How Satan Is Propping Up
Bush's War On Terror
Sunday, 18 January 2004
Jan. 17, 2004 | Bill Ellis goes to some lengths to convince you that he's
a normal American. The biographical blurb in the back of his new book,
"Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture," assures
readers that he's an "active member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America" -- perhaps the most mainstream and least controversial religious
affiliation one can imagine.
When I first contacted Ellis about an interview, he replied by e-mail that
a reporter from another publication had recently insisted on visiting him
at home in Hazleton, Pa., to watch him celebrate Halloween and then attend
church the following Sunday. "I'm not sure what he expected," Ellis wrote,
"but we did not sacrifice any goats on the former date and didn't have
anyone slain in the spirit or exorcised of demons on the latter."
Indeed, when I finally reach Ellis by telephone one recent morning, he
does not come off like the goat-sacrificing, demon-exorcising type. He's a
soft-spoken man with a mild demeanor, careful to avoid overstatements and
generalizations, and his sense of humor is so dry as to be almost
imperceptible. He has to take a moment near the beginning of our
conversation to help his arthritic dog in the door and up the steps to her
food bowl. At one point, he describes himself as a "solitary," a word used
by Wiccans to denote a person who is interested in witchcraft but belongs
to no coven. There is no folklore department at the Hazleton branch campus
of Penn State, where Ellis teaches English, and almost all his contact
with colleagues is via the Internet.
Yet one could make a case that this unglamorous professor is a curious
kind of cultural hero. At the very least, Ellis has demonstrated courage
and fortitude for little tangible reward. His research field -- Satanism
and the occult, especially as perpetuated in the folklore and rituals of
teenage culture -- is not seen as respectable either by the society at
large or the academic world. He has sporadically been attacked by
fundamentalist Christians for spreading the evil gospel of the Horned One.
"If you think that Satan is not alive and an ever present threat to
Christians," wrote one Penn State alumnus, "then you are either (A) not a
Christian or (B) a dupe of Satan himself." The writer went on to say he
would pray for Ellis' removal from the classroom -- a prayer the
university administration, to its credit, has declined to answer.
When I ask whether people in Hazleton judge him harshly because of his
scholarly interest in Satan, Ellis chuckles quietly. "I would say they
would judge me harshly on my commitment to literacy," he says. "We're in
an area where intellectualism is not especially liked."
But the more you read about Ellis' research into the history of Ouija
boards, chain letters, lucky rabbit's feet and adolescent
"legend-tripping" (i.e., late-night visits to haunted graveyards and other
spooky locations), the more you understand that behind these obscurities
lie key questions in contemporary culture. Among other things, Ellis says
he understands exactly why so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden were working together, despite the lack of any factual
evidence to support that claim.
In both "Lucifer Ascending" and his 2000 book "Raising the Devil:
Satanism, New Religions, and the Media," Ellis builds a sober and
persuasive argument that the recent hysteria over the influence of Satan
in America, much of it emanating from the Christian right, reflects a
misunderstanding of a cyclical or dialectical process that has repeated
itself for centuries. The dorm-room séance and the midnight cemetery
voyage in some dude's unmuffled Camaro, he argues, are debased fragments
of an ancient and genuine folk-witchcraft tradition. (More so, perhaps,
than the New Age feminist happy-talk of contemporary Wiccans and
neo-pagans, although Ellis speaks respectfully of such boutique beliefs.)
As such, they reflect an eternal struggle between individuals and
institutions over access to spiritual and supernatural realms, and the
equally eternal struggle of teenagers to resist adult authority in general
and the strictures of organized religion in particular.
Most significantly, Ellis argues that occultism and evangelical
Christianity are more closely related than the devotees of either are
likely to admit. The two phenomena have shaped each other, with the
Spiritualism craze of the 19th century (which produced the Ouija board,
among other phenomena) leading to the explosion of Pentecostalism, with
its emphasis on individual experience with demonic possession and the Holy
Spirit, early in the 20th. Today, after an interlude in the middle of the
last century when American Christianity was dominated by mainstream
Protestant and Catholic theologies -- religion based on "intellectual
ethics," in Ellis' words -- the charismatic, holy-roller, born-again
faiths are back with a vengeance. And so is Satan.
For many evangelical Christians, Ellis explains, the Man-Goat and his
legions of demons are not metaphorical or intellectual constructs. "The
trend in Christianity toward Pentecostal, charismatic modes of worship
really has revived the experience of Satan, rather than the concept of
Satan," he says.
As difficult as this can be for atheists, agnostics and even mainstream
religious types to accept, Ellis insists that the ecstatic transformations
seen at a Pentecostal revival -- speaking in tongues, being slain in the
spirit, the exorcism of demons, etc. -- reflect something genuine and
powerful. (No one who has ever witnessed such a service, regardless of his
or her personal beliefs, is likely to doubt this.) Whether you believe the
experience is spirit possession or a dissociated psychological state is,
of course, an irreducible question of faith. But all religions that rely
on such incandescent moments -- from snake-handling Pentecostalism to
Christian Science to Wicca to the animist faiths of sub-Saharan Africa --
must confront what it means when the spiritual experience turns sour.
"Any religious movement that involves being born again, some kind of
ecstatic experience, is quite aware that you can have good trips and bad
trips," says Ellis. "When you dissociate your personality and allow
someone else to step in, so to speak, most of the time it's going to be
somebody good. It's going to be the Holy Spirit, it's going to be your
spiritual helper, whatever term you wish to use. And then, a certain
number of times, it's going to be somebody bad.
"Satan is the cultural name that has been given to those experiences for
several millennia" within the Judeo-Christian tradition, he goes on. So
believers who have witnessed ritual spirit possession in their churches,
both positive and negative, "don't have to be convinced to believe in the
devil. They've felt the devil. They've experienced the devil."
In other words, the explosion of fundamentalist Christianity in the United
States in recent years has led directly, even inevitably, to widespread
public belief in the Father of Lies and his nefarious schemes -- a topic
avoided by mainstream religion for most of the 20th century. Not so
paradoxically, it has also led countless heavy-metal musicians and their
fans to embrace the trappings of Satanism, on the time-honored premise
that anything that outrages and horrifies adult authority figures is
inherently cool.
Nothing exemplifies this dialectic better than the infamous Onion article
published in 2000 titled "Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among
Children." To regular Onion readers, this article, with its ludicrous
factoids about millions of J.K. Rowling readers fleeing from Sunday school
to Satanic churches, forming their own schoolyard covens (membership fee:
$6.66!) and proclaiming that "Jesus died because He was weak and stupid,"
was an obvious and even rather heavy-handed spoof. (Its outrageous coup de
grace was a spurious quote from Rowling, crowing that "the weak, idiotic
Son of God is a living hoax" who will be forced to "suck the greasy cock
of the Dark Lord" on the Day of Judgment.)
But as Ellis discusses in "Lucifer Ascending," fundamentalists took the
story at face value, and it spread through Christian anti-occult circles
like an unstoppable virus. A chain letter containing the text of the Onion
piece was forwarded from one believer to another (usually with the obscene
quotation redacted), along with appended messages urging recipients to
"forward to every pastor, teacher and parent you know ... Pray also for
the Holy Spirit to work in the young minds of those who are reading this
garbage that they may be delivered from its harm."
What Ellis may not have noticed is that even now, more than three years
after the hoax article was first spread (and then widely debunked), and
despite Rowling's frequent avowals that she herself is a believing
Christian, fundamentalists on the Internet have not quite abandoned the
cause. At the evangelical Web site Greater Things, pseudo-damning
quotations from Rowling are assembled ("Death and bereavement and what
death means, I would say, is one of the central themes in all seven
books"), and the site's author explains that the Onion article itself was
yet another diabolical machination: "One of the tactics of Satan is to
make fun of those who cry 'evil' or 'foul,' by creating parody designed to
make the concerned Christian look foolish."
Sincere believers, the site continues, "intuitively sense (by the Spirit)
that there is cause for concern about these books" and so became
vulnerable to the Onion hoax. By the same token, Ellis argues, you can't
understand contemporary American politics without understanding the
importance of profound spiritual faith, and specifically belief in
Absolute Evil. "An experience-centered believer," he says, "is going to
think and vote different ways from someone who -- like me, being a
Lutheran -- checks the precedents and reads the Bible and thinks for a
while before making a decision."
So when our born-again president refers to Osama bin Laden as "the Evil
One," he is not dealing in metaphor or analogy, even assuming he is
capable of such things. Rather he is addressing his co-religionists in a
not-so-secret code. "That makes perfect sense to a born-again believer,"
Ellis says. "Evil, like God, is One. So you can say, and believe in, an
'Axis of Evil,' because you know that the person who is giving the orders
to bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and the leader of Iran and the leader of
North Korea is, of course, Satan."
Ellis also believes that the current belief in Satanic evil (and the
Saddam-Osama linkage) is connected to 20th-century right-wing fantasies
about the Illuminati, a Jewish-run conspiracy that aimed at taking over
the world, often through the United Nations, an international banking
consortium or some other nightmarish force. "You did not have to believe
that the members of the Illuminati all belonged to the same ideology or
ethnic group," he says. "Some would be communists, some would be alleged
liberals, some would be terrorists. But they would all be working together
in the same diabolically inspired plan."
As a scholar and historian, Ellis is inclined to believe that religious
manias, both of the Christian and occult varieties, inevitably burn
themselves out. Organized religion and the folk-witchcraft traditions, he
suggests, balance each other out in the long term in what he calls a
"Luciferian dialectic." But as the witch trials of medieval Europe and
colonial Massachusetts, the Red Scare of the 1950s and the Satan panic of
the 1980s also indicate, these moments of ecstatic belief can also produce
fervent persecutions of dissidents, heretics and perceived enemies of all
kinds.
Ellis explains this in neutral, anthropological language, but its
relevance to George W. Bush and John Ashcroft's America -- where the
Constitution seems increasingly endangered and prominent Christian
ministers accuse Muslims of worshipping the Moon God -- should be obvious.
"One group can become so convinced of its religious rectitude, and so
convinced of the danger that the Other puts them into," he says, "that
they end up taking political and legal action against the Other. And of
course, the fact that they're doing this for God makes them even less
critical than they otherwise might be about the evidence and about their
own motives. This is why I'm writing these books -- I'm trying to get
people to see these dangers."
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