Satanist Granted Religious Exemption

A high school student who is a member of The Satanic Temple has been granted a religious exemption at a Colorado school. The exemption allows them to opt out of a digital hall pass system that the student believes violates the right to bodily autonomy, a key Satanist principle.

The parents of the Elizabeth High School student had requested that she be exempted from the system, but their request was initially denied, according to TST. That’s when the Temple’s lawyers stepped in.

“This was a cut-and-dry case of a TST member’s bodily autonomy being violated by invasive digital controls,” says Eliphaz Costus, campaign director of the Temple’s Protect Children Project.

Using the digital hall pass system to monitor and restrict the time students spend in the restroom apparently goes against TST’s third tenet, which states, “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.”

The student will now be able to use physical hall passes to access the restroom at any time and for any duration, according to the school district.

Exemption from a digital hall pass system may at first seem trivial, but the significance is that the religious exemption was granted to a non-Christian student. As I have written here many times, the cost of religious freedom is that it must be extended to all religions or to none of them.

Since Christians keep pushing for these exemptions all the time, it is clear that these days "none of them" is no longer an option. So "all of them" it has to be.

The Cabal is Not Shadowy

Over and over again, I keep hearing online conspiracy theorists go on about the "shadowy cabal" of "satanists" who run the world. Some people go so far as to think they are literally shape-shifting lizards. Others insist that they're magicians, occultists, or pagans. In all these cases, though, they're secret. Nobody knows who their members are, and constant speculation goes back and forth over who might or might not be a member.

If you're one of these people wondering about the truth, do I have news for you! It is no mystery whatsoever who these people are, at least in the United Stats. As a matter of fact, a list of them is published every year. It's called the Forbes 400. Don't believe me? You should. Billionaires run nearly every aspect of the modern world, especially in the United States.

Being a billionaire is not just being rich. I'm willing to bet that hardly anybody reading this has an accurate sense of how much money a billion dollars actually is. People seem to feel like a billionaire is somebody a fair amount richer than a millionaire. But a millionaire is a thousand times closer to being entirely destitute than they are to being a billionaire. The real difference in scale is staggering.

A million dollars is a sum that a lot of people will wind up earning over the course of their careers. If you work for 40 years and average $25,000 per year you will earn a million dollars. You'll need to spend most of it on expenses, of course, and won't have anywhere near that amount in savings. But a billion dollars? You would have to make 25 million dollars per year over that same span to earn a billion.

AI Devil Worshippers?

There are lots of reasons to hate AI. As a writer, it really bothers me that large language models were trained on content for which their creators received no credit or royalties of any kind. AI could have been built ethically, but it wasn't. An ethical version of exactly what we see today could have been built with (A) opt-in for writers and/or artists submitting content and (B) royalty payments to those writers/artists based on the percentage of their work AI compositions include. There are no technical barriers to creating that sort of system, but AI companies decided that they would rather just steal from creators.

I recently came across a reason for hating AI, though, that never occurred to me. Apparently the Roman Catholic Church is running an "exorcism training course" that teaches, among other things, that AI can be used for "devil worship."

Father Luis Ramirez Almanza is running an exorcism training course in Rome in May, and he’s giving it a very 2026 theme. He wants clergy and faith leaders thinking about artificial intelligence as a tool that can be used in spiritual warfare. It’s not limited to Catholic clergy, either. Reporting says he’s inviting rabbis, imams, and evangelical pastors to attend, basically pitching a rare interfaith training built around a shared enemy.

The first weird thing about this is that "devil worship" - that is, the theistic worship of a literal devil - is incredibly rare. It is a practice that is disavowed by even the vast majority of people who identify as Satanists, such as members of The Satanic Temple and Church of Satan. Outside those two groups there are barely any Satanists in the world, so the theistic practitioners are a tiny minority. Christians sometimes try to give Satanists numbers by defining all non-Christians as "devil worshippers," but with the inclusion of rabbis, and imams in this course it sounds like that's not what the Catholics are up to here.

As a point, I received a comment over on BlueSky in reponse to a recent post that I was wrong about the Church of Satan not practicing magick because Anton LaVey wrote books on it. It is true that LaVey himself knew a lot about magick and likely practiced at least some of it, but I was talking about the organization today. If you look at this article on their current website, you can see that they are hostile towards both literal "devil worship" and anything transcendental or supernatural. I also have heard a story from years ago of a Thelemite kicked out of The Satanic Temple for openly practicing magick, so their current beliefs apparently fall along the same lines.

Still Not Occultists

I have talked a lot over the years on Augoeides about the almost complete non-existence of "occult crime." Time and time again, occultism will be cited as the motivation behind some horrible crime. And time and time again, it always turns out that the real motivation is something ordinary - usually sex, money, or revenge. Occultism makes a wonderful boogeyman because statistically speaking, nobody understands what magick is about. Ask a random person on the street and they are going to answer with something they saw in a horror movie.

Magick shows up in horror movies for the same reason that it gets blamed for any crime that includes elements of weirdness - again, because nobody understands what it's about. Ignorance about magick creates an information gap that filmmakers or criminal investigators can fill with whatever nonsense they want. As a teacher of magick, one of the things I have to keep explaining to new students is that magick doesn't work like it does in the movies. It also doesn't work anything like most "occult crime" scenarios propose.

You never see this sort of thing with Tarot or astrology - at least not anymore. That's because just about everybody has a pretty good idea of what Tarot readers and astrologers do. To be clear, lots of people out there think those things are bullshit, but even those people know what they are. Astrologers track the movement of planets through the sky and use those movements to predict future events and explain personality traits. Tarot readers work with decks of cards and interpret the symbolism of those cards for pretty much the same reasons.

Even a person who thinks Tarot or astrology are bullshit would never consider them reasonable motivations for weird crimes. The closest to that are scammers who exploit belief in them to con clients out of money - which is an entirely ordinary motivation, not anything occult. Magick doesn't get that same consideration because the practice is often secretive and kept out of the public eye. Magical organizations keep things like initiation ritual secret because they are based on the mystery tradition idea that initiations are more effective when candidates have no idea what to expect, not because anything heinous or diabolical is actually going on.

I keep my magical work and writings free and public in service to an idea that I call "exotericism." That is, I'm looking to demystify magick in the public sphere. I promote my books in an effort to make a little money, but it's not very much and my main goal is to make the material easily available. That way people can see what magick is and what magicians do, rather than some sort of horror movie nonsense. It's not sensational. It consists of study, analysis, and dedicated ritual practice. For anybody who doesn't have a passion for mysticism and the paranormal, the whole thing is actually pretty boring.

Satanic Temple Display Vandal Charged

This is good to see. An Iowa man who vandalized a religious display set up by The Satanic Temple at the Iowa State Capitol has been charged with a hate crime. That is exactly how hate crime laws are supposed to work, and why we have them.

A man who attacked and beheaded a permitted statue put up by the Satanic Temple at Iowa’s Capitol in December has been charged with a felony under the state’s hate crime statutes, the prosecutor’s office said this week. Michael Cassidy, who was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Mississippi’s state House of Representatives, is charged with third-degree criminal mischief in violation of individual rights, the Polk County Attorney’s Office said Tuesday.

This probably doesn't mean much coming from me as I've been very open about my progressive politics, but I always find it amazing that Republicans will go on and on and on about freedom until it means freedom for somebody they don't like. Freedom of religion is a basic concept enshrined by the United States Constitution, and it means that it is totally unconstitutional and thus illegal to persecute minority religions. There is no way you can read the actual text honestly and come away with the impression that the intent is to give any particular religion special rights and privileges above all the others.

“Evidence shows the defendant made statements to law enforcement and the public indicating he destroyed the property because of the victim’s religion,” the prosecutor’s office said. Cassidy, 36, had been charged with a misdemeanor. The enhanced charge is a class D felony under Iowa’s hate crime statutes. Cassidy, of Lauderdale, ran for Mississippi State House District 45 as a Republican but was defeated in November by Democrat Keith Jackson by 55% to 38%. His campaign biography describes him as a former Navy pilot and “a Christian conservative who loves our nation.”

Cassidy appeared on Fox News days after he beheaded the statue and called it “Christian civil disobedience.” He said he went to the Capitol and “nobody was there, and it offended me. It touched a nerve. It was, you know, righteous indignation.” Cassidy said on Fox News that he “pulled his head off,” referring to the display of Baphomet.

So basically Cassidy is claiming that he should have the right to persecute members of any religion that offends him. I'm sure parts of his religion are offensive to my beliefs too, but I don't go around vandalizing his religious displays. All it requires is some basic emotional maturity.

Minister Mortimer Adramelech of the Satanic Temple of Iowa told NBC affiliate WHO of Des Moines at the time of the vandalism that the display was there for the holidays. The Iowa Department of Administrative Services said the group met the application requirements for the display. “All religions have equal rights in the public forum under the First Amendment of the Constitution. As Americans we have every right to be here just like anyone else,” Adramelech told the station.

The Satanic Temple started its campaign of placing religious displays at State Capitols in response to a Christian movement to place promotional statues created for the film The Ten Commandmants at statehouses. The goal of this was clearly to privilege Christianity over other religions in the public square. Courts repeatedly have ruled that the displays can go up in public spaces so long as all other religions have the same rights to display their own symbols.

The Satanic Temple has gone on record stating that their preference would be to have no religious monuments on state property, as the United States is a secular, pluralistic nation. Personally, though, I actually like the idea of every religion out there having the right to put up their own displays. I'm perfectly fine with a celebration of our nation's many different religious groups, highlighting the secular laws that allow all of them to coexist peacefully - at least until some asshole like Cassidy comes around.

Another Satanic Panic Source

As I have covered previously here on Augoeides, the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's and early 1990's largely originated from porn. This is why so many of the things "Satanists" were accused of aren't real techiques of magick or occultism, and why magicians looking into those claims don't understand how their alleged rituals even worked. They didn't, because real magick had nothing to do with the panic. It was all about fabricating accounts and accusations based on material presented in "Satanic pornography" from the 1970's.

The New Yorker has an article up that explores yet another piece of the puzzle that I previously knew nothing about, a Mormon housewife named Beatrice Sparks. Sparks was a literary fraud, kind of like James Frey and other recent authors who have passed off made-up stories as memoirs or factual accounts. The New Yorker article is a review of a recent book by Rick Emerson that discusses Sparks' work.

Sparks published a book called Go Ask Alice in 1971. Sparks claimed that the book was a real diary kept by a teenage girl and that she merely "edited" the text. The book was presented this way to the media and, of course, became a huge bestseller - because the market rewarding writers for fraud is practically a cliche. At any rate, the book tells the story of a young girl's descent into horrific drug addiction and ends with an author's note describing her alleged death by either suicide or accidental overdose.

Go Ask Alice provided fuel for the drug war of the 1970s, as it implied that the lurid and exaggerated events of the book were "what the kids were up to" or something like that. It was Sparks' next project, though, where this story moves into Augoeides territory. Sparks was contacted by a family who wanted her to edit and publish their son's diary, who had died by suicide at the age of sixteen.

A few months later, Sparks was back in the diary business with “Jay’s Journal.” She claimed, in the book’s introduction, that a woman had read an article about her and then called to ask if Sparks might take the journal of her son—a deceased sixteen-year-old who’d had a genius-level I.Q.—and use it to expose the dangers of witchcraft. Accepting this solemn task, Sparks sorted through the boy’s possessions, interviewed his friends and teachers, and organized his journal into more than two hundred entries. A small disclaimer on the copyright page indicated that “times, places, names, and some details have been changed to protect the privacy and identity of Jay’s family and friends.”

Magicians Are Not Criminals

One of the most disturbing events in the recent history of esotericism was the so-called "Satanic Panic" of the late 1980's and early 1990's. Back in 2015 I covered a bizarre law enforcement training video from the period that associated nonsense like graffiti pentagrams (that is, stars) with serious criminal activity. The period was a disaster for anybody who had even a passing interest in the occult and caught the eye of investigators. As just one prominent example, in the HBO documentary series Paradise Lost you can see courtroom footage of Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three being convicted of murder on the basis of merely having an interest in Aleister Crowley.

DNA evidence eventually showed that the murder committed by someone else entirely, but the West Memphis Three nonetheless spent eighteen years in prison - all because of the idea that people who use magick are criminals, so evidence of interest in magick is evidence of a crime. And that brings me to today's story out of Phoenix, Arizona. A new initiative is underway to help law enforcement identify occult practices employed by Mexican drug cartels. While it is true that cartels use magick, this quote from the article makes me nervous.

"They use prayer, icons or candles as a tool to facilitate criminal activity such as for drugs, human smuggling and weapons," Almonte tells the Tribune. "Officers frequently run into these icons and items of their spiritual underworld and they don't know what they're dealing with. We want to make officers aware of these indicators of criminal activity so they can know what to look for that also can lead to other avenues in an investigation."

The Tribune notes that as recently as last month, Mexican drug cartel violence was found in the Valley when a 38-year-old illegal immigrant was found beheaded in his Chandler apartment after stealing 400 pounds of marijuana from a drug cartel. Candles and a Ouija board were reportedly found at the scene, which -- along with the beheading -- Almonte says is "just another day at the office."

The problem here is not that cartels don't really make use of occult practices - it has been thoroughly documented that they absolutely do. The problem is treating anyone who has items related to esotericism as a criminal. Magical items are not "indicators of criminal activity." They are elements of spiritual and religious practice and need to be treated as such in the eyes of the law. If police searched my home, they would find more magical paraphernalia than you can shake a stick at. Does that make me a cartel member? Of course it doesn't, any more than somebody who spray-paints a pentagram on a tree is engaged in human sacrifices.

Become a Living Murderer?

A week and a half or so back, the BBC released a report claiming to link a murder case and a terrorism case to a "Satanic occult forum." I've posted several articles here on Augoeides about how genuine "occult crime" is very rare and usually a case of overreach by investigators, and in fact the two cases named are significant in the sense that they have some actual occult connections. The laughable law enforcement training video referenced in this article is a classic example of what police were being told to look for back in the day.

However, the BBC report then dives into the classic moral panic trope suggesting that many, many people (besides the handful they identify) are being brainwashed by these forums and so forth. It's a very small step from that to "we need to censor you online because you're posting occult stuff on your blog and that's dangerous." The previous Cameron administration in fact did attempt to censor "esoteric content" from web users in the UK before the policy was struck down by the courts, so the notion is not even a little farfetched.

The BBC has uncovered new evidence about the teenage killer of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, the two sisters murdered last summer in a Wembley park in London.

Danyal Hussein was a member of a web forum, run by an American self-styled black magician, whose instructions about demonic pacts mirror steps taken by the killer.

The American has encouraged murder in some of his writings, including for a violent Satanic group that’s been cited as an influence on seven young men convicted of neo-Nazi terror offences in the UK over the past two years.

The forum referred to in the report is run by E. A. Koetting of "Become a Living God" fame. Personally, I'm not a fan of Koetting. Much of the stuff he talks about, including "sacrifices" and the like, seems more intended to shock than enlighten. Some of the material he covers is accurate, but it's neither groundbreaking nor exceptional. Basically, as I see it, the free material here on Augeides is better than the material he charges for if you really want to learn to be an effective magical practitioner. It should be noted that that the "pact" included in the image above totally didn't work.

At the same time, the report conflates several factors in a manner reminiscent of a moral panic, and regardless of how you or I might feel about Koetting's work, it's important to keep the two issues separate. There's no question that Danyal Hussein is a bad guy. He stabbed two strangers to death. There's also no question that he was interested in the occult and particularly BALG. This is a noteworthy point because real occult crimes are very rare and his might actually be at least partially motived by his occult beliefs. But instead of that perspective, the report goes on about how "too many teens" are being "radicalized" by online Satanism.

This is Where it Comes From!

I've posted and posted here on Augoeides about fundamentalist Christian ideas about what "witches" and "Satanists" do, and how it has hardly any bearing on how real witches, magicians, and even Satanists practice. I've argued that making magick less mysterious and increasing magical literacy among the general population would help people see the ridiculousness of those ideas. The supposed "black magic" of fundamentalist imagination is mostly fiction, and doesn't even consist of workable or effective magical methods.

Fundamentalists have been insisting for decades that this fake magic is out there and very real. It was one of the big motivators behind the "Satanic Panic" that sent hundreds of innocent people to prison in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the dawn of the Internet, primers on that same fake magic were circulated first on UseNet news groups and later on Christian websites. Even today, it has managed to fold itself into the QAnon network of conspiracies. The latest crop of Satanists is described the same way as the last one - evil people doing evil things for no other reason than to be evil.

The sheer perniciousness of this particular urban myth has always made me wonder where it came from. Some of the ideas, like "blood libel" sacrifices, are very old accusations commonly made to persecute marginalized groups. But some of the others seem bizarre even from an occult standpoint. "Being evil" isn't something that gives you magical power. It might make you more willing to engage in unethical applications of the power you have, but that's it. Really, it gives you no more advantage than a garden variety psychopath, so the idea that it serves some magical purpose is laughable.

But I'm burying the lede a bit here. What I wanted to bring to your attention is that I think I found the origin of at least some of these silly ideas about witches and Satanists. They come from porn. I suppose it makes sense - most porn these days that has plot or structure is a parody of some sort. If that's the origin, it's entirely reasonable to consider "fundie Satanism" a parody of real magick. That fits nicely, and explains why when you look into these alleged practices it's clear that most of them would never work.

Demonic Voter Fraud

If you ever are trying to track down evidence for my assertion that success in America is almost entirely attributable to luck, you need look no further than my fellow Minnesotan Mike Lindell. Lindell is the wealthy founder of the MyPillow company, a prominent media conservative and Trump supporter, and a complete idiot.

To be clear, I'm not calling Lindell an idiot because he's a conservative. Lindell promotes every bizarre conspiracy theory that supports his political beliefs, and is now working with a former occult expert who knows nothing about occultism to root out voter fraud in Arizona. I suppose if you're an occult expert who knows nothing about occultism, being a voter fraud expert who knows nothing about voter fraud is just par for the course.

The Daily Beast's Will Sommer reports that Lindell is now working with Dr. Lyle Rapacki, who pitched himself to law enforcement agencies as an expert on devil worship during the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, and who is now apparently pivoting toward being an expert in election fraud.

In particular, Rapacki has been working with the Arizona Republican Party in its effort to obtain ballots and voting machines from Maricopa County, which is the most populous county in the state and which delivered the state to President Joe Biden last November.

"It's been unfair, it's been unreal, it's been demonic," Rapacki said in an interview earlier this month. Rapacki has also adapted his purported expertise on Satanism to the QAnon era, as he's endorsed conspiracy theories claiming that the Democratic Party runs a Satanic pedophile ring.

Rapacki is one of those guys I talked about in this recent post, who presented themselves as "occult experts" back in the 1980's and early 1990's. As far as I can tell none of them knew anything about real occultism and were in fact experts on the various lurid and mostly made-up versions of occultism and "Devil Worship" promoted by evangelical Christians. A lot of that information came from frauds like Mike Warnke and Bill Schnoebelen who seem to have been caught up in making lots of money by telling Christians that what occultists do is exactly what they see in horror movies.

Occult Cold Case Isn't

I'm a big fan of the true crime genre, but the one thing about it that drives me a little nuts is the notion of "occult murders." I've written about several cases here on Augoeides where law enforcement suspected "occult involvement" and - of course - turned up nothing. Because there is literally no viable occult reason to murder someone. Generally when detectives look at a suspect, they put in a lot of effort to assess means, motive, and opportunity. But if they knew anything about magick, they would understand that "occult" is not a motive and cannot be considered as such.

I recently came across this article about a cold case from 1972. A young woman was found dead under unusual circumstances, and law enforcement apparently suspected satanic or occult activity based on "ritualistic elements" found at the crime scene. But recently review crime scene photos show a classic case of pareidola. In the photos, the sticks that were supposedly arranged in the shape of crosses in a "coffin-like" arrangement around the body are just random brush that the body was found in. You can click through to the article and scroll down to see the crime scene photo for yourself. The brush is clearly not arranged in any particular pattern.

When the unrecognizable body of Jeannette DePalma, 16, was found atop a steep, wooded hill that the locals called the Devil’s Teeth in 1972, rumors spread quickly that the Springfield girl was killed in some sort of satanic rite or witchcraft. Police sources leaked to the press that they had found signs they thought might be related to the occult, including crosses made of sticks and branches arranged in a coffin-like outline around her body. The coroner’s report mentions a “rock formation surrounding the body.” The Star-Ledger reported that police even brought a witch to the site to inspect for signs of the occult.

But crime scene photographs released for the first time this week seem to debunk those claims, showing that DePalma’s body was simply lying in a dense, brushy area in Houdaille Quarry, facedown with an arm draped over a downed tree branch. There are branches lying across one another by her head, but they do not appear to be arranged in a purposeful way. Jason Coy, a history professor at the College of Charleston who researches witchcraft and superstition, said he can’t find any sign of the occult or any other symbolism in the jumble of brush and branches. It suggests that investigators, looking for something sinister, saw patterns that weren’t there, or perhaps their initial descriptions of the branches near her body became exaggerated or misconstrued in the retellings of the scene.

Coy was one of several experts featured in “Death on the Devil’s Teeth,” a 2015 book by Mark Moran and Jesse Pollack, who had written about the case for Weird N.J. magazine. Coy recalled being shown a sketch of the crime scene then, drawn based on the memories of people who were there, depicting many crosses around the body. “Everything in that sketch that was marked out as a cross, in these crime scene photos just looks like a pile of underbrush that happened to be in a kind of pattern,” he said. “I think it’s a perfect example of how sometimes in someone’s memory, if they are influenced by the idea that something could be occult, they remember things that way.”

Moral Panics, Old and New

Here's a blast from the past. Remember when religious prohibitionists tried to crack down on "backwards Satanic messages" in popular rock music? It happened decades ago, so if you don't recall or weren't even around back then, Ars Obscura has an in-depth article covering the moral panic over these alleged messages that peaked in the early 1980's. That may seem like ancient history, but the tale also holds some important lessons for today and for the current political situation.

On April 27, 1982, members of the California Assembly’s Consumer Protection and Toxics Committee gathered in Sacramento to hear Robert Plant endorse Satan. This was not a straightforward testimonial. For one thing, the Led Zeppelin frontman wasn’t actually in attendance. Also, his pro-devil paeans could only be heard when you played “Stairway to Heaven” backwards.

After circulating pamphlets with the “backward masked” declarations spelled out, that’s precisely what Assemblyman Phillip Wyman and panel witness William H. Yarroll II did. The relevant portion of the eight-minute classic was first played forward for committee members and then reversed. Here’s what Wyman claimed could be heard:

“I sing because I live with Satan. The Lord turns me off. There’s no escaping it. Here’s to my sweet Satan.” Yarroll, who identified himself as a “neuroscientist,” noted that a teenager need only listen to “Stairway to Heaven” three times before these backward messages were “stored as truth.”

One of the biggest problems religious prohibitionists face is that many religious prohibitions exist only for religious reasons and cause no real harm to anyone in society at large. As an early-eighties teenager who enjoyed both classic and progressive rock, it made no difference to me whether someone who belonged to an evangelical church believed that such music was sinful and therefore chose not to listen to it. Logically it should go the other way - I listen to the music I like, they listen to the music they find acceptable. We're done, right?

Airbnb for Satan

A family renting an Airbnb unit in New York City got a surprise when they got there and found the place decorated with - well, basically a couple of animal skulls and some implements for casting spells. They freaked and reported being terrified by this display of "devil worship." I do understand that one of the unwritten rules about doing magick is that in general, when dealing with people who get their information from horror films and the like, you should do your best not to antagonize them. At the same time, though, their total over-reaction is kind of funny.

A family staying at an Airbnb property in New York state were frightened upon discovering animal skulls, ritualistic floor markings and “imagery, candles, books, etc for rituals and what looked like devil worship”.

Frederick Joseph, an author from New York City, had booked the house for two nights to spend time with his fiancée, his cousin and his eight-year-old brother, paying $1,150 for the privilege. But as soon as they arrived at the property, they became wary.

“When we walked up to the house we noticed an animal skull hanging on the outside of the house, so I went inside to check it out,” tweeted Joseph. “When I walked I went to the basement and found more animal skulls and ritualistic floor markings and then I went up to the rooms to find much more.

“As we walked through the two rooms we found a bunch of imagery, candles, books, etc for rituals and what looked like devil worship. My brother was terrified, as were we.”

Not a lot of people really engage in "devil worship," so probably the owner of this space is some flavor of Wiccan or Neo-Pagan, which are much larger traditions. Since most of my friends are at least peripherally involved in the occult community I've been in plenty of houses with this sort of decor. The idea that it's scary and dangerous is just silly, but people do have a right to their religious beliefs regardless of what people outside their traditions think of those beliefs.

Satanists Did It!

As you can probably guess, I happen to think that the last thing we need in politics is more Christians. Or, more to the point, more Poor Oppressed Christians who believe that passing laws based on their religious beliefs is a good and noble goal. A group made up of Christian lawmakers (who obviously disagree with me) recently put up a Twitter poll asking if America would be better off if more Christians served in elected office. It did not turn out as expected, which maybe means that there's hope for our country yet.

After more than 16,000 replies, the answer was an overwhelming “no,” which received 95.8% of the vote. In response, the group accused “atheists and Satanists” of “religious persecution” for voting in the poll. Congress is overwhelmingly Christian, far out of proportion with the people they represent. According to a Pew survey last year, the Senate and House are nearly 90% Christian, compared with 65% of America as a whole.

First off, why should atheists and Satanists not get a vote? They're citizens of this country too. How is expressing an opionion "persecution?" And finally, why can't these folks accept that even a lot of mainstream Christians are sick of their nonsense? I'm willing to bet that a lot of Christians who don't consider themselves oppressed by the mere existence of dissenting opinions voted "No" in that poll.

One in four Americans now considers themselves atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” a position publicly held by just one member of the current Congress, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who lists her religion as “none.” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) describes himself as a humanist, while a handful of others haven’t acknowledged a faith or lack thereof.

The National Association of Christian Lawmakers was started last year by Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert (R), who warned about the rise of witches in a recruitment email. It’s not clear how many members the group has, but its board of advisers includes a number of current and former elected officials, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Aggressive Satanism?

I suppose, if you really think about it, the opposite of "palatable occultism" might be "aggressive Satanism" - you know, if a significant portion of this alleged "Satanism" really had anything to do with actual occultism.

Here's the background. Father Francois Dermine, a longtime Roman Catholic exorcist, claimed in an article published in Crux that society is in grave danger due to the rise of what he calls "aggressive Satanism." The problem is that most of what he's railing against is only "Satanism" according to the literal definition put forth by conservative Roman Catholicism - that is, pretty much anything that's not Roman Catholicism.

Roman Catholic exorcists are some of the last practitioners of anything resembling ceremonial magick to be found among mainstream Christians, so to some extent I try to avoid making fun of them. On the other hand, they also say some pretty dumb things, like arguing that anybody who takes a yoga class incurs a significant risk of demonic possession. I can't say I've ever come across anybody who legitimately got possessed by these supposed yoga demons, so I think that argument is ridiculous.

Now it's not completely silly to point out that aggression and violence are major problems in society and are dangerous. But if you look around, it's not like being a Christian means you're any less likely to engage in them. Sure, it should, if you really are trying to follow the tenets of the religion. But the very existence of massive "Prosperity Gospel" churches should dispel any notion that all Christians pay attention to what Jesus actually taught.

“There are many groups of satanism,” Dermine said, noting that internet exposure has also increased, and references to the demonic are increasingly prevalent in videogames and school games such as the “Charlie Charlie challenge,” in which players cross two pencils on a grid with sectors marking ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and ask a supernatural being, “Charlie,” to answer the questions they ask.

Bad Devil Worshipper

And by bad, I don't mean evil. I mean inept. This article from the sensationalistic Daily Mail asks the question - is a Satanic cult on the loose in rural Hampshire? As evidence, they cite several sheep that were found dead with pentagrams and the number 666 spray-painted on them, and vandalism of a local church that consisted of spray-painted pentagrams, the number 666, and inverted crosses. But if they're talking about an organized cult, or even a real occultist, the answer is a flat-out no. I'll explain as I go through the article.

Rounding up the hefty sheep that graze half-wild on this unfenced expanse is no easy task, even for an experienced shepherd. But somehow they managed to capture one: a pretty black-faced ewe.

The ewe’s owners, Colin Barnes, 76, and his partner Heather Miles, 68 (so-called ‘commoners’ entitled to rear animals in the forest under an ancient law), called her ‘Fluffy’. She was kept for breeding and would have roamed contentedly for the rest of her days. Yet with one precise thrust of a long, very sharp knife, the couple’s sheep was callously dispatched.

As Fluffy bled slowly to death, the attacker used blue aerosol paint to defile her with satanic symbols. A pentagram (five-pointed star) was drawn on her thick fleece, and 666 — supposedly the Devil’s number — on her ear.

While this is clearly the work of a sicko going around looking for animals to kill, I'll point out the first clue that this is no real occultist. The spray paint was blue. It's no coincidence that pentagrams are normally drawn in red. Red = Geburah, strength or power, in the Qabalistic system used by magicians. Geburah is associated with the color red and the number five. The angel of Geburah is Samael or Zamael, often associated with Shaitan or Satan (which is a title meaning "accuser," not a proper name).

Absolutely Nobody Does This

You know what I was saying yesterday about evangelical Christians who believe in some sort of gigantic "Satanic conspiracy" are either engaging in propaganda or are flat-out nuts? Here's a prime example. Dave Daubenmire is one of those self-proclaimed "prophets" who hosts a Christian talk radio show. He recently explained that abortion is evil because "many women" have abortions "for Satanic rituals." I would like to think he's being a propagandist, because if he's not and he really believes this stuff he's completely delusional.

Christian Right activist Dave Daubenmire knows something about Planned Parenthood that is news to me. He said on his “Pass The Salt Live” show yesterday that many women who have abortions are actually doing it as part of a Satanic ritual.

"I don’t know if you guys know this or not. Many of the people who go into Planned Parenthoods, to have their babies killed, are what they call “breeders.” Breeders! They do it over and over and over. They’re paid to get pregnant to abort the baby for Satanic rituals. Did you guys have any idea of that? Did you know that? Did you understand that some of those women walking in there aren’t just troubled women, aren’t just caught-themselves-in-a-bad-situation, they’re breeders! They do it over and over and… but we don’t want to believe that, do we?"

I've been an occultist for more than thirty years, so let me set the record straight here. Absolutely nobody does this. Actual Satanists don't. LaVey Satanists are mostly atheists who don't believe in the supernatural, period, and theistic Satanists like the Setians and others who practice magical rituals don't do it either.

Even discredited accounts based on recovered memories that involve giving birth to babies for Satanic sacrifices (recalled, thanks to unethical therapists during the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's, by women who medical examinations showed had never been pregnant) don't have anything to do with medical abortions.

I mean, if you can't believe the lying therapists that you trained to induce false memories of Satanic rituals in unwitting subjects, who can you believe? Come on, evangelicals!

From a practical standpoint - if you have an abortion at Planned Parenthood, do you think that they hand you the fetal tissue afterwards? How do you do magick with something you don't have, even if there was a ritual that called for it? And, of course, beyond that there isn't such a ritual and it's not even remotely clear how it would work.

I think I understand what's going on here, and it's pretty damn ugly. Evangelicals like Daubenmire are so confused by the idea that women might have rights to bodily autonomy that the only reason they can think of for a woman to have an abortion is to be evil for evil's sake - which is, of course, not a real thing outside of Hollywood melodramas.

That Teddy Bear is Totally Haunted

This article sounds exactly like the first act of a new horror movie. The movie I'm thinking of would be a little like the Chucky series of films, with the twist being that Chucky is a haunted, murderous teddy bear. The whole concept manages to be ridiculous, but at the same time pretty creepy. Here's the story.

Marie and Steve Wesson, owners of Nottingham's Haunted Museum, discovered the venue's only metal door under a layer of plasterboard when they acquired the old Mapperley picturehouse last year. It was sealed shut in an emergency exit chute with plugs and electrics fitted over it, and sinister rumours circulated about its past.

Marie and Steve, scared of what they might find behind it, have left it locked for more than a year, Nottinghamshire Live reports. But on Thursday, along with a group of seven paranormal enthusiasts, they finally cracked it open. Inside, Marie claims they found a five-pointed pentagram star made from charcoal, a grubby old teddy bear and a collection of white candles burnt to their stubs.

It was a shock to the 44-year-old, who'd just expected to find a brick wall on the other side of the door. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing," says Marie, who recreated a ghostly groping for an American TV show. "We're paranormal investigators not satanists so were are going to have to get on it to find out as much as we can about it."

She's convinced however, that spooky things have already been going on. "During investigations [at the museum, recently ranked the 29th most haunted place in the UK by supernatural website higgypop.com], we've had voice recordings of someone saying 'don't open the door' and 'don't open the door' with a sinister laugh after.

This is so much like a movie, in fact, I have to wonder if it might some sort of setup to generate publicity. But let's say that it isn't, just for the sake of argument and because it makes the whole thing a lot more potentially interesting.

Exorcism Summit Open to Non-Catholics

Sadly, though, you still have to be Christian.

In a move that I imagine can only be positive for non-Catholic reverse-conjurers everywhere, the Roman Catholic Church has opened up its annual exorcism summit to exorcists belonging to other Christian denominations. By exploring techniques from other strands of their tradition, they hope to improve their methods and develop "best practices." You know, like a great big Agile team or something.

With a rise in reported demonic possessions and devil worship in the era of social media, the Roman Catholic Church opened its doors to non-Catholics for the first time during its annual exorcism training conference.

This article is from Fox News, so I want to interrogate some of its implied assumptions a bit. Is there really a "rise in reported demonic possessions and devil worship in the era of social media?" Members of groups like The Satanic Temple are atheists, and while there are theistic Satanists their numbers are much lower. "Lifestyle witchcraft" is not "devil worship" either - nor is it really even magick or witchcraft as I think of it, just a fashion trend.

I do realize that conservative Catholics think anybody who isn't a Catholic, and certainly anyone who isn't Christian, is basically a devil worshipper or might as well be one. But to be clear, I'm a Thelemite and I don't "worship the devil." I actually don't really "worship" anything. I work with deities and spirits as a peer, not a supplicant. And I have to say, in the occult community I don't think literal "devil worship" is much of a thing for the most part.

Also - has there actually been an increase in "reported demonic possessions?" I scour the Internet for anything that looks like a real case of possession so I can cover it here on the blog, and I can't say that I've seen any increase in reports over the course of at least the last decade and probably longer. It was rare before, and it remains rare now.

Sweet, Sweet Alien Blood

Sabrina Sabrok is not just an adult film star, television personality, and satanic cult leader. She also claims to be the offspring of humans and aliens, due to her sweet, sweet alien blood. That's the kind of blood they would call "Rh-negative" if you were in the hospital and needed a transfusion, you might have it too, and there's absolutely no scientific evidence that it has anything to do with beings from another world. But then, that's exactly the sort of thing an Rh-positive full-blooded human like me would say, right?

Sabrina Sabrok, a self-styled psychic and medium who has recently set up a Satanic cult, appears to believe that her blood came from outside sources. "I worked with researchers who told me that my blood type is not from this planet," the 43-year-old former Playboy model told the Daily Star. "There are even theories that aliens carried out experiments with humans, mixing DNA and things like this. As a result, some people are Rh-negative," she was quoted as saying.

Rh-negative blood refers to the type of red blood cells that do not have a protein called the Rhesus (Rh) factor on their surface. Nearly 85 percent of the world's population is estimated to have Rh-positive blood, while the rest are Rh-negative. Rh-positive individuals can be given transfusions of both types of blood, but Rh-negative people should only get Rh-negative blood, because there's a chance that an incompatibility might happen otherwise.

Scientists believe that Rh-negative blood is the result of a mutation that happened during our evolution, but some conspiracy theorists suggest that Rh-negative individuals have evolved from aliens who mated with or experimented on humans when they came to our planet.

It's not clear where the Rh-negative = alien thing came from, but I have heard it floating around the Internet for awhile in the context of stories about alien abductions and the like. The "Rh" stands for "Rhesus factor" based on the erroneous conclusion that the human Rh factor was the same as a similar factor found in Rhesus monkeys (even though, in fact, it's not - but the name stuck). So maybe somebody might think that people without it didn't evolve from Rhesus monkeys? That would mean aliens had to be involved - even though, you know, humans are apes and none of us evolved from Rhesus monkeys.

Augoeides readers interested in Sabrok's satanic cult can find (a little) more information here, though not a lot of details are forthcoming about what kinds of practices membership actually entails. A lot of it seems to have to do with following Sabrok on Instagram.