Moral Panic, Anyone?

The case of the West Memphis Three may have happened nineteen years ago, but as this latest bizarre story shows the the media is still going completely crazy over any crime that appears to involve occultism. According to initial reports, two young women got together with a man they met over the Internet, then tortured and stabbed him to death in a Satanic sexual ritual. No, wait, actually there was no murder, the supposed "ritual" involved no occult or Satanic components, the stabbing was apparently consensual cutting that got out of hand, and the man is not pressing charges. Wow. That went from "batshit insane" to "poorly executed BDSM scene without safewords" in about two seconds. But of course the news media outlets prefer the former fabricated account.

While at the apartment building, police were approached by Rebecca Chandler, 22, who stated, “I think you are here looking for me.” Chandler told cops that she had engaged in sexual relations with the Arizona man “and that the cutting was consensual but that it got quickly out of hand.”

Chandler claimed that her roommate--whom she identified only as “Scarlett”--was “the one who did the majority of the cutting” during the incident. Chandler, police reported, “also made reference to ‘Scarlett’ possibly being involved in satanic or occult activities.”

Chandler was placed in custody at the scene. During a subsequent search of the apartment, investigators seized copies of "The Necromantic Ritual Book” and "The Werewolf’s Guide to Life,” a humor book. The former book promises to enable a reader to “share consiousness with the Angel of Death.” Paperwork seized from the home was described by police as the “7 Pentacles” of planets. Additionally, a black folder was described as an “Intro to Sigilborne Spirtits,” an apparent reference to “The Sigil-Born,” metaphysical entities that are “occultic practitioners” of necromancy, the purported ability to contact the dead.

As an aside, in the Thoth Tarot the Seven of Disks is titled "Failure," which in this case seems about right.

"Bad Magick" Case Falling Apart?

This could be a bad sign for prosecutors in North Carolina. The charges against Diana Palmer, the third person charged in the "Satanic cult" case involving Joy Johnson and Joseph Craig, were dropped today.

Police said Palmer knew about assaults alleged to have occurred in a residence on Albany Street in Durham and said she helped Joseph Scott Craig remove evidence from the house.

...

Prosecutors asked Thursday for a continuance in Palmer's case, but defense attorney Bill Thomas objected, saying the case had dragged on for more than six months.

District Judge Nancy Gordon denied the continuance, effectively dismissing the case.

Palmer was only charged as an accessory and Johnson and Craig have yet to go to trial, but it remains to be seen whether this dismissal is simply a sign that Palmer was not involved or an indication that the entire case has serious problems.

Bad Magick Update

Just when I thought that the strange case of Joseph Craig and Joy Johnson, charged with sexual assault in connection with an alleged "Satanic cult" in North Carolina had slipped away into the shadows never to be heard from again, I came across an update on the case. I pointed out in a previous article that as far as I can tell, neither Craig nor Johnson were affiliated with any genuine Satanic group or magical order, and I wondered if the court had just decided to quietly drop the case after the cult allegations failed to hold up to even cursory scrutiny.

It seems that Craig did claim to study magick, though his involvement in this situation suggests he was a really, really bad magician. Not bad as in tough, bad as in ignorant and probably incompetent. I'll say it again - reading a few books won't teach you magick, no matter how interested you happen to be in the subject. And in my experience, nothing like these allegations would ever arise in the life of a serious and competent magical practitioner.

According to the article much of the "cult" hysteria seems to have been dropped from the case, which is a good thing because frankly the earlier allegations along those lines were completely unbelievable. More to the point, it doesn't make any difference to the court whether or not you're performing some kind of ritual when you rape someone. If you don't have consent, it's rape and you're guilty. End of story. The case now seems to hinge on this question of consent, which is exactly where the focus of the trial should be.

As I suspected, this appears to be a BDSM situation that got out of hand, and Craig and Johnson's guilt will be determined based on whether or not they transgressed the agreed-upon boundaries of the scenes in which they participated. I'll continue to follow the case and keep you posted.

Bad Magick Revisited

As more information is becoming available regarding the "Satanic Cult" case in North Carolina the whole thing is starting to look more and more fishy. To recap:

Joseph Scott Craig, 25, and his wife, Joy Johnson, 30, were arrested last month after a man and a woman told authorities they were beaten, shackled to beds, kept in dog cages and starved.

According to the couple's defense attorney, the victims could have left at any time and were not prevented from doing so, implying that whatever went on was consensual. Also in the article, a "cult" organization is finally named - "The Order of the Morning Star." No order of that exact name maintains a web site and the only references to it are in articles about the case. It might be a case of prosecuters garbling "Hermetic Order of the Morning Star" and if that's the case the organization is part of the Golden Dawn tradition and has nothing whatsoever to do with Satanism. Then again, this is North Carolina.

A second Durham County Democratic Party official has been arrested in relation to the case, which raises the specter of possible political persecution on the part of law enforcement.

Diana Palmer, 44, of Cottage Woods Court, surrendered to police Wednesday afternoon. She was charged with being an accessory after the fact of assault with a deadly weapon and was being held in the Durham County Jail.

Palmer denies knowledge of any cult or illegal activity. It seems awfully convenient that both women happened to be involved in a Democratic Party that may finally be within striking distance of winning North Carolina in the upcoming presidential election. Also in the article, a representative of the actual Church of Satan issued a statement that the original couple charged were not members and that the Church does not sanction any sort of sexual abuse.

Also, am I the only one who finds this suspicious?

Prosecutors say both victims are originally from out of state and have since left North Carolina. The District Attorney's Office says that so far, it hasn't been able to contact them and that the contact information is with an investigator who is on vacation for the next two weeks.

From the same article, we find that:

The male victim went to live with the couple in November 2007, the female victim a month later.

So the victims and the accused were housemates. Maybe this whole thing doesn't have anything to do with BDSM or Satanism or magick, but some sort of bad roommate situation. If that is the case, the lurid allegations could be yet another instance of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" that never actually occurred.

Even more sinister, could this be some sort of a setup in the ongoing battle between the various Golden Dawn lineages? (1) We would have to start out assuming that the couple were involved with the Hermetic Order of the Morning Star, part of the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn, rather than some made-up organization consisting of the people involved in the case. (2) EOGD has been the target of numerous attacks on various online lists, especially from David Griffin's Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. To be fair to Griffin, his group has also been targeted so perhaps some third party might be involved. It seems unlikely that anyone would go to such great lengths to discredit a rival magical order and a bit paranoid to even float the suggestion, but stranger things have happened in the magical community.

I'll keep following the case and post any new revelations that arise during the trial, but at this point the line between prosecution and persecution in this case is starting to look awfully thin.

Some Seriously Bad Magick

A North Carolina couple have been charged with kidnapping, rape and assault in connection with their involvement in a supposed Satanic cult. I'm flashing back on the late 1980's when "Satanic Ritual Abuse" first appeared. People initially took it seriously, but it later turned out that most of the allegations of abuse had been fabricated by therapists who used hypnosis to create false memories. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

What does strike me as strange about the case is the "Satanic cult" angle. No "cult" organization is named by the investigators. Neither the husband nor the wife appear to have been members of the Church of Satan or Temple of Set, the only two organizations of any size that to my way of thinking could be considered "Satanic" in the usual vernacular. In fact, the only statement in the article related to Satanism is this:

Prosecutors said a man and a woman met [the husband] through a shared interest in Satan worship, but the pair never consented to physical abuse.

This sounds to me like the "cult" was essentially limited to the four people involved in the case, but of course it's more sensational from the point of view of the media to imply that some sort of larger group was involved. Since this is a statement from the prosecution, not the victims themselves, it's also hard to say whether "magical" and "Satanic" are being confused. This wouldn't be the first time law enforcement has done that.

According to the husband's web site he is "a devout student of magick." Well, if this is his idea of a magical ritual, he's not devout enough.

[the husband] shackled his victims to beds, kept them in dog cages and starved them inside his Albany Street home, prosecutors said. He was charged with beating the man with a cane and a cord and with raping the woman.

Where to begin... no statement of intent, no ritual forms, tools consisting of a cane and an electrical cord? I seriously want to know who this idiot studied with so I can avoid their other students. Or is he just a BDSM enthusiast who thinks talking about magick makes him "edgy?"

Because that's really what this case sounds like - a BDSM situation gone very, very bad. I have no problem with safe, sane, and consensual BDSM, but if the victims were pushed past agreed-upon boundaries the charges are more than justified. I just don't see where Satanism or magick figures into it, aside from helping the media sell more newspapers.