis to wallow in any occult mania.
In his unrepentant Memoirs, penned in a prison cell at Nuremberg,
Alfred Rosenberg denied that his ideas led to violence. Today, Anton
LaVey makes the same claim. "The Church of Satan," writes Langone,
In 1935, Hitler Youth was deployed to confiscate the pamphlet written
by Cardinal Faulhaber against the Aryan Paragraph of the Reich's
Constitution, which outlawed as criminal all civil, intellectual and
commercial activity of Jews, as well as their right to marry German,
indeed, any Gentile women. This, despite the fact that the earlier
Nuremberg Laws, which rescinded most anti-Semitic reaction in
Germany, had brought an influx of Jews from eastern Europe. Cardinal
Faulhaber's document is a paen not only to Catholic courage but to
the Church's unconditional support for protection of the
disenfranchised members of society. It finds its approximation today
in Catholicism's defense of all those whose personhood is is
attacked. The Cardinal, like the Pope 1500 years before, stared
unafraid into the eyes of the new Attila, a dramatic confrontation
described by Mario Bendiscioli, in Nazism versus Christianity:
No matter whether it's the Old or the New Testament... It's all
the same Jewish swindle. It's all the same and doesn't make us
free. A German church, German Christianity is nonsense. You are
either a Christian or a German.
Despite his belief that the destruction of Christianity would be but
a mere matter of time, Hitler, evil and determined as he was, ended
up vanquished. The spiritual struggle between good and evil was,
paradoxically, a clear reminder of God's primacy. Once defeat was
imminent and inevitable, Hitler ordered Albert Speer to destroy the
infrastructure of Germany. This Speer would not do, as so much of the
physical Reich was his own work as Reich architect. Perhaps God chose
to remind Hitler and the world of His greatness by making it
necessary for the Fuhrer to destroy his own work. Hitler ordered
the destruction, he said, because his defeat proved that the German
people were too weak to prevail. They had not measured up to his
Nietzschean, Luciferian requirement. Or perhaps Hitler knew he had
failed as black magician and Anti-Christ. He wanted to burn Germany
itself because he had come to believe that the German people were too
"weak" to win the war.
He could have just as easily said they had not proven evil enough.
Like the devil Isacaron, who possessed Antoine Gay (See "The Devil in
Antoine Gay," Fidelity, April 1987), Hitler was forced to say, "The
greatest suffering that God can inflict on me is to be obliged to
destroy my own work." This is not to say that Hitler was merely
possessed, as Gay surely was. Hitler became a function of the total
degradation and depravity of his own will to power, that "thing upon
which he so often violently expatiated, which he frighteningly and
effectively exhibited in so many public and private paroxysms. So
demonic did that will seem, so "perfectly" conformed to the highest
standards of evil, that arch-Satanist Aleister Crowley felt sure that
Hitler had followed his own prescriptions as laid out in his own
Book of Law. Crowley had also written Thelema, the Greek word for
"will," recognizing its disordering as the first principle of
opposition to God. James Webb reports that "Crowley marked for
attention all the passages in Herman Rauschning's Hitler Speaks
that referred to a new world order or to the collapse of the old
system of values."
Just as Hitler's monomania led him to believe that Christianity's
weaknesses and accommodation would lead to his final victory over it,
so today, Anton LaVey clings to the same proud hope. "The events that
LaVey predicted," writes Burton H. Wulfe in his prologue to The
Satanic Bible,
Deriding the neo-Nazi Satanists will not make them go away or delete
the burgeoning crimes committed or encouraged by them from the police
blotters. Not all of today's devil worshippers are imbued with
LaVey's preening, which makes him seem a kind of netherworld
Liberace, making it temptingly naive to deride if not dismiss him,
which is probably his game. Some other current Satanists inspire a
more sobering response; they are the rough types who stand to create
widespread, large scale havoc. This is the contingent which feels
empowered by dark mandates from beyond the grave. Alfred Rosenberg,
during his imprisonment after the War, while awaiting the finality of
judgment at Nuremberg, wrote, "In the future everything depends upon
the need for the coming generations to recognize the inevitability of
this battle of our times, so that they may not become weary and weak
like those who came before us." U.S. culture as anti-culture sinking
steadily into nihilism is already finding new expressions and forms.
It is ready to receive the inheritors of Rosenberg's legacy.
For instance, there is our fellow citizen, Mr. Nicholas Schreck. As
reported by Langone and Raschke, Schreck counts himself as an avowed
neo-Nazi. He has pledged himself to Rosenberg's plea for dark
historical continuity and his "apostolate" is the resurrection of
Joseph Goebbels' "resistance organization," Radio Werewolf. Schreck
has cast this Nazi program in the guise of a heavy metal band.
Goebbels founded the resistance/propaganda movement once the Nazi
defeat was inevitable. He wanted a music and radio terrorist
underground which would take the Nazi doctrine and mission forward
into the future, where it has deftly landed. In Schreck's manifesto
titled "Radio Werewolf Indoctrination," he writes that his band "is
the current incarnation of a demonic manifestation," and its music's
purpose is-now quoting Hitler- "'to instill the gleam of pride and
independence of the beast of prey into the eyes of pitiless youth.'"
Considering that heavy metal and dead metal bands are one of the main
recruiting forums for professional Satanists, the Nazi promise that
their doctrine would not die with them is made good by creatures like
Schreck. Rosenberg and Goebbels, who ended their abominable lives in
nooses, symbolically find their reincarnation in men like Schreck.
At Chicago's Hartgrave Hospital, psychiatrists created the Center for
Treatment of Ritualistic Deviance. The psychiatrist in charge avers
that "No one will be hospitalized for strange beliefs or unusual
values that we would disagree with." One can't help quip that the
Devil probably is very entertained by the pretensions of
psychiatrists. Perhaps the Devil is also a little angry that, these
days, the shrinks are reluctant to give him his due. Of course, the
Devil must be grateful at least that his presence in a case "hampers
conventional treatment." For author Langone, however, the context of
satanism is not religious. After reporting pages of mayhem ascribed
to Satanism, he ends his book by saying: "I don't believe the
problems associated with Satanism have to be construed as a religious
issue, although they can be, and I am sure intelligent arguments
could be made that they should be. The analysis of evil I have
advanced rests comfortably (italics added) in psychological
paradigms. It represents a challenge to mental health, and I
encourage my colleagues to explore its ramifications for theory and
treatment."
So should parents of youngsters who "dabble" in Satanism be alarmed
if Johnny has a Satanist altar in his bedroom? How will they
determine just how evil Johnny is at the moment or might be tomorrow?
Should they dwell at all on the fate of Tommy Sullivan's dead mother?
And as for the difference between psychosis and evil, we must in all
fairness point out to Dr. Langone that Charles Manson, a true life
Cathar who propitiates both Gad and the Devil, is not doing life in a
nuthouse, but in a prison, and that his "delusions" were firm enough
to inspire him to commit mayhem. What Langone and his colleagues are
advocating is the whittling away of Christianity by its own internal
weakness, one of which is that of allowing various secular forces,
like psychiatry, to usurp its functions and ape its wisdom, and its
effectiveness against evil.
Hitler would have been edified.
Only something as serious as belief can be at the bottom of all this,
whether you want to be comfortable with it or not. And that belief is
exploited and aided by the real force of evil. The rapidity with
which Tommy Sullivan and others progressed from curiosity to murder
and suicide clearly demonstrates the presence of a supernatural
force. Although belief may be out of style, it remains a potent
cause.
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