The WM3 are free

This is a beautiful day: The day that I remove the "Free the West Memphis Three" posters from this blog and Speak of the Devil. After spending the entirety of their young adulthoods in prison, Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols have been freed after a plea deal. Sadly, the deal prevents them from suing for wrongful prosecution or anything else related to their false convictions, and it is incredibly unlikely that West Memphis investigators will ever admit their mistakes and search for the real killer or killers.
Not just three, but six boys' lives were destroyed by the murders of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Now that the West Memphis Three have some justice, let's see some justice for the three boys who lost their lives. Enough time has been wasted.

I'm dismayed by some of the media coverage of this. For instance, ABC News posted a video with the sub-headline "Three men convicted of killing three boys in a satanic cult ritual are set free." Really? The prosecution couldn't present any evidence of a Satanic ritual, because there wasn't any. At all.

SME's Bizarre Book of the Month: The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke

When you see this kind of book at a garage sale or in the discount bin at a used bookstore, you might wonder, "Who reads this shit?".
Well, I do.
But I have my reasons. This particular book is key to the anti-occult paranoia and fearmongering that swept America in the '70s, '80s, and early '90s. In its mildest manifestations, this hysteria simply led to a few parents forbidding their children to watch the Smurfs because Papa Smurf was some kind of little blue Satanic warlock or whatever. In its worst manifestations, entire communities were ravaged by false accusations of child abuse and ritual murder, and people went to jail for a very long time. The town of Gilmer, Texas, offers just one chilling example.

And it all started with a relatively small group of Christians who were concerned about '60s New Age fads, heavy metal music, and drugs. For the first time, Christian hegemony seemed to be threatened in the United States of America. Who would step forward to staunch the rising tide of ouiija boards, Yoga classes, and fantasy role-playing games? Who would lead America's jaded youth back into the wholesome realm of Stryper and Bible school exorcisms?

Mike Warnke, that's who. Because he'd been there. He'd seen it all. Back in the mid-'60s, this Catholic California boy had been hand-picked by Satanists and lured into a secret, nation-wide witchcraft coven with all-you-can-eat drugs, sex, and magic. Within a year, he was Master Counselor of the coven, overseeing gang rapes and chopping off fingers. He smuggled enough pot, mescaline, and peyote into California to keep Timothy Leary and Bill Burroughs supplied for a year. He was one bad-ass Satanic mofo, and he had the bullet scars to prove it. Well, sort of. No one has actually seen his bullet scars.

Anyway, all this changed when Mike Warnke, Boy Satanist, joined the Navy.


No, he didn't become gay. He became a Christian. Someone left a Bible lying around in the Navy barracks, and Mr. Hardcore Satanist was transformed after just one peep at it. Talk about an easy convert.

From that day on, Mike Warnke did everything he could to convince the world that Satanists and witches are evil drug fiends in the sway of demons. He knew. He'd been there. He even suspected the Satanists were just one level of the Illuminati, that elusive uber-organization that controls the world:

"A world-wide, super secret control group with perhaps as few as a very dozen at the top...with key men controlling governments, economies, armies, food supplies...pulling the strings on every major international event...and not just now, but for generations, centuries, since the beginning of civilization...manipulating men by their egos and their appetites, rewarding and depriving, enraging and pacifying, raising up first one side and then the other, maintaining a balance of frustration, bitterness, and despair?" (p. 93, ellipses in original)

He heard other Satanists talking about demons that controlled the worst dictators of history: Nero, Hitler, Stalin. A light went on in his head, showing him that demonically inspired Satanists and their human puppets were the force behind international finance, politics, war, industry, and everything else.

"I laughed, a little hysterically, but the light show wouldn't shut off. So that was how it was done! The global-conspiracy buffs were right, after all. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan B. Sirhan - they were the pawns of a much bigger plot."

Keep in mind that Warnke was supposedly having this epiphany in 1965 or '66, before anyone had ever heard of Ray and Sirhan.

Warnke promptly left the Navy, got married to a solid Christian gal, and started his own ministry. He published this book in 1973. Then he formed his own special niche as a Christian stand-up comedian, blending comedy routines with his Satanic testimony and some good old-fashioned preaching. Yes, it's every bit as awful as it sounds. But evangelical and Charismatic Christians loved it; Warnke cranked out album after album.

Then things got a little wonky. Shortly after entering an Oklahoma Bible college in '74, Warnke began boinking a fellow student named Carol. They ran off together to live in Nashville the following year, leaving Mrs. Warnke and her two sons to figure out WTF went wrong.

Warnke's days in Christian stand-up and ministry were far from over, though. For the next decade and a half, he preached and guffawed and elbow-rubbed his way to the top of the fundamentalist pile. He went through three wives and a few changes of address, but he made it. At the end of the '80s, his ministry was receiving over $1 annually in donations. In 1985, 20/20 interviewed him as an "occult expert" for their show on devil worship.

And that's when things finally went wrong for him. Some writers at the Christian magazine Cornerstone had been observing his goings-on for quite some time, and they were more than a little suspicious about the "Satanic high priest" story that launched Warnke into Christian stardom.
Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein interviewed Warnke's family members, ex-girlfriends, college friends, and early associates, and the story they pieced together had nothing to do with Satanism. It turned out that Mike Warnke had been a squeaky-clean Christian long before he joined the Navy. His high school and college buddies had never seen him take a drag, much less move hundreds of kilos into the Inland Empire at the behest of Satanic kingpins. While Mike "Judas" Warnke was supposedly lopping off the fingers of devil-worshipers and sipping blood from a chalice, the real Mike Warnke was bowling and sharing hot fudge sundaes with his Catholic girlfriend. Trott and Hertenstein published their findings in '92.

Warnke responded to the Cornerstone allegations the way most preachers respond to scandal: He lied his ass off and accused everyone but Christ himself of being aligned against him.
Later, he still insisted that he had been a Satanic high priest in '66, but conceded his coven was a wee bit smaller than The Satan Seller indicated. Instead of 1500 members, it had maybe 13. But other than that, the book was totally true!

Warnke's ministry took a bit of a shit-kicking for a few years, but in the grand tradition of American preacher scandals, he was rehabilitated and welcomed back into the arms of the Christian community. The born again are born again.
His fellow preachers skirt around the whole Satanic thing these days, focusing instead on his trials and triumphs as a temporary Christian pariah. During Warnke's appearance on The New Jim Bakker Show, Bakker asked, "Say, weren't you into Satanism or something?".

For the morbidly curious or the very-very bored, here's the website of Warnke's current ministry, which he runs with Wife #4.

Witches Who Switched and Former Satanists

Harmless nuttery, or dangerous smear campaign?

One minor but fascinating aspect of modern fundamentalist Christian culture are the testimonies offered by "former Satanists", "witches who switched", and born-again New Agers. For decades, these stories of miraculous conversion were passed reverently from hand to hand via audio recordings made in church basements, grainy VHS tapes shot from the back rows of churches, fireside tales told at Bible camps, and pamphlets Xeroxed by church secretaries. The simple but powerful message imparted by these testimonies is that if God can save a devil-worshiper, He can (and will) save anyone. He'll snatch you into His arms even as you kneel at a Satanic altar, dripping with the blood of a freshly sacrificed virgin. Before you even know what's happened, you're wearing sweater vests and homeschooling your kids so they won't have to learn about dinosaurs. It's like Extreme Home Makeover: Jesus Edition.

It seems to have started with Doreen Irvine. In the late '60s, this mundane-looking English spinster revealed that she had once been "Queen of the Black Witches of Europe", presiding over thousands of Satanic witches. Her master "Diablos" [sic] granted her powers to levitate, render herself invisible, kill birds in midair just by looking at them, and walk through roaring bonfires without so much as a blister.
However, being Queen of the Black Witches brought absolutely no material benefits to Doreen. She continued to work as a hooker and a stripper until her conversion in 1964. That's quite unusual, because in most of these testimonies the Devil bestows enormous wealth and influence on his minions. Naturally, they renounce all the goodies after being saved, which makes the testimonies even more powerful.
Anyway, Doreen's story was published in 1973 as From Witchraft to Christ, and since that time she has been revered in fundie circles as The Witch Who Switched. She gave her testimony on 100 Huntley Street, appeared in Caryl Matrisciana's documentary Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism, and became the UK rep for Campus Crusade for Christ.

It didn't take long for others to follow in Doreen Irvine's cloven footsteps. And with each testimony that emerged from a Christian publishing house or the office of a recovered-memory therapist, the details got darker and weirder. Irvine's cult, which supposedly encompassed the whole of Western Europe, took part in nothing hinkier than some rooster sacrifice and the occasional bisexual orgy (who doesn't, amirite?). But the cults described by Satanist-turned-Christian-comedian Mike Warnke in his 1973 book The Satan Seller routinely sacrificed unwilling human victims. And the African megacult depicted in Emmanuel Eni's 1987 tract Delivered from the Powers of Darkness pretty much defies description. Eni's story contains more blood, guts, and WTFery than a horrorcore convention.

Yet not one born again Satanist has been charged with being an accessory to murder, and no one in their faith communities is concerned about that. While this speaks to the beauty of forgiveness and redemption, it would sure as hell make me feel queasy on Sunday mornings. Didn't that guy in the third pew eat babies and rape corpses a few years ago? Didn't that lady stab somebody with a crucifix while screwing a goat? And now I'm supposed to eat cookies and drink coffee with them?
Fortunately, as most of us can plainly see, these monstrous cults never actually existed. Whether they were brewed up in the stew of troubled minds or stitched together from B movies seen on late-night TV, we may never know - but we do know there is no empirical evidence for the existence of widespread, homicidal Satanic sects of the sort described by Irvine, Warnke, and Eni. In fact, Warnke's autobiography was roundly debunked by other Christians.
The value of ex-Satanists' testimonies lies not in their truthfulness, but in the way they make you feel. Sure, Mike Warnke wasn't literally a Satanist, but didn't his epic tale of conversion to Christianity give you a ton of warm fuzzies? Well, then, it's good enough for God. Let's not let truth get in the way of Truth, folks.

This tradition carries on today. Take, for instance, the testimony of Mike Leehan (below). It's quite typical of ex-Satanist testimonies. We don't know where Mike Leehan resides, where he grew up, or which Satanic group he joined. He vaguely mentions sacrifices, bloodletting, and Satanists' unquenchable thirst for "power" (in these testimonies, explanations of Satanic beliefs rarely go beyond "power"). Then he tells us the Devil once commanded him to shoot the pastor who is filming the testimony. Testimonials are often custom-tailored to appeal to a specific audience in this way, perhaps unintentionally or perhaps with great guile. For instance, spiritualist-cum-Adventist Roger Morneau claimed in his testimony that his high priest frequently spoke of the sanctity of the Sunday Sabbath. Why? Because Seventh Day Adventism, with its Saturday Sabbath, was deemed as Satan's greatest enemy.



It would be nice if we could just relegate all these ghoulish, implausible stories to the netherworld of the born-again fringe and forget all about them, but these testimonials unfortunately have a real-world impact on Pagans, Wiccans, Satanists, and other faith communities. Thanks to Doreen Irvine and her successors, millions of Christians believe that witches and Satanists abduct, torture, and sacrifice unwilling victims (including infants and children); that witches and Satanists target Christian leaders for death; that Satanists and witches infiltrate churches to subvert believers; etc. The dissemination of unsubstantiated testimonies like Michael Leehan's amounts to a smear campaign against millions of law-abiding Pagans, Satanists, and Wiccans. This smear campaign undermines their freedom of religion, their freedom of expression, sometimes even their careers or their standing in their communities (look at the endless ordeals of Michael Aquino for a chilling example). In many ways, the anti-Satanic testimonials of today differ little from the ancient Jewish blood libel that refuses to die among religious supremacists and anti-Semites. The cult stories are just as groundless, just as prejudicial, just as damaging as tales of Jewish ritual murder. In accepting the testimonials as either factual accounts or harmless fabrications, we are helping to brand unknown Satanists and witches as criminals without a fair hearing.
The consequences can be brutal. In many parts of the world, witchcraft hysteria has resulted in the torture, internment, and murder of suspected "witches". In Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana, elderly women and children are confined to gulag-like "witch camps". In Papua New Guinea, an unknown number of women and girls have been mutilated, tortured, and killed by their neighbors because they were supposedly possessed by the spirits of evil witches. These panics are sparked and fostered, in part, by fundamentalist teachings that sanction the expulsion and/or mistreatment of "witches" as an act of spiritual warfare.

I'm sorry, Mr. Leehan, but until you produce more evidence of your involvement in "Satanic" crimes, I'll have to view you as part of the problem.


More information:

- Doreen Irvine's testimony (YouTube)
- Emmanuel Eni's "Delivered from the Powers of Darkness"
- Cornerstone magazine's series on Mike Warnke

SME's Bizarre Book of the Month: Occult ABC

In the world of anti-occult zealotry, Dr. Kurt Koch is something of a legend. A Lutheran pastor and doctor of theology in Germany, he traveled the world addressing churches of nearly every denomination for over half a century, spreading his peculiar brand of superstitious crapola. He claimed to have counseled about 20,000 people by the late '70s.

I was *lucky* enough to score a copy of his most famous book, Occult ABC, at my local secondhand bookshop.

While it's hard not to admire Koch's deep religious devotion, it's pretty easy to hate this book. Originally published in 1978, it reads like it was written in the early '50s and consists almost entirely of anecdotes - mostly secondhand stories told by missionaries and pastors. You know the kind: "You wouldn't believe what these savages are doing!" Koch even includes the old legend of the Hippie Babysitter and the Roasted Baby, substituting devil worshippers for the hippie. He also promotes the b.s. stories of "former Satanists" like Doreen Irvine and Mike Warnke. A big part of the reason Koch falls for this blarney is explained on p. 229: "When people have been convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit and have received Jesus Christ as their Lord, they generally speak the truth."

As you've probably guessed, damn near everything that doesn't involve Bible-reading and praying to Jesus is "occult" in Koch's eyes. He devotes sections to acupuncture, homosexuality, porn, yoga, meditation, "descent from the ape", Freemasonry, and of course rock music. And Koch believes that any degree of occult influence can afflict multiple generations (the "sins of the father"), causing everything from skin diseases to demonic possession.

The wisdom Koch dispenses is often wildly contradictory. For instance, he maintains that all precognitive powers come from Satan, yet implies several times that it can be 100% accurate and that only a fool would ignore a warning from a psychic.
He stresses that some mental illnesses have natural causes and can be treated by psychiatry, while others are occult in origin and must be treated spiritually. But then he states that occult involvement isn't the cause of mental illness; it just paves the way for mental illness to develop.
He describes many cases in which occultists changed their evil ways because a spouse or parent prayed for their salvation for years. Later, he tells us never to pray for occultists unless they have explicitly expressed a desire to change, because it simply won't work.

Some of his examples are just plain creepy. Koch boasts that Mirin Dajo died because some Christians prayed for his sword-piercing trick to fail onstage, and it did. (Actually, it didn't. Dajo died after slipping into a coma, and he was not performing at the time.)
In another example, Koch writes of a man who foolishly yoked himself to a non-Christian wife and spent the rest of his life regretting it. His poor son-in-law got so tired of the woman's nagging that he boxed her ears until she shut up. The lesson seems to be that it's A-OK to smack your mother-in-law around if she's a non-Christian.
Once, when a woman with a nasty skin disease consulted him, Koch asked her "how she ever got married in such a condition." Nice.
Then there was the little girl who become "dreadfully depraved" after being treated by a nature healer. "At the age of ten she seduced a married man - not vice versa." Where have I heard that before? Oh, right, from child molesters.

Here are just a few choice bits from Occult ABC:

• Christian Scientists ganged up to psychically murder a man who left the church, giving him a skin disease that caused him to shed his skin "like a snake."
• Sorcerors in East Timor engage in "criminal activity" by projecting parts of their spirits into owls, which fly to the homes of enemies to steal pieces of the enemies' livers.
• After signing a pact with the Devil, a German woman become possessed and was repeatedly squished by a giant, invisible snake. Koch recorded about 100 cases of such blood pacts, and states that in the previous 20 years, "tens of thousands of young people have signed their souls to the Devil in their own blood." As with every other statistic in the book, we have no idea where he got these numbers.
  
• Elves are real.
• All hypnosis is dangerous, even stage hypnosis. If you allow yourself to be hypnotized by one, you may become a drunk like this one chick in Argentina. Stage hypnotists are criminals.
  
• If you go to an iridologist, you might become a wife-beating drunk like this one dude.
• If an occultist becomes a Christian, the Devil will be pissed off. So you might become a wife-beater anyway, like this other dude.
  
• UFOs are heralds of the Antichrist.
• Gospel singer Henry Drummond, before becoming a Christian, could hypnotize people at a distance of 50 miles.
• A woman with legs of unequal length went to a "spiritist healer" for healing, and the shorter leg magically grew. But when she became a Christian, it shrank.
• You must never collect bric-a-brac from non-Christian cultures. "A minister's wife on Prince Edward Island had collected a whole table-full of figures of gods and cultic objects from the mission field. Today she is in a mental institution."
• About 50% of the compulsive neurotics Koch counseled had connections with spiritism or magic in their backgrounds, hence these things cause compulsive neuroses.
• Uri Geller is really psychic, and everyone who found their cutlery bent after one of his TV broadcasts had some psychic ability, as well. "Only the ignorant make fun of these things."
  
• "Voodoo" practitioners drink blood and sacrifice children.
• In his chapter on Freemasonry, Koch writes that "French historians like Abbe Barnuel maintain that the French Revolution" was engineered by Masons. First of all, it's Barruel. Secondly, he was not a historian. He was a conspiranoid priest who later rewrote his anti-Catholic thesis, shifting blame to the Jews.
• Koch takes the view that porn is a Communist device to weaken the morals of Westerners. Perversion for Profit, anyone?
• Anonymous psychiatrist: "The ouija board is filling our pyschiatric clinics in New York."
• Koch on the manufacturers of ouija boards: "If the American government knew how much evil this one firm in Massassachusetts has brought on the American people, they would prohibit the production of these devilish boards at once."
  
• Some Africans can turn themselves into leopards.
  
• "I go to the dentist when it is necessary. But I always pray when I go, for dental treatment can last six months and cause much pain."
  
• "Undoubtedly many diseases can be diagnosed by examination of the blood. I have had a blood test myself."
• In the Arctic, archaeologists found bones that were said to be 20,000 years old. "I am somewhat skeptical about this claim."
• At a Black Mass in West Germany, the Satanists placed bottles of schnapps on their altar. LOL.
  
• On astrology: "There really ought to be a law prohibiting this and all other forms of fortune-telling. Astrology has been responsible for a number of suicides and murders."
• You must not touch a practicing medium. You might get an electric shock, like this one guy.
  

And so on. From what I've seen, all Koch's books are like this one - so I won't be reading any of them.

Christine O'Donnell & Witchcraft: We're Missing the Point

When a clip of Republican senate candidate Christine O'Donnell talking about a teenage flirtation with witchcraft on a 1999 Politically Incorrect surfaced, her many critics pounced on it immediately. But they used it in the wrong way. They used it to embarrass O'Donnell in front of her Republican cohorts and the voting public, implying that her squeaky-queen Christian image is tainted by witchcraft. What they should have done was point out the real reason why O'Donnell spoke about witchcraft in the first place: To smear witches (presumably Wiccans) as shady, sinister people who engage in ritual sacrifice.

But no one has done that, because sticking up for witches is not politically expedient. It's much more effective, and much more fun, to crow, "She used to be a witch!" and watch her squirm.

Meanwhile, the truth gets left behind in the dust. The truth is that Christine O'Donnell is a stupid bitch who doesn't know anything about religions other than her own, and pretended to have some knowledge of witchcraft to give herself "insider status" that would make her slandering of Wiccans sound halfway credible to a few morons in the viewing audience. And to give herself more street cred.

Let me explain. By making an issue of her alleged adolescent interest in some form of Satanism or whatever the hell she was babbling about, we've actually done Christine a favour, because fundamentalist Christians loooooove stories about "witches who switched" and Satanists who came over from the dark side to join the choir. This witchcraft thing only boosts O'Donnell's standing in her faith community....and that was her intention all along. You fell right in line with her plans. Way to go.

I would also like to point out that on a 1998 Politically Incorrect, O'Donnell made a statement that is much, much worse than her inane bloody Satanic altar comment. She was having a debate with Eddie Izzard about lying, insisting that it is not OK to lie under any circumstances. Izzard asked her what she would do if she was hiding Anne Frank in the attic.
After saying something about God providing her a magical way out of the situation, O'Donnell replied that she would not lie.

Christine O'Donnell would hand a teenage girl over to Nazi thugs, to die in a camp, rather than say, "No, there's no one upstairs." She'll lie about her education and maybe about her spending, but she definitely will not lie to save a life. There you go. Cast your vote for her, morons.

SME's Book of the Month: A Razor for a Goat (1962)

The mysterious and rather creepy title caught my attention, but it was the subtitle that sold me on this book: "Problems in the History of Witchcraft and Diabolism". The author, Elliot Rose, was (is?) a history professor at the University of Toronto, and this book is (according to one of the blurbs on the back) "an analysis of witchcraft in the western European culture complex from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries" which "ends up shattering most of the positions held by the various schools of witchcraft theory". Other than that, I have no idea what I'm in for.

Recent Satanic/Heavy Metal Panic in Russia

I hesitate to call these two examples "Satanic panic", because they're more like Satanic idiocy.

• A teacher in Orenburg has been fired because kids in his "school of rock" afterschool club were recreating heavy metal music videos with Satanic overtones. The director of the cultural centre at which the club convened is quoted as saying the children displayed signs of "manic depression" afterwards, as though any religion or form of entertainment could cause bipolar disorder.
  
• The city of Belgorod has issued requests to all live-music venues to stop putting on heavy metal concerts, reportedly "to promote suppression of satanic activity".
  

A Family Divided

An unhappy ending to 1989 abductions motivated by Satanic ritual abuse panic

Twenty years ago, Marvin Maple and his wife Sandra somehow got it into their heads that their two grandchildren were being ritually abused by their parents (the Maples' daughter, Debbie Baskin, and her husband Mark). The Maples alleged that Debbie and Mark belonged to a Satanic cult in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which practiced murder, child molestation, animal sacrifice, and other atrocities. So they sought, and were granted, temporary custody of 8-year-old Christie and 7-year-old Bobby. When a yearlong investigation failed to turn up even one indication of Satanic ritual abuse (or any abuse, for that matter), a court ordered the children returned to their home. At the time, far from being a Satanist, Mark Baskin was pursuing a degree in theology. He is now a Baptist minister.

Just before the Baskins were scheduled to regain custody of their children in March 1989, the Maples disappeared with the kids. For 20 years, they lived in California as the "Bunting" family; Christie was renamed Jennifer, and Bobby went by the name Jonathan.

Meanwhile, the Baskins never gave up on their missing children. They distributed fliers far and wide, gave interviews and made media appearances whenever possible, and appealed to the Maples to do the right thing. Their answering machine always contained a message for Bobby and Christie.

Then it happened. Early in February 2009, a cafe patron in San Jose overheard 73-year-old "John Bunting" recounting the abduction of his grandchildren. He was annoyed that a newspaper story about the children had described him as a kidnapper.



Police soon located Christie and Bobby. Christie, 28, was working as a nurse in San Jose, while Bobby was married with children of his own. The Baskins eagerly awaited a reunion, but feared that the kids might not feel the same way after being told for 20 years that their parents were abusive Satanists. Unfortunately, their fears manifested when they traveled to San Jose; both children refused to respond to phone calls or visits.

Sandra Maple died in 2006. Marvin faced kidnapping charges in Tennessee. In May 2009 he pled guilty to the lesser charge of custodial interference and was sentenced to just four months of probation for depriving his daughter of her family for two decades. He, too, refuses to speak with the Baskins. He says he is innocent. According to the report below, Debbie's two sisters seem to support their father.




The Baskin abduction bears a striking similarity to a 1990 grandparent abduction in Hobbes, New Mexico. This case has a happier ending, and the underhanded method used to induce stories of Satanic ritual abuse is transparent:

As described in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, Ladonna Morrow had a strained relationship with her mom, Pat Farmer, but needed her to help care for her 4-year-old son, Jared Peters, after she divorced Jared's father. Pat disapproved of the divorce, so using televangelist-produced videotapes and coaching, she taught Jared to describe being molested and ritually abused by members of a Satanic cult. Then she encouraged Jared to report this abuse, and sought sole custody of her grandson.

Two months after custody was granted to Pat Farmer, Jared's father and the authorities came to the conclusion that there was no Satanic cult and no abuse. Ladonna regained custody of Jared, but Pat was allowed monthly, unsupervised visits. She simply didn't return Jared after one of these visits.

Pat was caught in Salt Lake City two years later, and Jared was reunited with his mother.

There may be no such reunion for the Baskins. They remain a family divided and ruined by the spectre of Satanic panic.

The Devil and Anna Nicole

Immediately after her death in Febuary 2007, a note from Bob Larson, posted on his website, told us how/why Anna Nicole Smith was cursed and how we can avoid her fate by buying stuff created by (you guessed it) Bob Larson.

"Dear Friend,
Don’t let you and your family, and those you care about, suffer needlessly because Satan has the right to inflict pain and suffering through generational curses.
Remove the legal right of Satan to your life. Let me teach you the right kind of prayers and renunciations that will once and for all break Satan’s hold on you and your family.
The death of the buxom blonde Anna Nicole Smith was no shock. Frankly, I’m surprised she lived as long as she did. She died because of her self-destructive behavior, but there’s more to it than that.
The media has incessantly talked about her untimely death. Anna was a former Playboy Playmate of the year and, at age 26, married an 89-year-old billionaire. She starred in her own racy reality show, modeled for Guess? Jeans, and then touted a weight-loss program.
On February 8, she was found dead in her hotel room in Florida. We don’t know the full report on her autopsy yet, but her family, and all those around her, are convinced that drugs played a role in her tragic death. The real issue isn’t what killed her, but why she died so young while surrounded by money, fame and the attention of millions.
The autopsy will only tell what physically killed her, not the spiritual reason behind her death. Anna Nicole was set up by Satan. Generational and family curses were hanging over her head from the day she was born. These curses grew stronger the longer she lived.
How can I so positively say I know what killed her? After three decades of confronting the forces of darkness and performing more exorcisms than anyone on the planet, I have learned valuable lessons about the destructive way that demons operate through curses. Let me explain how Ms. Smith’s life was under a curse.
Although her life seemed to be rich and glamorous, it was not always like that. She hungered for attention. In one interview she said, "I love the paparazzi . . . I've always liked attention. I didn't get it very much growing up and I always wanted to be, you know, noticed." Why didn’t she get attention growing up? It probably had to do with the fact that her father abandoned her at a very young age. In a 2004 People magazine interview she said, “I don’t have any good memories from Christmas when I was a girl.” Her mother raised Anna (known then as Vicki Lynn Hogan) as a single parent. This curse of abandonment literally turned her over to the devil. If her mother had known what to do, she could have broken the curse. Anna’s life indicates that her mother did not break that curse.
On my DVD HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES I explain in detail how Satan continues his evil through the family bloodline, generation to generation. You must see this DVD to prevent Satan’s attacks on your children and grandchildren. You may not live a wild and immoral life like Ms. Smith, but you may still be cursed by your ancestors.
When she was a child, Ms. Smith declared she wanted to grow up to be like Marilyn Monroe. Well, she succeeded, down to the circumstances of her death. By wanting to be like Marilyn Monroe, Ms. Smith spoke a curse over her life and the devil used it to his evil advantage. Those who have seen our DVD HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES understand how unnecessary this tragedy was. The curse could have been broken. Also, notice that Anna’s 20-year-old son died just months before her, likely from the same cause—drugs and a destructive lifestyle. Nicole was born with a curse, so was her son, and so was her new baby daughter that lawyers and ex-lovers are fighting over.
Family curses can be broken! Generational curses can be stopped!
In addition to the DVD HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES I have especially prepared a message using the death of Ms. Smith to explain exactly how curses work. It’s called, THE CURSE OF ANNA NICOLE SMITH.
For your gift of $50 or more, I’ll send both DVDs, plus one of the most important documents you’ll ever hold in your hands: THE LAWSUIT AGAINST SATAN. This spiritually legal transaction will teach you how to legally confront the devil and file a lawsuit against him in the courts of heaven. Thousands have done this and have begun a journey to health, prosperity, and blessings they had never known.
Just print out the form below, or email me immediately to get:
● DVD - HOW TO BREAK GENERATIONAL CURSES
● DVD - THE CURSE OF ANNA NICOLE SMITH
● THE LAWSUIT AGAINST SATAN
We leave for Africa in a couple of months and we need to start right now raising the $50,000 missions budget for this outreach. Your gift of $5000, $500, $150, or at least $50 or more will bring thousands to Christ and plant healing & deliverance teams across the continent.
Call, write, or email me today with your gift of $50 or more and get on the way to breaking every curse of the devil over you and your family.

Doing What Jesus Did,
Pastor Bob Larson

P. S. Make sure to sign up for our April 18-20 DWJD Training Institute on the subject “Last Days Deliverance - confronting the demons of pop culture.”

Soon after Larson offered his handy DIY curse-removal kit for sale ("like Jesus did"), the host of the Austin, Texas anti-occult cable access TV show The Freeman Perspective offered up the theory that infant Dannielynn is a Moonchild summoned by Anna Nicole's Satanic Illuminati mind-control handlers. I won't comment on Larson's motives - I think we can all guess what they are - but it seems that "Freeman" believed every word he said. According to him, Zsa Zsa Gabor’s eccentric husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, really is the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter Dannielynn, as he insisted (DNA testing revealed Larry Birkhead to be the father, but never mind that; facts must never get in the way of a good conspiracy theory). Von Anhalt was the result of Nazi experiments in breeding perfect Aryan specimens who could take over the world (clearly unsuccessful). Anna Nicole was a mind-controlled slave programmed through Satanic ritual abuse to have multiple personalities (he points to the infamous Mushroom Clown video as evidence that she had a little-girl alter personality). Lawyer/partner Howard Stern was her primary mind control handler. And Dannielynn is a Moonchild.

The Nazi breeding part of Freeman's theory is drawn from a rumour that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is the biological daughter of Adolf Hitler. This shouldn’t even be considered a possibility, as Merkel was born 9 years after the Fuhrer's death, but the explanation is that the horrifically sadistic Auschwitz doctor Carl Clauberg was able to freeze some of Hitler’s sperm and inseminate Eva Braun’s younger sister, Gretl, with it years later. The rumour has it that Clauberg was “the father of artificial insemination”, but in actuality his Auschwitz experiments centered around forced sterilization of Jewish women. Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1986 book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide , noted “Clauberg is reported to have told prisoners he planned artificial-insemination experiments, and there is one report of his admitting to two assistants that he had future plans for experiments in both natural and artificial insemination.” (272) There are no reports that Clauberg actually achieved any success with insemination; he is by no means the father of the procedure, which is derived from much older methods of animal husbandry.

Gretl Braun did have a daughter, Eva Barbara Fegelein, named after her Aunt Eva, but she was born on May 5, 1945, and committed suicide in 1975 - during the same period Merkel was studying physics at the University of Leipzig. Clearly, the Merkel-Hitler rumour is a fantasy aimed at defaming a controversial and much-maligned public figure: G8 member, first female chancellor of German, proponent of EU expansion. She’s ideal fodder for anti-Illuminati conspiracy theories.

The Moonchild was a concept introduced in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. It was described as something like an AntiChrist and/or an incarnate god, a child "resembling man, and possessing those qualities of man which distinguish him from beasts, namely intellect and power of speech, but neither begotten in the manner of human generation, nor inhabited by a human soul." Rather than being conceived and born, the Moonchild would apparently be summoned through magick ritual.

In 1946, California rocket scientist/occultist Jack Parsons attempted to summon a Moonchild into the womb of his girlfriend following a complex set of rituals he called The Babalon Working. His assistant in this endeavor was, believe it or not, L. Ron Hubbard. The intended vessel/mother of the Moonchild, Marjorie Cameron, never manifested any signs of pregnancy, but to the end of her life she believed that she really was the incarnation of Thelema's Mother of Abominations, the Scarlet Woman of The Book of the Law. The “birth” of the Moonchild was a metaphysical event, taking place on the ethereal plane. After Parsons' untimely death, Marjorie Cameron performed a ritual to conceive a posthumous child with him a la Osiris and Isis, whom she christened Wormwood. This "child", too, manifested only on the ethereal plane.

Freeman's theory is, essentially, that genetically engineered Nazi Satanists are trying to take over the world by impregnating their mind-controlled robotic priestesses with antichrist Moonchildren.
Crowley’s Book of the Law described the Moonchild as "mightier than all the kings of the earth".

So, if you can imagine that the daughter of Anna Nicole Smith will someday rise up to rule over us all, this may be the conspiracy theory for you.

Thank You, Sheldon

Two years ago a Charismatic Christian named Sheldon shared with me some of the goofiest, weirdest examples of Satanic panic I have ever heard. And that's saying something. As you peruse the Deep Thoughts of Sheldon, remember: He believed every word of this stuff, and I doubt he's the only one. It's folks like Sheldon who make me realize that the work of combatting anti-occult misinformation is far from over. We've got a lot to do. So in a way, I should thank him for reminding me.

- As "explained" in a YouTube slideshow that has since vanished, the Jonas Brothers (Evangelical Christian teens who sing for Disney) could be demonic entities. In the '80s and '90s, they were an obscure Scandinavian black metal band called The Sanoj Brotherhood. By the power of Satan, they morphed themselves into wholesome American "brothers" in order to entice young girls to the dark side. The dark side of what? Shitty pop music?
The only "evidence" for this is that that Jonas is Sanoj spelled backward. Oh, and the music of both bands sucks some very serious ass.
Saturday Night Live spoofed this on Valentine's Day by having Andy Samberg confront the Jonas Brothers with videos of an '80s hair band. "This is you guys, isn't it? Are you Highlanders?"
The Sanoj Brotherhood theory seems to have died, but playing J.B. songs backwards to decipher Satanic messages is now very popular on YouTube.

- Criss Angel is probably using demonic powers granted to him by the Devil. I asked Sheldon why he only suspects Criss Angel of making a pact with Satan, and not, say, Doug Henning. Sheldon's reply: How else could he lie on broken glass and be run over by a steamroller without being harmed?
This theory might have come from a very strange anti-occult site called Satan's Fake Apocalypse , which asks such questions as "Criss Angel: Black Magician or Illusionist?" and "Was Bertrand Russell Possessed?". Other articles include "Programming Kids for Satanism with Video Games", "SRA: the appalling and pervasive reality hidden in plain sight", and "Demonic possession: sociopathy on steroids".

- Sheldon claimed he has worked with people from seven different Satanic covens operating in our province (which is overwhelmingly conservative and Christian, by the way). He knows Satanic breeders in our area. Also, a local man told him he was allowed to wander through a local Mormon "temple" (presumably a ward house) and discovered a room draped in black, adorned with an upside-down crucifix. My Mormon friend interrupted at this point in the conversation, for obvious reasons. He even offered to take Sheldon through the ward house in question to satisfy himself that no such room exists. Sheldon declined.

- Todd Bentley, the preacher who blessed Sheldon and his girlfriend, is a legitimate healer. Bentley's the guy who made a name for himself by leading a spectacle-laden revival down in Florida in 2008, healing the sick and elderly by kicking, punching, and kneeing them. Sheldon informed me that God asked Bentley to smack people around just to test him; God prevented actual physical contact from happening (the numerous YouTube videos of Bentley using his "knee of God" indicate otherwise). Sheldon believes Bentley's claim of raising a dozen people from the dead during the revival; this is a routine occurrence in the Chinese underground church, he said.
At any rate, Sheldon no longer believes that Bentley is a righteous man, because he was caught having an affair with a staffer. But the staffer was probably a plant, hired to lead Bentley astray.

- It's good that California's Proposition 8 passed, according to Sheldon. This will avert earthquakes. 'Cause we all know that gayness, rather than seismic activity, creates earthquakes, right?