Sometimes things are on one side, and sometimes things are on two sides at the same time. As I move to the end of the Dead of Night installment, liminality lies dead ahead. Picking up where I left off on the one side, I move to the other. It is worth considering something else that involves Black Sabbath and Satan. One of the band’s best songs is called…

…N.I.B. And yes! Another terrible Ozzy photo. Originally, there was no dark connotation to the name, but later it was referred to as…Nativity in Black, though not, apparently, by the band. But that was later. The song is dark, indeed, and is sung in the first person. Who is the first-person person?

 Now I have you with me, under my power,
our love grows stronger now with every hour.
Look into my eyes, you will see who I am,
my name is Lucifer, please take my hand.

There is no reference to Satan in the song, or even a reference to the devil. I will not rehash my position that Lucifer and Satan were originally two very different entities. Nonetheless, here we have the satanic Black Sabbath. Or do we? Bassist Geezer Butler wrote the lyrics. What did he say the song was about?

…the song was about the devil falling in love and totally changing, becoming a good person.

 Silly, you say? Time to meet a good friend of mine…

…St. Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Basil of Caesarea, who was later known as St. Basil the Great, as well as brother of Saint Peter of Sebaste, St. Naucratius, and St. Macrina the Younger. His mother was St. Emilia, and his grandmother was St. Macrina the Elder.

This was a family second only to the Holy Family. Grandma was a saint, mother was a saint, his brothers were saints, and his sister was a saint. Gregory of Nyssa was an early, and quite imposing, doctor of the church, also known as the Father of Fathers. Now, what could Gregory of Nyssa have in common with a heavy metal song by Black Sabbath? Gregory made an extraordinary statement…

A certain deception was indeed practiced upon the Evil one, by concealing the Divine nature within the human; but for the latter, as himself a deceiver, it was only a just recompense that he should be deceived himself: the great adversary must himself at last find that what has been done is just and salutary, when he also shall experience the benefit of the Incarnation. He, as well as humanity, will be purged.

(The Great Catechism, chapter XXVI). So yes, the devil himself shall be reconciled to God.

Given Gregory’s assumptions about the nature of all created beings, including angels, demons and the devil, these existing beings too must be purged of evil as God restores them to their original state of goodness – or else God himself cannot be good, and therefore cannot be God.

The second, more explicit way in which Gregory presumes the eschatological salvation of Satan is in his discussion of the incarnation and atonement in the Catechetical Oration. Gregory’s “fishhook” analogy is well known, though not particularly well liked, for its colorful imagery of God using Jesus’ humanity as the bait with which to ensnare the devil, who held humanity captive in the prison of death. Satan, enamored with the uniqueness of the miraculous person before him, gladly traded all of humanity for this extraordinary human, only to find that within the bait lay the hook of divinity. When confronted with the light of the divine, death and darkness died, robbing the devil of his power and setting in motion the process of restoration that will end with God as “all in all.”

God, who has provided healing for the sickness of humanity, must now do the same for Satan; just as a physician disguises healing medicine in something more palatable, so did God save the one who had been ruined.

So, in the end, Satan is saved through conversion...this is something that would seem to be certain…

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

(1 Colossians 1: 1-20). God will not be reconciled to evil, so all evil must be purified until none is left. If all things are reconciled to God, then Satan must be saved in the end.

Origen was certainly one of the greatest doctors of the church in history. Yet, he would find himself ostracized as a result of his comments on the salvation of Satan. A gnostic theologian named Valentinus taught that there were three kinds of people…the spiritual, who have received knowledge that allows them to return to the divine Pleroma, the psychic, which represents ordinary Christians, which can only obtain a lesser form of salvation. Those people of a material nature were doomed. In this teaching, the beginnings of the theological concept of predestination has its roots. Origen, on the other hand, championed the concept of freewill. And where there is freewill, there is the possibility of salvation. Origen had the misfortune of crossing paths with a gnostic named Candidus, who was a Valentinian. Candidus argued that the devil was beyond salvation. But Origen argued that Satan was only morally reprobate, not absolutely reprobate. Now this claim about the debate between Origen and Candidus, and the former’s statements about the possibility of salvation for the devil, was made by Demetrius, bishop of Alexandria, an irreconcilable enemy of Origen. The latter made the following statement…

Some of those persons who take pleasure in accusing their neighbors bring, against us and our teaching, the charge of blasphemy; though, from us, they have never heard anything of the kind. Let them take heed to themselves how they refuse to mark that solemn warning, which says that “Revilers shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:10), when they declare that I hold that [satan,] the father of wickedness and perdition (that is, the devil), and of those who are cast forth from the kingdom of God are to be saved—a thing which no man can say, even if he has departed from his senses and is manifestly insane.

So was Demetrius wrong about Origen’s belief in the possibility of the salvation of the devil, or did the serious damage to Origen’s credibility brought about by condemnation of this view cause him to later deny it? In either case, the concept of possible salvation for Satan was in circulation at that time. A similar concept was attributed to the Origenists named Evagrius Ponticus and Didymus the Blind.

…such a cast of characters. (Demetrius, far left; Origen, center left; Evagrius Ponticus, center right; and Didymus the Blind, far right) So, strangely, Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath is a modern echo of an ancient view about Satan’s possible salvation.

Time to meet another good friend of mine. I’m sure you know him too…

…Samael, viewed as an angel, but also as a demon. A bad guy who was good sometimes, or a good guy who was bad sometimes, a Watcher, a prosecutor, a fallen son of God who enjoyed sex with mortal women, a destroyer of sinners, the Angel of Death, consort of Lilith and the father of Cain, complicit in what happened in the Garden of Eden…he’s been so many things. Top panel, to the left…Samael as the angel who wrestled with Jacob; center and right panels…Samael as the Angel of Death. Bottom panel, left…Samael as the Grim Reaper, center and right images, Samael as the consort of Lilith…and a guy who apparently couldn’t keep his hands to himself. He was clearly linked to God, but what about…Satan? Here it gets a little complicated.

Shemot Rabbah 21:7 reinforces the view that Satan is…the satan, a title, and not a name. The context is one that is found in Job and Zechariah. In this case, the setting is Israel’s departure from Egypt. When this occurred…Samael the angel arose to prosecute them. The scene shifts to Job, where we find…the satan, just where we expect him to be…

He handed me into the hand of the accuser (the satan).

I handed Job to the accuser (the satan).

This is the altar in St. Bartholomew’s Church, Sydenham, London. Samael is the figure indicated by the star.

However, is it possible to worship Satan but not worship Satan at the same time? Can you worship what is satanic while denying that any being named Satan ever existed? You can. On April 30, 1966, the Church of Satan was founded by…

 …Anton LaVey. And he was associated with some interesting people…

 …Susan Atkins, of Manson Family fame; Jayne Mansfield; Sammie Davis Jr; and…

…Liberace, human-animal hybrids, and Marilyn Manson, although the latter isn’t too surprising. And it is remarkably unfortunate for good ole…

…Baphomet that LeVay used the inverted version as the sigil. Of course, this is not consistent with the androgenous Baphomet. though with a more maniacal look to him, though the sigil is not consistent with the pentagram on his forehead, which is not inverted. From there, a modified form of the sigil began to appear with black metal bands such as…

…Venom, a band that did manage to make it into Tipper Gore’s Filthy Fifteen. An earlier, bizarre, manifestation of Baphomet in rock music was…

…the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, employing a Baphomet-like headgear, used during the song…Fire, which begins with the singer declaring that he is the God of Hell Fire. The combination of music with bizarre performances, which would become most famous with Alice Cooper, was shared with Screaming Lord Sutch and Screaming Jay Hawkins.

Here’s a question…if Anton LaVey was travelling around California, what hotel would he stay in?

Yes…Hotel California. However, the hotel shown on the cover of the Eagles’ album is actually the Beverly Hills Hotel. But some think…

…really? I thought it was the Beverly Hills Hotel. And it is rather perplexing that Hotel California became linked to Anton LeVay and the Church of Satan. What is clear is that the accusations began to appear in the press by 1981. To cut to the chase…

The inside jacket has an image that reminds one of Sargeant Peppers by the Beatles…a collage of people that beckons one to identify who they are. As the image above shows, some have seen the face of Anton LeVay looking down from the second floor. But it seems difficult to believe that the accusations start with this, seeing that one had to work hard to find this strange image. It must have started somewhere else. Many have suggested the lyrics gave rise to the accusations. But reading the lyrics does not suggest occultic messages. A crackpot evangelist claimed that there were backwards messages in the song. I’ve discussed backward masking in several essays on this site and will not rehash it here. However, it is with Hotel California that the most ludicrous backward messages are suggested…

Yes, Satan, he organized his own religion... It was delicious... He puts it in a vat and fixes it for his son and gives it away.

Be careful about your next glass of wine. I don’t think any more needs to be said as to how stupid that is. But it seems unlikely that the accusations started there. And there were no known connections between the band and Anton LeVay. The most common explanation is that kooky people on the right believed that the Hotel California is a reference to a hotel that Anton LeVay purchased to set up the Church of Satan. To this end, some quote the following verse…

So I called up the Captain, "Please bring me my wine."
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since 1969."

Yes, the lyrics to the song are enigmatic…why do you call a Captain in a hotel to bring you your wine? However, what has been suggested is that this is referring to is…

Fundamentalist Joseph Correa, with the help of his Magic Record Player, makes a fundamental mistake, as does everyone who comments on this. The Church of Satan was founded on April 30, 1966, thus 3 years prior to 1969. Others link 1969 to the year in which LaVey published the Satanic Bible. ,But in and of itself, this is simply a coincidence…a lot of things happened in 1969. This included the publication of the book…

…The Teachings of Don Juan…written by Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist who experimented with Peyote. The connection is true…

The Eagles took their name from Carlos Castaneda, whose books were totally druggy, and so were the Eagles’ albums; the difference was that while Castaneda was steeped in psychedelics, the Eagles just did anything they could get their hands on them.

One would have to start from the Anton-LeVay-Thing to get to that conclusion. And Anton LeVay purchased a hotel in the desert for his Church? Still, it is worth noting that some suggest that the Eagles had…

…the Camarillo State Mental Hospital located in Camarillo, California, when they wrote the song. It’s most famous for being the location where the movie…The Snake Pit, was filmed. When the hospital closed in 1997, Hotel California by the Eagles was played over the loudspeakers. Rumor has it that one of the members of the Eagles was briefly confined in the asylum, and thus the song is a description of a stay in Camarillo.

Still, there is actually a Hotel California in the desert…

…located in Baja California Sur, founded in 1947. There appears to be no connection with this hotel and the song, although the hostel has the misfortune of being close to Michoacan, where drug cartels and other organized crime syndicates hold sway. An even more obscure theory holds that the…

…the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, formerly a luxury hotel, now…a dive, is the Hotel California in the song. The Cecil Hotel had an interesting past featuring deaths, at least one murder, and some bizarre people who once lived there. And I would be remiss if I didn’t note something rather interesting…

…Elisa Lam, a traveling Canadian college student, checked into the Cecil Hotel on January 28, 2010. And then she…disappeared, leaving a very bizarre incident captured by a surveillance camera in one of the elevators.

…the footage is available for viewing on the internet. It wasn’t until after guests were complaining about dark, nasty water coming out of their faucets that the…

…water tanks were checked, and her body was floating inside one of them. Interesting, seeing that she couldn’t have gotten into the tank herself, and no one could have taken Elisa up the side of the tank and put her in it. So if the Hotel California is somewhere that, upon checking out, you can never leave, then the Cecil Hotel reflects this. And how I love a good coincidence.  In 2002, a Japanese horror movie called…Dark Water…was released. The film is about a woman and young daughter who move into a seedy apartment building. And, of course, the elevator doesn’t function properly. And there is a continual leak of water coming from the apartment above. It turns out that the faucet in the apartment had been left on at the time the previous residents left, whose daughter had disappeared. Following clues that led to the water tank on the roof, the missing girl was found floating in it. In the 2005 remake, the name of the main character’s daughter is…Cecilia. The Cecilia Hotel? And an even more interesting coincidence is that at the time, there was a TB outbreak in the nearby vicinity. A medical team was sent in to perform a LAM/ELISA test.

Ok, so there was a Hotel California in Mexico. And the hotel pictured on the front of the Peyotes…sorry…the Eagles is clearly the Beverly Hills Hotel. We know there was also a Camarillo State Mental Facility. But was there a Hotel California in the U.S.? Yes, there were more than one…

The death of Edward Vreddenburg occurred in 1903. This Hotel California was located in Buffalo, New York. And his cause of death is interesting. He died of cancer, and one of the most bizarre theories about the meaning of Hotel California is that it describes the contraction of cancer.

So there was also a Hotel California in San Francisco, whose manager, Joseph Dier, died in 1933. Joseph Dier did not die at the Hotel California, but Vreddenburg did die there; well, in the New York version of it.

If the Eagles needed a painter and paperhanger, they could go to the Hotel California and consult with Mr. Simmons.

But the Fresno Hotel California received a little negative press…

No booze? Clearly Joe Walsh wouldn’t be caught dead at the Hotel California.

But there’s more…

…so there was a chambermaid-less Hotel California in San Maria, CA. What about San Bernardino?

Oakland…

and…

So Oakland, as well. As a life-long lover of coincidence, I was thrilled to discover that the name of the newspaper is the…

There’s more…

Paris, 1960. Hotel California in Paris?

Yes…Paris, France. Then there’s…

Yes, San Francisco also had the Hotel Californian. But it appears that these hotels are not relevant to the Eagles’ song.

The headquarters of the Church of Satan was called the Black House…

And yes! The Church was located in the Black House, and here comes the kicker…the address is…6114 California Street, San Francisco. I think we’re there. Satan’s at California Street, the Eagles are at the Hotel California. This is the only firm connection I have found. Noting this, one can see a message in the lyrics. The hotel in the song becomes a place from which there is no return. And this is the key…

 There she stood in the doorway, I heard the mission bell,
And I was thinkin' to myself, "This could be heaven or this could be hell."

It seems clear that both heaven and hell are two places where, once there, you can’t return. Based on the fact that the person in the song tries to escape suggests hell, not heaven. So the Hotel California is…Hell. Connect this with the Church of Satan being located on California street, add a bunch of stupidity, and now you have your connection. But I’m sure that LeVay, and the Eagles, were both confused as to how people came to their final conclusions.

As part of the founding principles of the Church of Satan, it should be noted that the church, at least in its earliest manifestation, did not believe in an actual Satan, much less worship him. But the church also didn’t believe in God…or Christ…or angels…in other words, they were atheists who did not believe in an type of spirit-beings of any kind. They also seem to be better schooled in the Bible than many Christians...

 High priest Peter Gilmore describes its members as “skeptical atheists”, indicating the Hebrew root of the word…satan…as “adversary” or “opposer”.

In an interview, High Priest Peter Gilmore stated "My real feeling is that anybody who believes in supernatural entities on some level is insane. Whether they believe in the Devil or God, they are abdicating reason." He added, "Satanism begins with atheism. We begin with the universe and say, 'It’s indifferent. There’s no God, there’s no Devil. No one cares!'”

According to Gilmore…

We do not believe in the supernatural. To the Satanist, he is his own God. Satan is a symbol of Man living as his prideful, carnal nature dictates. Some Satanists extend this symbol to encompass the evolutionary "force" of entropy that permeates all of nature and provides the drive for survival and propagation inherent in all living things. To the Satanist, Satan is not a conscious entity to be worshiped, rather it is a name for the reservoir of power inside each human to be tapped at will.

So, the Church of Satan doesn’t worship Satan and managed to get the meaning of…The Satan…correct, apparently showing greater mastery of the Old Testament than most of its detractors do. How serious did Black Sabbath take the devil? Ozzy himself passed judgment on those who thought the band were satanists…

I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually 'practiced the occult.' These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, 'Look, mate, the only evil spirits that I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka, and gin.'"

Ah, the wisdom of Ossie Osbourne! Geezer Butler…

"One night, after finishing a show, we returned to the hotel and found the corridor leading to our rooms completely filled with people wearing black cloaks, sitting on the floor with candles in their hands, chanting, 'Ahhhhh.' So we climbed over them to get to our rooms, but we could still hear them chanting...so we synchronized our watches, opened our doors at the same time, blew out the candles and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to them.

People like to find the negative in everything. We weren’t interested in writing songs about the 'nice' things in the world - everyone else was writing about that. We wanted to inject some reality into music. If we’d been called White Sunday, we’d have had a totally different reaction! We all believe in God."

And the whole thing gets even stranger. The 1980s were the time of the Satanic Panic, which wormed its way into almost everything. One of the initial drivers of the Satanic Panic was a ridiculous book that has long since been debunked…

…Michelle Remembers…a most forgettable paperback book, published in 1980, telling a fake story,  and written by…

…Canadian Psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his wife, Michelle Smith Pazder. Michelle Smith claimed that she couldn’t remember what had happened to her as a child. Pazder used the discredited type of psychotherapy called…Recovered-memory therapy. This led to the subsequent phenomenon called…Satanic Ritual Abuse, which produced over 12,000 people claiming that they had suffered what Michelle suffered. In the book, Michelle and Lawrence claimed that Michelle endured horrible ritual abuse by a satanic cult that included her mother. This type of hysteria related to claims of disturbing religious events included cannibalism, child sacrifice, torture, and incestuous orgies. These accusations were also commonly made against Jewish communities. In 1144…

…the dead body of 12-year-old boy William was found in Norwich. Accusations against Jews included torture, stabbing, and nailing to a cross to mock the suffering of Christ. This accusation arose again in…

…in 1255, when the dead body of Little Hugh of Lincoln was found…

A great number of Christians assembled at Lincoln, and then they appointed a Jew of Lincoln judge, to take the place of Pilate, by whose sentence, and with the concurrence of all, the boy was subjected to various tortures. They scourged him till the blood flowed, they crowned him with thorns, mocked him, and spat upon him; each of them also pierced him with a knife, and they made him drink gall, and scoffed at him with blasphemous insults, and kept gnashing their teeth and calling him Jesus, the false prophet. And after tormenting him in diverse ways they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a spear. When the boy was dead, they took the body down from the cross, and for some reason disemboweled it; it is said for the purpose of their magic arts.

In 1475, the dead body of the Christian child…

…Simon of Trent, which again set off attacks against the Jewish population. The accusation was that Simon was murdered by Jews who used his blood as an ingredient in the Passover matzot as well as using it for red wine. This notion of the…blood libel…was later used by the Nazis…

 …particularly by Julius Streicher, a rabid anti semitic Nazi who was responsible for Nazi propaganda in the newspaper…Der Sturmer. And we all know about the persecution of the Jews unleashed by Streicher and Hitler. A more modern use of false accusations to provoke a mass reactions stems from Joseph McCarthy. The term McCarthyism had been defined as…

 1. The political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence; and 2. The use of methods of investigation and accusation regarded as unfair, in order to suppress opposition.

So it is certainly the case that false accusation have been used to manipulate people. They convince others that false claims are actually the truth, with the end result being persecution.

Michelle Smith’s claims about abuse had been brought to light using Recovered-memory therapy, hearkens back to…

…Sybil, published in 1973, in which Shirely Mason directs the  never-happened-abuse accusations at the mother.

Shirley Mason, the real Sybil, grew up in the Midwest in a strict Seventh-day Adventist family. As a young woman she was emotionally unstable, and she decided to seek psychiatric help. Mason became unusually attached to her psychiatrist, Dr. Connie Wilbur, and she knew that Wilbur had a special interest in multiple personality disorder.

Wilbur believed that she had stumbled on a remarkable case. She began seeing Mason frequently and eventually teamed up with the writer Flora Rheta Schreiber to work on a book about her patient. 

Mason became increasingly dependent on Wilbur for emotional and even financial support. She was eager to give her psychiatrist what she wanted.

Reading through Schreiber's papers, it becomes obvious that the writer knew that Mason's story was not entirely true. But she already had a contract and she already had a deadline. She was in the middle of writing the book. So she had the dilemma all journalists have nightmares about — what if my thesis turns out to be wrong as I do my research but it's too late?

And then, the bomb dropped…

 At one point, Mason tried to set things straight. She wrote a letter to Wilbur admitting that she had been lying: "I do not really have any multiple personalities," she wrote. "I do not even have a 'double.' I am all of them. I have been lying in my pretense of them." 

 Ouch! There it is. But…

 The book succeeded beyond anyone's expectations — it sold some 6 million copies around the world, and in 1976, it was made into a television movie starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward.

Yes, 6 million examples of something that was a complete and total fraud. And millions of people blindly believed a preposterous and clearly fake story simply because they read it in Schreiber’s paperback book. And she knew it was fraud. But, money was involved. The book was published in 1973, and, or so I think, helped set the foundation for the Satanic Panic that would begin in 1980, although Satan and possession are not themes in the book. But the element of terrible abuse of children would become a staple of the storm that was to come. And there was a sequence of events that happened, beginning in 1972, that would help push the whole Nation-Wide Cultural Satan scare into motion. My least-favorite favorite pope…

Yes Paul VI, hoping to distract the Catholic world from his disastrous promulgation that overturned the vote that would have removed the use of contraception from the List-of-Naughty Things, said the following…

We would say that, through some mysterious crack—no, it’s not mysterious; through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God. There is doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, dissatisfaction, confrontation.

So what happened? Since 1963, the Catholic Church had been debating whether or not to remove the prohibition against birth control. Pope John XXIII had set up a commission of six churchmen to decide how the issue could be resolved. When John died, Pope Paul VI took over. He tried to uphold the ban on birth control by expanding the size of the commission to 72 people, of which 69 voted. The result? 64 of 69 members voted to recognize the validity of birth control. But the matter wasn’t decided. Paul simply chose to ignore the whole thing. This was an unfortunate decision, since it created a large rift between Rome and much of the Catholic world…something that Paul would not accept stoically. As the problem became worse over the years, Paul gave his Smoke of Satan speech in 1972. Another event that happened in 1973 was…

…the Supreme Court voted to make all abortions legal throughout the U.S. It followed on the heels of…

…the much anticipated amendement to the Constitution known as the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was approved by the House of Representatives on October 12, 1972, and the Senate on March 22, 1973. It also had the support of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. However, it stalled after Phyllis Schlafley mobilized support to oppose the proposed amendement to the Constitution, and it was eventually dropped. Still, the ERA certainly added to the Cauldron-of-Things –That-Scared-Evangelicals, despite its defeat.

What can be said about Norma McCorvey, whose unfortunate plight became a political crusade ending in the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to abortion in the United States?

In a new documentary, AKA Jane Roe, premiering Friday on FX, which was filmed at her nursing home the year before her death, an ailing McCorvey comes out with a self-described shocking “deathbed confession”: The whole thing was a lie, one that the Evangelical movement apparently paid her hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in. “I was the big fish” to them, she says dispassionately, breathing through an oxygen tube. “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money, and they put me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say.” At the end of her life, she remains privately pro-choice: “If a woman wants to have an abortion, it’s no skin off my ass.”

No skin off my ass? And yes, it was based on a tremendous act of fraud. But McCorvey’s fraud didn’t end there. It’s sad that such an important issue became a butt of Norma’s jokes. Then something happened…

In the mid-1990s, McCorvey had made a public religious and political conversion. She was baptized on television in a backyard swimming pool; she wore overalls and came out beaming. She declared herself newly pro-life and spent the last two decades of her life crusading against the ruling her own case had made possible.

She even said…

The playgrounds are all empty, and it’s because of me. 

Speaking of her role in the pro-life movement…

I took their money and they put me out in front of the camera and told me what to say, and that’s what I’d say.

For Jane Roe, it all came down to the highest bidder. In 1971, William Peter Blatty’s novel…

…The Exorcist…was published. The story is that of a young girl who’s supposedly possessed. At first, she attempted to get everyone to believe that she was possessed by the Devil. But Father Karras tricked Regan into a situation where the Devil was not involved. For the rest of the story, Regan shifted to claiming that she was possessed by a group of unnamed entities, suggesting the Biblical account of Christ encountering…Legion…for we are many. However, Legion is never named in the film. But it was the movie that turned The Exorcist into a cultural icon…

Controversy was evitable, but the beginning may lie in the fact that the movie was set to hit theaters on December 25th. Someone caught this problematic date, and changed in December 26th.The crowds waiting see the movie were completely unexpected…

THAT New York phenomenon, the long-long-long-long-long movie line, was carried to new lengths in recent weeks after William Friedkin's Christmas offering, “The Exorcist,” opened on Dec. 26 at Cinema I. This time, people stood like sheep in the rain, cold and sleet for up to four hours to see the chilling film about a 12‐year‐old girl going to the devil.

They lit bonfires at their waiting post on Second Avenue, between 59th and 60th Streets, to keep warm, littered the streets with food wrappings, got into fist fights, and annoyed shop owners and apartment dwellers who didn't like their entry‐ways blocked by a great wall of humans. Once, on a Friday night, they even stormed Cinema I when It looked as though they weren't going to make it inside after a four‐hour wait.

“It was like a riot,” said Ralph Bailey, one of six night‐time uniformed security guards at the theater. “We had to cancel the showing.” Mr. Bailey, by the way, said he had been offered bribes as high as $110 to let people jump to the head of the line, while scalpers were getting only $50 for a pair of tickets.

 $100 in 1973 is worth approximately $781.15 today. That’s an expensive movie ticket. Reaction to the film was intense…

It's been reported that once inside the theater, a number of moviegoers vomited at the very graphic goings‐on on the screen. Others fainted, or left the theater, nauseous and trembling, before the film was half over. Several people had heart attacks. One woman even had a miscarriage, he said.

At the Savoy Theater in Boston, “People were running up the aisles and into the lobby, some of them making it out to the street before vomiting, while others did it en route.”

“I couldn’t imagine people being affected like that. I just stood around and watched the crowd; that was a movie in itself,” Tom Kauycheck, the manager of the theater chain, said.

“Ticket-holders waiting in line for the next performance would see the distressed faces of those leaving and pump themselves into a frenzy even before the lights went down.”

Some theaters even had ambulances parked outside ready to attend to overstimulated guests.

A figure lays prone on a theatre lobby couch. Two friends huddle together, one firmly asserting, “I’m not going back in there.” A man stutters through a response and shakes his head, seemingly at a loss for words. When it was released in theatres, The Exorcist affected audiences in ways no one could have imagined.

I have a running essay series on The Exorcist and see no need to go into here. The main point is that the popular view of the movie seems to imply that the forces of Satan are real, ever-present, and attack even the youngest victims. Still, the only two entities in the movie are Pazuzu, and St. Joseph. All of these cultural developments helped create the powder keg that would need only match to set off. But to speak for a final time about Michelle Remembers, it is definitely cool that Michelle, who saw Satan several times, gave us some sooper-dooper drawings of what the Prince of Darkness, or his minions, looks like…

…Darla told me that she could draw a better Devil than Michelle could. I must admit that I still see these haunting images of Satan in my nightmares, though I never knew that the Devil was an anteater with scales. Do we have a problem getting things right?

…the pentagram should be inverted…oops. And one of the most ridiculous claims was that, after someone commented on the lack of scarring on her body, Michelle claimed that the Virgin Mary conveniently appeared to her and removed the scars. Pazder used elements that appear in bizarre and dangerous West African cult societies…

I could find no corroborating evidence in M. Smith and Pazder (1980) for the reality of Michelle’s remembrances. If for no other reason, skepticism appears warranted by the fact that some of these “memories” involve Michelle’s encounters with supernatural beings. In fact, both of Michelle’s two sisters (who are never mentioned in the book) and her father have denied all of her allegations (Grescoe, 1980). Interestingly, Pazder had practiced medicine in West Africa in the early 1960s, where he developed an interest in ceremonial magic and acquired an extensive collection of photographs of such ceremonies. During this period, there was widespread concern in Africa over secret societies and their supposed practices of cannibalism and blood sacrifice (Parrinder, 1963; Scobie, 1965). Although Pazder denied that his African experiences influenced Michelle’s remembrances, the satanic cult described by Michelle shares numerous similarities with the African “leopard societies” referred to by Pazder (Jenkins & Maier-Katkin, 1991).

There was a group called the Leopard Society in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast who dressed up in leopard skins and attacked passersby, killing them and supposedly eat their flesh.

Don’t forget to lock your doors!

Yes, Darla, I will show them your drawing…of Satan…

…not bad, huh? In the original version of the book, the satanic abusers of poor Michelle were…and let’s immediately go to the most obvious choice…

The reader is invited upon an extraordinary journey, into the memory and soul of a woman who. as a child, was delivered into the hands of the Antichrist — the ancient and infamous Church of Satan. Much more than a thrilling case of psychiatric detection, this is a true epic of human survival that has impressed religious leaders on the highest level.

Needless to say, the Church of Satan took offense at this accusation, and threatened to sue for libel. Their name was subsequently removed from the book, and other bad guys were created. You’re in an odd situation when the Church of Satan, as far as you are concerned, has the moral high ground. To show how crazy things got, the group calling itself the Temple of Set, which was spun-off from the Church of Satan in 1975, was accused of practicing satanism. In fact, they practice Setianism…close but no cigar. Complaints about the Church reached the FBI on at least two occasions. Both investigations were closed due to the lack of any wrong done by what is ultimately a crank organization, although the FBI did state that the Church owned a spooky-looking house.

We have heard it said many times that liquor is the Devil’s Drink. That, however, is not true. As it turns out, his favorite drink is coffee, specifically…

…Folger’s Coffee. That might seem like a strange thing to say. But I assure you, it’s not, for the simple fact that the company who made it…Proctor & Gamble…was a satanic organization. Well, they weren’t at first. The monthly newsletter, called Potpourri, printed for a nursing home in Gaylord, Minnesota, printed a strange assertion…Proctor & Gamble was purchased and run by the…

The Unification Church, originally a South Korean sect, led by Sun Myung Moon. And notice the center photo…someone just came back from Burger King. One of the most memorable aspects of the sect was their enormous wedding ceremonies. The silliness in the newsletter of a nursing home somehow caught on. Why?

Yes, the hundred-year-old icon of the Proctor & Gamble Corporation. The logo evolved over time…

The accusations surfaced in 1979.

And…

Another example…

Sorry I made that so large, but the copy isn’t the best, and I wanted to make it readable.

There is very little similarity between the P&G logo and that of the Unification Church…

Ok…there is no similarity whatsoever, and the symbol for the Unification Church doesn’t even have a moon in it…it has sun and a heart. And this rumor disappeared almost as fast as it arrived. However, the rumors about Proctor & Gamble took a new, and much malevolent turn…

There we are…a commercial logo went from indicating ownership of the Unification Church to being a symbol of Satan.

Once you start a rumor this is what inevitably happens. The Matamoros murders? This may be a reference to the murder of an American college student named Mark Kilroy while on spring break in Mexico. He was kidnapped and murdered by a cult led by Adolfo Constanzo and Sara Aldrete. This cult was based on human sacrifice, and Mexican authorities proved that 16 people had been killed by it, although they suspected a total of 26. The cult was widely believed to be a satanic cult aligned with members of the drug cartels. How you could connect Proctor & Gamble to the activities of this cult is beyond me. But, in the next installment, I will discuss Pat Pulling of B.A.D.D fame. She too, discussing the occult and the dangers of Dungeons and Dragons, referenced the Matamoros cult.

The rumors became even crazier when my old friends…The Peters brothers, got involved. They were the most stand-out evangelicals who denounced rock music and held record-burnings. What does P&G have in common with Led Zeppelin? I have no idea…maybe the members of the band used Ivory soap.

I was over the moon when I found a copy of one of these flyers. I will show it large enough to read…

This flyer, and different yet similar versions of it, were distributed by putting it people’s mailboxes, but also in churches. And I was unaware that Clearasil Mouthwash existed, or that Scope mouthwash and Crest toothpaste treated acne. Unfortunately, Liz Claibourne became a target of these claims. However, she had never been on the Oprah Winfrey show, and many regard this to be one of the earliest internet hoaxes. And I would point out that P&G isn’t the first to be a target of such a rumor…

In the late 1970s, McDonald’s officials faced a public-relations nightmare over a silly rumour that was too ludicrous to be believed. Yet, many customers bought it.

According to the outrageous gossip, Ronald McDonald was in league with the devil.

Officials chuckled when the first letter arrived at corporate headquarters in Illinois. An Ohio woman wanted to know if it was true that company owner Ray Kroc donated 20 per cent of the fast-food chain’s profits to the Church of Satan in California.

It’s odd how these claims seem to revolve around where a company’s profits are going, and ground zero always seems to be churches. The Rev. John McFarland of the Kenmore Church of God said the following in the church newsletter called…Moments of Sunshine…

“Every time you and I have eaten at McDonald’s, we have unknowingly been financially supporting the worship of Satan and the promotion of his cause. Just the thought of it makes me feel sick inside. I don’t think I can ever eat at another McDonald’s under those conditions.”

McFarland later retracted his statement. Perhaps…Moments of Fales Rumors…would be a better name for the church bulletin. And what about McDonald’s golden arches?

When McDonald’s was thinking about doing away with the arches in the 1960s they hired consultant and psychologist Louis Cheskin. Cheskin wisely instructed the chain to keep the arches, for a very interesting reason:

He argued against completely eliminating the golden arches, claiming they had a great Freudian importance in the subconscious mind of consumers. According to Cheskin, the golden arches resembled a pair of large breasts: Mother McDonald’s breasts.” It made little sense to lose the appeal of that universal, and yet somehow all-American, symbolism. The company followed Cheskin’s advice and retained the golden arches, using them to form the M in McDonald’s.

A particularly disturbing claim was made about the CEO of P&G…

He said that as long as gays and other cults have come out of the closet, he was doing the same. He said that he had told Satan that if he (Satan) would help him prosper that he would give his heart and soul to him when he died. He gives Satan the credit for his riches.

 Jim Peters? He admitted that he had been spreading the rumor that the P&G icon was Satanic. And he did it in a ridiculously stupid way that he always did. Initially, he claimed that he saw the symbol in a book called…Amulets and Superstitions…written by E.A. Wallis Budge, and that it was the sign of a coven of witches in the 13th century. Others checked this book and did not find the symbol. I have checked the book, and there is no such symbol in it with the remotest similarity to the P&G emblem. Peters’ mistake was being too specific referring to a supposed source for his lies, so he changed it. He claimed that he saw the sign in a book he read in the University of Minnesota Library. What book? Well, he couldn’t remember. He then referenced seeing a similar crescent moon image on the door of the Gnostica Book Store, located in St. Paul. The bookstore catered to customers looking for books on astrology, magic, witchcraft, and graphology…

The book store was owned by Carl Weschcke of Llewellyn Publications. Peters accused him of being the number two in command of white witchcraft after Sybil Leek. The latter was a kooky woman who wrote a plethora of books about how to be a witch, and she was nothing more than a harmless crank. Weschcke said that the symbol, a plain crescent moon against a rectangular backdrop, had been in use by the publication company since 1904. 

It was chosen as Lewellyn’s symbol because the company publishes…The Moon Sign Book…an annual almanac that deals with agriculture and astrology- planting and harvesting by the moon.

And what about a quarter moon with the face?

All these satanic moons! This motif has always been popular and always will be. However, I did find one that is rather similar to the P&G emblem…

So just how nutty can this get?

Piles of leaflets appeared elsewhere around Clymer, including Hairworks beauty salon and a nearby coal mine. A customer of Tate’s supermarket demanded his money back on a can of P&G’s Folgers Coffee and refused to drink the “devil’s brew.

A coal mine? Well, coal miners do get rather dirty, so they may have been debating whether to keep using Ivory soap or not. However, they were also found taped to the walls of public restrooms, tacked to telephone poles, and pasted on the walls of subways, and supermarkets. But we’re not done yet. Rev. Nicholas Trongo of St. Anthony’s church said something mindboggling…

I wouldn’t give a sermon defending P&G. I might be trapped. You can’t rule out a connection between the company and Satanism. Father Trongo theorizes that the company could be using the rumors as a  tax write-off or a publicity gimmick.

That’s right, he’s blaming P&G for the rumors! I was not aware that satanism could be deducted from your taxes. And clearly, it’s not just sappy protestants who fell into the P&G trap. So too did…Sister Domitilla Drobnak, principle at St. Anthony’s Elementary school in Clymer…

Not much needs to said about anyone from P&G showing up on a talk-show and making ridiculous statements about the company and Satan. Merv Griffin and Phil Donahue made it clear that no one from the company had appeared on their programs. P&G made it clear that they would sue anyone identified as spreading the rumors and did sue several people before the rumors abated, And yes…our go-to guys…the Church of Satan, although for all I know they may have used Tide laundry detergent.

In 1982, P&G filed lawsuites against six people, and the people involved make it clear that, for some at any rate, the motives of push the rumor was financial. But it would be believable unless some cleric was involved, even if he’s an armchair cleric…

…yes! Guy Sharpe, weatherman and Methodist lay preacher. According to P&G, on June 18,1982, Sharpe told his church to boycott Proctor & Gamble because of the compan’s satanism, and urged members to discard any products they had in their homes. Initially, he denied the allegation. But by the summer of 1982, he reached a deal with P&G according to which Guy apologized for his statements, and the company dropped the lawsuit. Perhaps he should be named…Guy Dull.

Another person sued by P&G was Mike Campbell of Doraville, GA. He worked for Raley Brothers, an Atlanta company that represents some manufacturers of household cleaning products. William and Linda Moore of Pensacola, Florida, were distributors for Amway Corp, which sold products door-to-door, products that were competing with those of P&G. So too Sherman and Margaret McCord of Tullahoma, Tennessee, who sold goods for Shaklee Corporation, another competitor. Finally, a lawsuit was brought against Elma Ed Pruitt of Clovis, New Mexico, and Margaret and Sherman McCord, who were also distributors of Amway Corp.

Despite the lawsuits, the libel just kept going. As did ignorance, evident in this article dated 1985…

Thus sayeth Millie.

Oh, dear! They look so much alike! And it is interesting to see the intensification of the rumored connection between P&G and the Church of Satan. The…president of the Church of Satan, presumably a reference to Anton LeVay, gives the company orders to put the…wrong…symbol on Oil of Olay.

Sadly, P&G took a desperate step to bring the rumors to an end…

Earlier, a nursing home started rumors, then churchs, and, most importantly, employees of other companies who competed with P&G. We’re missing something, but not for long…

…of course, a trailer park. How did this get printed?

Cheney said that one of the 140 residents of the mobile home park dropped the story, reprinted from a church bulletin in Washington, in his mailbox, and he decided to print it as a joke.

And we all know that great reporters come from trailer parks. And this battle between P&G and the trailer parkers heated up in 1985. And what a clever name for a trailer park newspaper…Park News. And Mr. Cheney added one more comment…

 I’d even go down to the store and buy an extra tube of toothpaste. I still have my teeth.

A resident of a trailer park that still has his teeth? Remarkable. By 1987, P&G had spent $100 million dollars on public relations in the effort to end the rumors. And in 1988, the company said that…

About 6% of the American consuming public either believed or circulated the false story.

Still, P&G’s lawsuits first came to a head in 1991…

And look at the employment of James and Linda Newton…there’s the name of Amway coming up again. But surely the rumors wound down after this…or did they?

Army chaplain? When did the Army get involved? And I never knew that Satan had such a toilet paper fetish. Since we’re talking about the Army, here’s a little collateral damage in 1992…

Guilt by association! Previously, the head of P&G appeared on the Phil Donahue show to admit to being a satanist. But now! Phil Donahue and Proctor & Gamble have sold their souls to the devil. And believe it or not, the whole thing reappeared in 1993, with one source of libel being clear…

Yes, ground zero was a church…imagine that. But, Sault is located in Ontario, Canada. And I found another from 1994!

Back to where the problem began…

Surely people have become too sophisticated to buy into the P&G and Satan rumor. Not in 1999 they weren’t…

I stand corrected. Sophisticated enough to use the latest technology to do something remarkably unsophisticated.

Sorry for being picky, but 666 is the number of the beast, not Satan.

Eventually, voice mails were being left urging what the people behind the persistent rumor had been seeking all along…boycott P&G. And who was a big part of the whole thing?

Of course…

Amway Corporation, founded in 1959, has the unenviable task of competing with P&G. The latter knew that some of the key players in the rumor about P&G and satanism were Amway distributors.

American culture is a fascinating one, in both good ways, and bad ways. But so too is religion. It is a force for good in the world, but has also, unfortunately, often times been an excuse for carrying out terrible deeds. And American Protestantism, in particular, has shown itself open to manipulation by less than noble people. The word…Evangelical…is terribly misused in America today. The word refers to the act of bringing the gospel message to people who haven’t heard it. Now, the term is used in a political way, almost devoid of any meaning that it held in the days when it was used correctly. It is an expression of fear, fear of the people around you. And who needs to change? Does anyone need to change? Most people define themselves by what they are against, not what they are for. This is a position that demands the those around you must change, if they don’t, then you will live with the fear that you can at any time adopt the different ways of the those around you. There is what you are, but there is also what you think you should be, and many people put considerable effort to convince people they are what they aren’t. If others believe that you are who you say you are, then you can believe it yourself. But you don’t, and yet again and again the old voice begins condemning you. You can surround yourself with people who claim to be what you are. That offers a momentary bit of relief. But you are well aware that it hasn’t changed anything. Fear is ultimately an expression of weakness, at least in this context. Socrates once said that justice is people minding their own business and not being busybodies. It takes a lot of courage to define yourself by what you’re for, and not what you’re against. And if you see the lights of the Hotel California ahead, perhaps you should just drive by without stopping for the night, or you may just find yourself wondering which side of the line you’re standing on.