Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (review)

Despite the recent proliferation of legend scholarship and the resulting widespread awareness that legends are part of legend complexes that interact in intricate ways with social reality and the mass media, very few scholars have attempted what Bill Ellis does in this book: the careful, methodical study of a legend complex and its interaction with the surrounding context—social, historical, and global. The satanic legend complex of the late 1980s focused on Satanism as a worldwide conspiracy behind such crimes as child sexual abuse, ritual murder, and cattle mutilation. Raising the Devil traces this legend back to the early twentieth century and across the Atlantic to Britain, where it morphed into related variants. Ellis reveals a story that is nothing short of fascinating: how legends, the ultimate shape-shifters, diffuse, adapt, and are appropriated by ideologically motivated parties to fit specific cultural and historical circumstances.

Ellis's innovative approach combines the theories of legend scholarship with those of belief scholars who, following the work of David Hufford, have focused on the experience-based nature of certain beliefs. He postulates that legends about Satan may be rooted in experiences that emerge through a host of vernacular practices that bring on alternate states of consciousness, during which material from the individual's psyche mixes freely with cultural and religious imagery to produce sometimes startling results. For instance, during charismatic Christian religious ecstasy, an individual may occasionally manifest voices or personalities that appear to witnesses as decidedly ungodly, leading them to conclude that the individual may be possessed by the devil. Ellis notes that similar, apparently demonic personalities can also emerge during the use of Ouija boards. Thus, techniques that access the autonomous imagination through alternate states of consciousness can unleash both positive, healing experiences and frightening negative ones, and vernacular beliefs about demonic possession may be rooted in some of these negative experiences.

In tracing the development of the satanic legend complex on American soil, Ellis demonstrates that Pentecostal Christianity, with its emphasis on possession by the Holy Spirit, divine healing, and deliverance from demons, needed to distinguish its own spiritual gifts from forms of what had been categorized as "magic." In order to do so, Pentecostals constructed "an evil satanic counterpart . . . to justify their revival of spiritual gifts that the theology-based European religious tradition had suppressed for centuries" (p. 10). Ellis goes on to examine the social context of the 1980s that led to the reemergence of the satanic legend complex in full force, including the claims of the psychologically unstable (and their apparently easily duped therapists) that satanic ritual abuse was occurring on a mass scale. At the same time, the existence of self-proclaimed witches in the new religions such as Wicca and Neo-Paganism was just the "proof" the legend complex needed to expand further into popular culture.

Ellis also traces the legend complex across the Atlantic to Britain, which had its own fears of witchcraft and black magic during the economically depressed 1980s, and he examines the role of media in a highly publicized hunt for a "vampire"—actually a series of grave desecrations—in Highgate Cemetery. He then returns to North America to look at legends of cattle mutilations in the western states and their link with the satanic legend complex.

This book is not the first study of Satanism scares in society, but it is the first to take such a broad geographic and historical scope. More important, it raises substantial questions about the instrumentalization of folk and vernacular discourses by hegemonic forces. Ellis argues that folk legends and beliefs about Satanism are, for the most part, benign, even helpful, in that they give a name to puzzling syndromes and malaises and suggest a cure—exorcism—that seems to help many believers overcome their problems. Although they can indeed scapegoat certain individuals in society, it...