Raising the Devil

During the 1970s, argues English and American studies professor Ellis (Penn State Hazleton), Satanism reemerged in American and English society--at least according to the media and to Pentecostals, who, by the mid-1980s, claimed that thousands of Satanic cults had sprung up all across America. Satanists purportedly drank animal blood and participated in bizarre sexual practices. But many of these so-called Satanic rituals, says Ellis, were really just ordinary folk practices. The observers, worried about restive, acid-tripping youth, often misunderstood these traditional rituals or simply invented scary scenarios from whole cloth. Rumormongers were especially instrumental in fomenting the Satanism scare. In one Pennsylvania town, locals spread the word that there would be a ritual murder or suicide at the high school prom; the gossip had roots in the suicide of one teenager who was rumored to have flirted with the occult. While Ellis admits that there is a grain of truth in the anticult activists' fears, the ""ritual abuse investigations"" they launched in the 1980s were mostly wastes of time and resources, damaging the reputations of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent people. Although his thesis about the media's role in sensationalizing folk practices is intriguing, Ellis's argument is difficult to follow and too frequently gets lost amidst all the good storytelling. Aren't professional folklorists supposed to do more than merely repeat the stories of the people they study? (Oct.)