Bonus Sample: Swan Song Series 4 | Michelle Remembers: Context & History
There's no Teal Swan without the Satanic Panic. And there's no Satanic Panic without the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith.In this first of three segments on this melted book, Matthew and Julian cover its historical, cultural, and mass media context. We start with a review of a 1985 20/20 episode called “The Devil Worshippers” for a taste of how mainstream outlets hosted cranks like Pazder, giving him a hall pass on evidence, and overlooking how his Catholic fetishes and paranoias played a huge role in the fictions he spun. The post Vatican 2 context is crucial, especially as we bear witness to the current political triumphs of Trad-Cath propaganda and politics in our post-Roe, QAnon -fried world. For help, we look to an excellent essay by social historian Bernard Doherty about the genre and elements of the Catholic Horror Film, which begins with Rosemary's Baby in 1968. This reactionary genre attempted to respond to modernizing—or postmodernizing, as Jordan Peterson might say—changes in Church doctrine.Bottom line? The Satanic Panic largely begins in and is sustained by Catholic-flavoured conspirituality anxiety about secularization, sex, babies, and abortion.Show NotesMichael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall cover Michelle Remembers with great skill. "20/20" the Devil Worshippers - May 16, 1985West of Memphis movie review & film summary (2012) | Roger EbertMel Gibson: The man without a pope - Where Peter IsThe Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology | Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
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This bonus sample comes to you from our early access Patreon collection called Swan Song Series, in which we examine the historical and cultural roots that inform and fuel the teal swan spectacle.
The full version of this episode will show up on this feed sometime in the future, but if you'd like to hear it now and support our growing research and publishing initiatives, please pledge $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality for access to this and hundreds of hours of bonus media.
Our own three-part pathway through this material will have a more narrow frame because we'll be thinking particularly about the legacy of Michelle Remembers in relation to conspirituality and Teal Swan.
So, our plan for this episode is to deliver some historical, cultural, and mass media context On the mass media front, we have clips of a 2020 episode from 1985.
It's called The Devil Worshippers, and it will spin your head around like poor Regan in The Exorcist.
So you'll hear us do some bits on it.
It's hilarious, but it's also harrowing to consider just how pilled network news was in the 1980s, which only added kerosene to the satanic panic fire.
We're also today going to introduce Lawrence Pazder, the co-author but likely the lead or main or sole author of Michelle Remembers, but for the transcripts of the sessions, which we'll get to.
In light of his devout Catholicism, we're going to look at some 20th century Catholic church history that I believe is crucial here, not only for understanding, Michelle remembers, but also for understanding the emergent political triumphs of traditional Catholic propaganda and but also for understanding the emergent political triumphs of traditional Catholic propaganda and politics, especially now in this post-Roe and
And to help with that, I'll be citing a really good essay by the social historian Bernard Daugherty about the genre and elements of the Catholic horror film, which gets rolling in the 1970s in part, he argues, as a panicked response to the liberalizations of the Vatican II Council, which had wrapped up in Rome in 1965.
five.
but was continuing to send modernizing, or post-modernizing, as Jordan Peterson might say, shockwaves through the global church straight through to the 1980s.
So, I'll do a brief segment on Vatican II in a bit, but for now I'll just say that the Satanic panic largely begins in, and is sustained by, Catholic-flavored paranoias about Satanism and sex, But more profoundly, about the secular melting away of metaphysical devotion.
So that's today.
Part two will concentrate on the front matter of the book and the prefatory notes from the publisher, Pazder, and the Catholic authorities he tries to rope into his macabre fantasy and they sort of like dip their toes in, as we'll see.
We'll argue that the primary somatic fascination of the book is with reproduction and abortion, and we'll do a little bit of psychology on the contradictions that wave big red flags.
And then part three, we'll get into the book itself, the imagery, tactics, the peak moments, as well as its bone crushing boredom.
To begin, Julian, I think you have some introductory details on this book as a literary event and cultural phenomenon.
Yeah, so Michelle Remembers is first published in 1980 by St.
Martin's Press.
A couple years later, 1982, Random House Value Publishing puts out an edition.
And we'll cover the publisher's foreword in part two, but the basic bones are that Pazder and Smith, his patient, are writing a stilted third-person account of their quote-unquote therapy based on hundreds of hours of transcripts in which it appears as if Smith is speaking under Pazder's hypnotic suggestion.
There are tons of indications in the text, we'll look at this in our part three, that Pazder is not only ruining the therapy in a way that erases Smith's agency as a child and as an adult, but also swallows up whatever her own contributions to the book might have turned out to be.
I can't find precise sales figures for the book, but I've seen journalist estimates selling at least hundreds of thousands of copies.
But it's not really the book sales that I think are the lead here, it's the virality of the ideas and what that does for Pazder in the, at that time, emerging economy of sensationalist daytime TV talk shows and newstainment special reports like the 2021.
He really hit a moment, didn't he?
Yeah, timing.
Timing is everything.
Those vectors of virality for the satanic ritual abuse themes will in turn make Pazder into an expert on a phenomenon that he conjured out of thin air, but which will destroy the lives of many, many innocent real people.
As with Michelle's detailed and fantastical tale, not a single shred of evidence for any of the 12,000 documented accusations in America alone was ever found to confirm the allegations of organized ritual abuse.
And the first victim of his unethical and opportunistic hubris is, of course, Michelle herself.
But then her family, her father Jack Proby is quoted as saying, the book took me four months to read and I cried all the time.
I kept saying to myself, dear God, how could anyone do this to their dead mother?
Notice he doesn't say how could anyone do this to my poor daughter?
He says, how could she and how could the therapist do this to the memory of the woman who raised her?
No evidence ever corroborated the detailed accounts that she gives of gruesome rituals being held in very specific cemeteries, famous court churchyards, or the mausoleum of a British Columbian politician.
Multiple murders and dismemberments of stillborn babies are mentioned.
There's a network of local cult members who were all required to have a certain finger amputated as part of their initiation.
None of this ever appears to have been corroborated.
Neighbors who lived in the houses immediately adjacent to their humble childhood home, so this is like a driveway away, said it's just impossible that they wouldn't have heard the torturous events that she described unfolding in her house's basement.
Michelle's adult medical examinations, which were not only encouraged but also referred by Pazder to people that he knew, revealed no history of injuries consistent with the sordid tale.
But this lack of corroboration didn't stop Pazder from taking an advance worth the equivalent of 1.2 million Canadian in today's economy, or $342,000 US at that time.
That's amazing.
He then would go on in 1985 to be featured in the definitive ABC 2020 report on satanic ritual abuse, called The Devil Worshippers, that purported to alert the public to an epidemic of satanic ritual abuse, sacrifice of abducted children, and what to look out for in your kids.
