Back in 1990, while I was finishing an undergraduate degree at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, I knew a social work student I’ll call Macbeth. Like many at the time, Macbeth believed that a vast Satanic conspiracy was ritually tormenting legions of children in North America and elsewhere. He had connections with various churches and with the local police, who often asked him to give presentations on the dangers of Satanism to troubled teens. I’m sure that, after graduation, his beliefs in a Satanic underground shaped his social work. Unfortunately, despite his decency, his intelligence, and all his certainty, Macbeth didn’t know what he was talking about.

Visit the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance website, religioustolerance.org and check out the information they’ve compiled on ritual abuse. The evidence has never supported Macbeth’s position.

Inflated numbers

Based on accounts given by people who recovered memories of ritual abuse during therapy, conspiracy theorists like Macbeth believed that up to 60,000 children had been ritually murdered in the US and Canada in the 1980s and early 90s. For every murdered child, at least several others would have survived their ritual abuse, abuse that may have involved incest, rape, torture, and forced cannibalism. For every child who was ritually abused, there would have to be at least several adults directly responsible for the abuse, along with many other adults needed to cover it up. Literally millions of people would have had to have been in on the conspiracy in North America alone, but the theory quickly spread to other developed countries, drastically increasing the supposed size of the Satanic networks. To commit such atrocities, most of the abusers would have to be psychopaths, a group that’s notoriously prone to ratting out their colleagues. And yet, no bodies were recovered, no Satanic infrastructure was exposed, and no one ever snitched.

Studies conducted in the 1990s by the FBI, as well as by the governments of the United States, Michigan, Virginia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands found no evidence of any Satanic conspiracies, no evidence that any children were being ritually slaughtered, and indeed no evidence that ritual abuse was even a widespread problem. These studies revealed instead that incidents of ritual abuse were extremely rare and that they were usually committed by isolated psychopaths and other mentally disturbed people.

The studies’ results were diametrically opposed to popular opinion. According to a 1994 Redbook magazine survey, 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults, and 32% believed that the FBI and police were ignoring evidence because they don’t want to admit the cults were real.

The public’s paranoia was supported by an entire industry devoted to promoting the conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists regularly appeared on popular shows like Geraldo, Sally, and 20-20, and enjoyed extensive coverage in fundamentalist Christian media. The industry produced books and films and offered seminars to professionals and laypeople alike. People on the left, including therapists, feminists, and social activists, were as vulnerable to this propaganda as those on the right.

Lives ruined on the other side

Thanks to incompetent investigations and credulous courts, hundreds of people, many of whom worked in daycares, were falsely imprisoned, while countless others were slandered. Even after most of the convictions were overturned, the damage done to reputations and careers was irreparable. Misguided investigators and therapists used leading questions, suggestion, and various other techniques to inadvertently implant false memories of horrific abuse in scores of children and adults, causing devastating emotional harm to both them and their families. Wiccans, Neo-pagans, and bona-fide Satanists—the majority of whom are perfectly law-abiding—were scapegoated and their religious beliefs unjustly condemned. While no one was hanged or burned at the stake, the parallels with earlier witchhunts are unmistakable.

How could Macbeth and so many other people swallow this line without gagging? The answer may be found in some unpleasant truths about human nature.

It keeps coming up

Unfounded stories about the ritual murder of children are a recurrent feature of Western society. For example, Roman pagans accused early Christians of exactly these crimes, proto-orthodox Christians accused Gnostics, and later Christians and Nazis accused Jews. These stories are so potent and perennial that they deserve to be called archetypal. It’s very likely that they’re primordial expressions of a psychological dynamic called transference.

Ernest Becker, the author of The Denial of Death (The Free Press, 1973) and the godfather of a school of psychology known as terror management theory, argued that the fundamental challenge facing all human beings is our knowledge of our own mortality. We have the minds of gods and the bodies of worms: our fantastic symbolic capacities are rooted in a pathetically transitory and vulnerable physical condition. Death in all its forms, from final extinction to physical mutilation, from disease to social emasculation, is a vulture forever circling overhead. This evil is often too great and too amorphous for the human mind to encompass, and so we try to make it more manageable by transferring its power to something tangible, something we can conceivably overcome. In doing so, we re-cast ourselves: rather than playing the role of the miserable victims of death, we become the heroic defenders of life, and thereby restore our sense of dignity and security.

An imaginary conspiracy of villains, especially ones so debased as to abuse and murder children in the name of cosmic evil, is the perfect vehicle for such transference—so perfect, in fact, that it’s hard to abandon even in the shadow of a mountain of conflicting evidence. Imagine what Macbeth would have lost if he disavowed the conspiracy theory. He would no longer have been able to think of himself as a champion waging war on behalf of innocents imperiled by demonic evil. He would have lost the feeling of righteousness associated with confronting a wickedness that others are too timid to acknowledge. He would have suffered the shame of having eagerly spread a damaging lie. Most of all, his fear of death would have escaped its symbolic shackles, making him its victim all over again. Of all the illusions we must eventually discard on the path to clarity, heroism is the hardest to relinquish.

We’re wired for conspiracies

As long as human beings are afraid of death our minds will be fertile soil for all sorts of unfounded conspiracy theories. The most powerful ones will involve accusations of ritualized child abuse, but these aren’t the only weeds that can grow in our inner gardens. Any story that delivers a hidden cabal of monstrous malefactors can serve the same psychological purpose. Of course, destructive conspiracies do occur in our world, and it would be foolish to believe otherwise. It’s equally foolish to ignore our deep-seated propensity to perceive conspiracies where none exist, and to deny, denigrate, or otherwise disregard evidence that challenges those perceptions.

I lost contact with Macbeth after I graduated and left Thunder Bay, but the memory of the man, who was compassionate and clever and terribly misguided, has stayed with me. It’s only a matter of time before ritual abuse stories resurface in one form or another again, capturing the public imagination and consuming a new harvest of innocent lives. For now, our fears will have to make do with lesser fetishes, and suffer containment by clumsier conspiracy theories, if only for a little while.