UNLOCKED: 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. CORRECTIONS: My dad informs me that I've made some Pope mistakes! Pius X was the last legitimate Pope according to the sedavacantists, and John XXIII, not Paul XXIII, opened the Vatican 2 proceedings. Thx dad. MRShow NotesMichael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall cover Michelle Remembers with great skill. "20/20" the Devil Worshippers - May 16, 1985West of Memphis movie review & film summaryMel Gibson: The man without a popeThe 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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Hello Conspiratuality listeners, it's Matthew here.
This is a special, unlocked episode from our Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
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Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
Welcome, listeners, to installment four of the Swan Song series.
This one is called Michelle Remembers History and Context.
Now, this is part of an early access bonus series, and listeners, you can further support this new vein of research and production we're initiating by telling friends about it if you think they might benefit from this work and the hundreds of hours of bonus content we have archived to Patreon already.
We have a number of series like this in the works.
Hello, Julian.
Today is the day.
We've talked about it, I've been dreaming about it, we've both suffered through reading it, and now we're talking today about Michelle Remembers and I Don't Know How I Feel About It.
How about you?
Well, I would describe it as equal parts fascinating, disgusting, and infuriating, but we do have to talk about it.
Because really, this book is the seminal influence of the entire satanic panic of the 80s and 90s, and the chaos that lives on in its wake, really.
I think for that period, culturally, I was starting to see, like, it's a bit like the Crucible, which, you know, listeners will know is Arthur Miller's play about the Salem Witch Trials, but really it was a metaphor for McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
But that comparison still fails because...
Miller wrote a deliberate work of fiction based on true events to show the dangers of a moral panic and social contagion of the satanic kind amongst children and teenagers, but really how that was being reenacted as all of the anxiety around creeping communism, whereas Michel Remembers would maybe be more like some kind of earnest Puritan text from the 1600s about the dangers of dancing in moonlight.
Or like a propaganda screed promoting the Red Scare in the 1940s.
Yeah, that's really on point, as we'll discuss later.
Put another way, we might say, to keep playing with comparisons here, that Michelle remembers is the Out of Shadows of the 1980s.
And that's the QAnon propaganda film that sort of gets the ball rolling for a certain audience around the alleged vast secret Hollywood pedophile network.
Yeah, totally on-point comparison, and I think it speaks to why we'll be taking this amount of time with this truly atrocious book.
And before we begin, I want to pay homage to Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbs, who already broke their brains on this book with Your Wrongabout Podcast's five-part series.
They took a very meticulous line-reading pathway through this book.
And it's excellent in all of the ways that they can be excellent and we'll link it in the notes.
And I'll also be citing some of Marshall's super cogent observations because she's really an excellent reader for this book.
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 politics, especially now in this post-Roe and QAnon-fried world.
And to help with that, I'll be citing a really good essay by the social historian Bernard
Dougherty 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.
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 we'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, 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 publishers forward 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 2020 report.
He really had 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.
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.
This not only set off a cultural madness driven by daytime TV hosts like Oprah and Geraldo, but it also elevated Pazder to being seen for a time as the world's foremost expert on this fantasy topic.
So, just as a thumbnail to begin, who is Lawrence Pazder?
We can let him speak for himself in the first page of chapter one.
Julian?
In his early 40s, Dr. Pazder was warm, manly, soft-spoken, what people who live elsewhere consider the typical Westerner.
He was lithe and athletic, a tennis player and skier, and had earned a brown belt in judo.
His hair was brown, beginning to turn to silver.
Oh, stop.
So, Michelle remembers publisher Thomas Congdon has a slightly more formal CV in the first graphs of his note from the publisher.
From my first meeting with Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, I knew that their book would be not only important but also unusual.
I felt that as readers began I felt that as readers began it, they would want information about the authors and the writing of the book.
Dr. Pazder's credentials are impressive.
He obtained his M.D.
from the University of Alberta in 1961, his Diploma in Tropical Medicine from the University of Liverpool in 1962, and in 1968, his Specialist Certificate in Psychiatry and his Diploma in Psychological Medicine from McGill University.
In 1971, he was made a fellow of Canada's Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons.
He's a member of three Canadian professional associations and of the American Psychiatric Association as well.
He practiced medicine in West Africa and has participated in medical task forces and health organizations.
He has been chairman of the Mental Health Committee of the Health Planning Council for British Columbia, a member of the staff of two hospitals in Victoria, British Columbia, the Royal Jubilee and the Victoria General.
He is in private practice with a group of five psychiatrists.
His professional papers include a study of the long-term effects of stress upon concentration camp victims.
So, it all sounds okay.
Apparently there's a solid medical training here, but I want to concentrate on one standout detail.
Which is that he practiced medicine in West Africa.
Now, this would have been in the late 60s or the early 1970s.
In fact, it looks like if he did tropical medicine in Liverpool in 62 and then in 68 he gets his certificate in psychiatry.
It's probably in those years there.
It looks like Like in between?
Like in between, he's doing some special training in tropical medicine so that he can go on a mission.
You know, I've tried for a few months to track down personal contacts for Pazdur, including family, who might be able to shed more light on his biography, but no luck.
And I don't think I'm going to pursue it any further because my sense is that his five children are leading extremely private lives, understandably.
We do know, however, that what he says about his West African experience is, you know, quite stunning.
And the context is that it's about two-thirds of the way through Michelle Remembers.
And Michelle has decided, of course not under the influence of her handsome psychiatrist and eventual lover, because we didn't mention yet that they eventually get married.
Spoiler!
Now she decides at this point to convert to Catholicism, that this is going to be part of her sort of therapeutic repair.
However, in one of the masses that they attend together that leads up to her baptism in the local church, she notices, strangely, that one of the pews is carved with a satanic symbol that she says that she saw in one of her quote-unquote recalled memories back from the 1950s.
Now, she dutifully alerts Pazder and the parish priest, and they make plans to burn the pew.
And as they're preparing to do that, Pazder runs off and gets his camera, and then when he photographs the burning pew, he claims that a ghostly image of the Virgin Mary appears in the wafting smoke.
Now, we might talk about that picture in episode 3, but the point is here that he has a memory at this point.
Dr. Pazder, during his time as a physician in West Africa, had become fascinated with African ceremonies and had taken countless photos of them.
Many ceremonies involved the burning of juju, little dolls and amulets used in black magic, and replacing them with a cross.
This as a way of trying to get rid of the animistic beliefs among West Africans in the spirits of the jungle.
Dr. Pastor had built up a very extensive collection of photographs of such ceremonies, planning someday to use them in some sort of transcultural study.
Now, as Father Gee prepared to light the bonfire, Dr. Pastor felt strongly compelled to take photographs of it.
Okay, so... It's almost like the power of Christ compelled him.
Right, almost.
So, it seems to me like a near certainty, given the central role of Catholicism in his life, that he is on a religious mission.
I don't know why any kind of medical practice would involve Such involvement with these, this sounds like very strange rituals with some big layered colonial echoes in them.
You know, here's a white doctor from Canada in West Africa who's performing perhaps an evangelizing role.
And then later, it's not surprising he comes to see his star client as her own kind of landscape that conceals dark secrets that have to be confessed and purged.
But I want to point out, I think you'd probably appreciate the burning of the bench to take a picture of the ghost of Mary having nothing to do, it's very, very separate from animistic beliefs, right?
Wouldn't you agree, Julian?
Yeah, I didn't realize you were about to say that because as I hear that colonial kind of description, immediately I think, okay, wait, you're taking pictures of a ritual from another culture that is no less kind of filled with magic and shall we say superstition than your own kind of Catholic conventions.
And that's always the glaring kind of It's one of my favorite, and I mean most hated, I guess, aspects of Catholic absurdity, which is these pretensions to reason and civilized philosophy while every day they are doing a magic spell over bread and wine, while every day they are claiming that water can be made holy, and while every day they are daydreaming about the resurrection.
And then claiming to see the Virgin Mary appearing in a puff of smoke from a pew that must be burnt because of a satanic symbol card.
It's incredible.
And I'm still confused about what's going on in this passage.
I think Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbs, they read it as though whoever he was with, the attendant doctors and whoever the religious officials were, We're actively burning the amulets and replacing them with crosses to get rid of the animistic beliefs.
Now, is that the sort of colonial presence doing that, or is that the converted West African people that they're talking about doing that themselves?
It's not clear to me.
But in any case, there's… There's progress being claimed here through the ascendancy of one religion over another.
It's very uncomfortable.
And it reminds me of how many Catholics I've seen treat icons of the Virgin Mary as if they were living beings, this whole sort of Catholic magic stuff, while they continue to decry the brutishness of so-called pagans or animists.
I had a friend who told me a story about how in one Italian fishing village, they would take their statue of Mary out on a tour around the harbour, propped up on the prow of the main fishing boat.
And so the friend was in the town and asked whether Mary was blessing the harbour.
And the priest said, nah, she just likes to go out for fresh air and see the beach.
Did you ever see Lars and the Real Girl?
It's an earlier Ryan Gosling film.
It's actually a very, very poignant, psychologically interesting piece, but ostensibly it's about a man who falls in love with a blow-up doll and demands that all the people around him treat her as if she's really alive, and it's unclear to what extent he's serious about this.
Did you just compare the Virgin Mary statue to the blow-up doll in a Ryan Gosling film?
In terms of how this guy is talking about her, right?
Alright, moving on.
You know, I think, I'm glad that the transcultural study didn't come to light because, you know, it probably would have been paired up with an art exhibit.
Right?
With his pictures.
Yeah.
Tea and deviled eggs.
Absolutely.
But I wanted to ask you, growing up in, you know, present day Zimbabwe and then South Africa, did you have any firsthand experience of this kind of hypocritical Catholic or Christian missionary attitudes towards Africans?
Gosh, you know, I think the problem with, I was so young when I left Zimbabwe, but the problem with trying to do any kind of comparison with South Africa is how thoroughly apartheid segregated people.
I was never exposed to any overt indigenous spirituality or ceremonies or anything like that, and they weren't really talked about.
I mean, I have vague images in my mind of them maybe being represented in some way in media as having the sort of typical, you know, overtones, condescending overtones toward the superstitions of the natives kind of thing.
But no, it wasn't a big part of Of my experience, and I also was not, even though I went to a church school, I wasn't a religious kid, I didn't come from a religious family, so I wasn't really tuned in to, or exposed too much to that kind of narrative.
Well, you also weren't in America in 1985 to see this 2020 episode that marks the transition of Lawrence Pazdur from, you know, respectable psychiatrist in Victoria to international satanic panic celebrity. So we're going to turn now to that
episode just for a little nostalgic tour through his ascendancy. And you know, I'll
just start by saying that we complain a lot about Gaia TV, but I think we can reflect
on the possibility that Gaia may have learned everything they needed to know about exploitative
sensationalism from the leading newscasters of the mid 80s, in this case, Hugh Downs and
Barbara Walters. And And I couldn't figure out who the correspondent was for this one, but he does just an absolute garbage job with, you know, Geraldo Rivera-style bravado.
And I also, I have this feeling that they are trying to compete as a news source with a rising tide of exploitative entertainment.
And I think the thing that underlines that competition as they open their episode is that they introduce the topic of Satanism by playing more than a minute from 1968's Rosemary's Baby by Roman Polanski, and they make the following claims and conflations.
It's the way some people interpret the Bible.
The book of Revelations, where it's written, Satan can be identified by the number 666, calling him the beast which deceiveth the whole world.
The goat's head is a key symbol of the beast.
Yet throughout history, Satan has taken on many different shapes and disguises.
He's widely considered by conventional religions as the embodiment of evil, on a mission to tempt man to sin and destroy God's kingdom.
Today we have found Satan is alive and thriving, or at least plenty of people believe he is.
His followers are extremely secretive, but found in all walks of life.
Modern Satanism was shockingly dramatized on the screen in the mid-60s with the release of Rosemary's Baby.
What have you done to it?
What have you done to it?
It's a movie that's been described as the best advertisement that devil worship has ever had.
What are you talking about?
Guy's eyes are normal!
What have you done to him?
You maniac!
Satan is his father, not Guy.
He came up from hell and begat a son of mortal woman.
Hail Satan!
Hail Satan!
Satan is his father, and his name is Adrian.
He shall overthrow the mighty in their temples.
He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance.
The zeal of these fictional devil worshippers is strikingly similar to that of real life Satanists.
God is dead!
Hail Satan!
Shockingly, strikingly similar to that of real-life Satanic readers of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Right.
You know, I've got the transcript here, and I think it's worth looking at a couple of lines.
You know, the goat's head is a key symbol of the beast, yet throughout history Satan has taken on many different shapes and disguises.
Today, we have found Satan is alive and thriving, or at least plenty of people believe he is.
It's kind of like the huge, if true, meme that goes around amongst conspiracy theorists.
It blows my mind that this is on ABC.
When did 2020 run, like 10 o'clock at night or something like that?
I don't know, but it's incredible that it's on any kind of channel claiming to be news.
Right, and so then they end this line you already referenced, the zeal of these fictional devil worshippers in this movie that our reporting is so thin we had to resort to in order to create a bang to open our segment, the zeal of these fictional devil worshippers is strikingly similar to that of real life Satanists.
Of course, they don't have any real live Satanists on film, as we'll go on to hear.
Anyway... Well wait, but not only that, they also say that it's the best advertisement that Satanism has ever had, while in the background they're playing Mia Farrow screaming about something absolutely awful having been done to her
baby.
That somehow this is an amazing advertisement for Satanism.
And the other thing, you mentioned paganism just a little bit ago.
I want to just say here that so much of this imagery that gets associated with quote-unquote
Satanism really over time is taking any of the symbols from local pagan religions that
have been converted, you know, that have been invaded and occupied and converted by Christianity
and turning that into representing Satanism.
Well, Pazder appears in this special, and we're going to give some clips of him because it's pretty rare to find him on film, actually, and to hear his voice.
Here he is, this is maybe two-thirds of the way through the spot, and he's chatting about how Satanists are completely dedicated to death.
The author of a popular book on Satanism, Dr. Lawrence Pazdur.
Children are involved in graveyards and crematoria, in funeral parlors, because one of the primary focuses of these people is death.
Everything is attempted to be destroyed and killed.
In that child, and in society, everything is goodness.
And death is a major preoccupation.
Yeah, so the main preoccupation is death, but there's also this kind of panic around nothing at the center is holding anymore.
There is, nihilism is reigning.
There's no meaning.
The next clip involves His thoughts on the sexual abuse content of ritual abuse, and he frames it as being about denying God, not about taking away somebody's agency, not about expressing power, but that sexual abuse occurs so that the abuser can force the victim to deny the existence of God.
Now, you'll hear the correspondent talking with anonymous sources to begin with.
Number four, sexual abuse aimed at destroying faith in God.
It's being described by numerous children.
What were the parallels with what the boys have told you and the worship of Satan?
Well, first of all, the sexual abuse, the pornography, which always seems to go hand in hand.
The boys talked about how these people actually said, I hate God.
And they used a very deep voice when they talked about that.
One of their primary aims is to destroy the belief system within a child, to make the child a child.
It's difficult to believe, but in every case we examined, children described it.
all matter of flesh, all matter of church institution, all matter of sign and symbol
that a child could in any way be attached to.
Cannibalism, it's difficult to believe, but in every case we examined, children described it.
The hearts were cut out, and the children were made to chew
pieces of these children's hearts, pieces of their flesh.
Yeah, so there's a... Huge if true, huge if true.
I left the little taster of cannibalism there at the end.
Well it's not just a taster, it's the fact that the word chew...
That's a very visceral kind of way of talking about it.
It's interesting, too, that the correspondent says, you know, in every case the children described it, and the person who's actually speaking is probably a woman in her 50s or 60s or something like that.
Maybe she's reporting what she's heard from children.
It's not exactly clear, but there's something that really bothers me about I mean, this whole thing bothers me, but Pazder's rationale for why abusers abuse is not really an expression of empathy for the victim or the survivor.
It's something else.
He's directing his attention towards there's something holy in the child, a way in which
they would believe about God or the world, and that's what's being taken away from them.
It's a very odd thing.
It's something, it reminds me of something we talked about on the Temple of the Gun episode,
which is the inversion, and perhaps we could even say the perversion of the relationship
between metaphorical and literal language or domains of reality, and to reduce the literal
sexual abuse of a child to being about the destroying of their ideological or metaphysical worldview.
It's grotesque while at the same time literalizing all of this weird psychological archetypal imagery as existing in the world.
It's all topsy-turvy.
I mean, it comes out in Michelle Remembers as Pazder continues to talk about how Michelle has some inner core of goodness or beauty or innocence that is resilient and eternal.
It seems that he's talking about her soul, but in this clip, he's talking also about the fact that the child would have Did he use the word institutional?
He didn't say structure, did he?
I kind of imagined something like there's a little church inside the person and what happens with abuse is that the abuser goes in and smashes up the church and that's what the problem is.
It's not that... Yes, and that's what the sexual abuse is intended to do.
Yes, it's not intended to hold power over.
It's not intended to humiliate.
It's not intended to...
It's a weird overreach and kind of like dehumanizing symbolic language that's just... I don't understand it.
It's very strange.
In the next clip, Pazder talks about why there's no evidence for what he's talking about.
These people cover their tracks very well.
When they dispose of a body, they use that body as well.
They will use, as I said, they will cremate that body, they will use the ashes that will become part of what they will continue to present to that particular group, and they will disperse that.
They're not going to do some simple murder and leave a body in a stream for you to pick up the pieces of.
Yeah, so it's all gone, Julian.
There's nothing to see.
Convenient.
We have holistic Satanists who use every part of what they kill.
It's bizarre.
It's such an obvious rationalization.
Alright, last clip from the 2020 episode is something that Pazder isn't in, but we just have to hear how they close this out to get a feeling for how incredibly corrupt this is as a news report.
It opens with a slide text that they've built up over the course of the episode.
It kind of looks like the, I don't know, a winner's list on a 1980s video game screen or something like that.
It's got those terrible graphics.
That's exactly right.
It's in like weird garish colors and then there's like a zoomed in sort of demonic image hovering in the background.
But yeah, it's very low res.
You're going to hear a woman and a man here in the clip.
6 clues that point to the illegal worship of Satan, each based on the testimony of children, and none of it has ever
been proved.
The problem that exists is we're getting the stories, but we don't have the victims.
Once it's proven with one case, it's going to add more credibility to each one of the other cases.
Until that one case is proved, the link between crime and satanic cults will remain speculative.
The victims in this report did break the grip of Satanism, but each is left with permanent scars, and experts say they were lucky to escape.
When you get into one of these groups, there's only a couple ways you can get out.
One is death.
The other is mental institutions.
Or third, you can't get out.
That's terrifying, and that's no choice.
It's a story of business.
If the police were aware of this, it might be that they could get to the instigators, to the top people.
Why isn't there more awareness on the part of the police?
Police are very reluctant to investigate these crimes as satanic crimes, Barbara, because communities quite naturally don't want their reputation stigmatized as being the home of the devil.
They prefer to try to categorize them as drug-related crimes, sex-related crimes, or robbery or something that they're more familiar with.
Individual, rather than finding out who's behind it.
Look, if this happens to your kid, or if you look at this and if you have children, you say, could this happen to my child out of some kind of rebellion?
How would a parent be aware?
Many youngsters are into it, teenagers and younger, and the clues are there.
The satanic symbol, 666, if you see that written on your child's notebook, if they're And with whom?
It could be harmless.
It could just be a diversion.
are drifting off to ceremonies and not explaining where they're at. It's well worth it for parents
to look deeper and ask, what exactly are you up to?
And with whom?
Because this is serious.
It could be harmless. It could just be a diversion. But it could also be deadly serious.
Absolutely.
It's so good. I just, I can...
I'm picturing the Christopher Guest script that could come out of all of this.
Especially with the initial part of that clip.
I'm imagining the production meeting where they're like, well, we have to hedge in the following ways.
We're going to say this outrageous thing.
We're going to say it's never been proven.
Then we're going to talk about how the victims have escaped something that has scarred them for life.
It's incredible.
It's such a blast to hear Barbara Walters.
In that mode, because she sounds so credulous.
She sounds like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, doesn't she?
I mean, it's breathless.
It could be.
It could be a distraction or diversion, but it could be deadly serious.
It's just so 1940s as well.
And I wonder if there's something about the diction even of those guys that's pulling on something older in the boomer imagination.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Why are the authorities not doing anything about this?
Anyway, we're going to look at the transcript a little bit closely, but you were talking before we began about this idea that the episode spends time perpetuating the idea that heavy metal bands are actually doing nefarious things in their records, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
These allusions to the idea that heavy metal concerts are a kind of satanic ceremony, and that kids who are listening to heavy metal music are somehow getting slowly transformed into Satanists or going to The dark side in ways that will make them become violent or kill themselves.
I recorded a bonus episode back in February of 2021 titled, The Devil and the Arrow of Time.
And I tell a personal story there of being a teenager right around when this had even spread to South Africa in the 80s.
And I go to an evangelical church service with a friend of mine from high school is actually the class president.
And at this evangelical ceremony, the first one I'd ever been to, which was really moving and powerful for me, I get pilled into the belief that there are reverse satanic messages that have been hidden in rock music.
And, you know, I actually go home with the cassette tape that I've gotten from the gift shop and play it to my parents and say, you know, this is what Led Zeppelin is really saying.
Oh my gosh, what did they say?
What did your parents say?
My parents said, I don't hear anything.
And I kept, I kept going like every, every few days I would go and say, no, you really have to listen to what is in Hotel California.
And my parents would look at me and they'd be like, you can hear anything you want to hear in weird backwards garbled sounds.
It's nothing.
You know, those basically my friends were like, those people are nuts.
Just calm down.
It's okay.
And in that same episode, I tell the much more serious story of how in 1990, the English metal band Judas Priest was actually put on trial for supposedly influencing two American teenagers who had a 1985 suicide pact.
And on the strength of the fact that if you played one of their songs backwards, you could hear them say, do it.
That's it?
And that was it.
In this time period, if you could show that there was this, and it's all based on this idea of Satanism and reverse messages, and somehow Judas Priest are involved in this, and the song made them commit suicide.
And here, as our piece of evidence, there's a crescendo in the music, where if you play it backwards, it sounds like they're saying, do it.
But do they name them?
Like, it could be anything.
That's very vague.
They could be saying, go get some pizza from the fridge because you got the munchies, do it!
There's so much camp that's misunderstood.
In the ABC episode, the only quote-unquote Satanist they got close to was Anthony LeVay, a very complex figure, but basically, you know, on the surface, a San Francisco burlesque performer and theater pipe organ player Who founded the Church of Satan.
He actually sued Lawrence Pazder for, at one point, for naming his church as implicated in the cult activity in 1955 in Victoria.
And Pazder, I think, had to remove the actual name from the text.
Anyway, LaVey larped around in this Count Chocula get-up, and they just took With one eyebrow permanently raised, right?
He's like a cartoon villain.
They didn't even interview him, they just found clips of him goofing off.
But anyway, choice quotes from this transcript of this closer for the ABC episode.
None of it has ever been proved, and the cop says the problem that exists is we're getting the stories but we don't have the victims.
Until that one case has been proved, the link between crime and satanic cults will remain speculative.
The victims in this report did break the grip of Satanism, but each is left with permanent scars, and experts say they were lucky to escape.
Okay, so the link will remain speculative, but there are victims, and they did break the grip, and each is left with permanent scars, And then the experts say they were.
It's incredible.
It's like somebody is having an aneurysm between the first sentence and the second sentence.
They've forgotten what they're saying.
It's so incredible.
I think you're right about, you know, legal or editorials trying to figure out how are we going to hedge and then it just ends up garbled.
Oh, yeah.
Many youngsters are into it, teenagers and younger, and the clues are the satanic symbol 666, if you see that written on your child's notebook, if they're into heavy metal music, if they're associating with strange characters, I love this, or drifting off to ceremonies and not explaining where they're at.
I have to say, it's not Satanism that they're drifting off to, my friends.
It's called Getting High and Fucking and Sucking.
And this show is, like, top of the sort of pile in terms of media views.
What are they called?
Ratings?
These are people that reported on elections and coups in foreign countries.
Astonishing.
Well, you know, this is Pazder's, to go back to our protagonist here, this is his small screen splash.
He got there not only because of the book, but because he was involved in seminars, training both therapists and law enforcement officials in how to identify the signs of satanic ritual abuse.
It turns out he was also hired as a consultant with Michelle Smith alongside him on the most prominent legal case of the period, the McMartin Preschool Trial.
It was a very famous trial.
A total of seven adults were charged with 321 counts of abuse involving 48 children.
And it was at that time the longest-running trial.
There were actually two trials that happened back-to-back in American history, lasting a total of three years from 1987 to 1990.
But the defendants had actually been arrested over three years before the trials began.
The accusation involved a network of tunnels under this preschool, molestation, bestiality, and even paranormal phenomena like claims that the abusers could fly through the air.
All of those accused were eventually acquitted and no evidence was found for any of the allegations.
It turns out the parent who had made the initial accusations here that led to this whole situation spiraling out of control was later revealed to have been hospitalized for acute paranoid schizophrenia, and she died in her home from complications of alcoholism before the preliminary hearing of the trial had been concluded.
The prosecution misrepresented her mental illness as having been caused by these alleged diabolical events, and her prior diagnosis was withheld from the defense for the first three years.
Even though these parents and kids and teachers went through an awful eight-year ordeal altogether, this no doubt severely impacted their lives, but at least justice was served in the end.
But this high-profile preschool trial spawned many others around the world, and other people falsely accused were not so fortunate.
As an example, Fran and Dan Keller were at the center of the Oak Hill Daycare Center trial in Austin, Texas, and they were sentenced to 48 years in prison, and actually served 22 of those years before being released in 2013, and finally completely exonerated in 2017, and then paid compensation by the state for this miscarriage of justice.
There are numerous other stories for any listeners who want to read up on the satanic panic.
Another one of note was called the Kern County child abuse case.
It resulted in 36 convictions, and 34 of those were overturned 12 years later.
And you might think, well, at least there were two satanic ritual child molesters in there.
No, they just died in prison, so their convictions didn't have to be overturned.
And lastly, there's also the very high-profile case of the West Memphis Three, which sees three teenagers falsely convicted of torturing and murdering three eight-year-old boys in 1993.
And this is largely on the strength of their small town, knowing that they wore black and listened to heavy metal and were alleged to be Satanists.
They served 18 years with one of the boys sitting on death row that entire time before being released in 2011.
I want to hear a little bit more about the West Memphis Three.
I've heard the story a little bit.
on all of this titled West of Memphis.
So that's the real world legacy of Michelle remembers.
And Matthew, we haven't even really mentioned- No, we haven't.
But I wanna hear a little bit more about the West Memphis Three.
I've heard the story a little bit.
How were they exonerated?
Well, let's back up just slightly.
This was a truly gruesome crime in West Memphis, in which kids actually were killed in Arkansas in the 1993 Bible Belt.
Three young boys went missing.
They were found the next day hog-tied and mutilated in a creek.
Three older boys, aged 16, 17, and 18 at the time, were then arrested.
The 17-year-old, so the middle of the three, Jesse Miskelley, actually had an IQ of 71.
And he confessed to the crimes after 12 hours of intense high-pressure interrogation, and he told a story that we now know was fabricated under that pressure and named the other two boys, Damien Echols and Charles Baldwin, as his accomplices in the murders.
The eldest defendant, Damien Echols, was a charismatic and intelligent kid with a history of mental illness and wild statements about gaining power by drinking blood and being possessed by the spirit of a woman who had killed her husband.
And Eccles actually acted the part of the cryptic Satanist during the trial, kind of mugging for the cameras a little bit, making weird gestures.
The three boys were painted by the prosecution as degenerate youths corrupted by heavy metal.
So Miss Kelly and Baldwin were sentenced to life, but Eccles was sentenced to death.
13 years after the trial, there was new DNA evidence that showed that none of the young men found guilty were in the vicinity, were involved at all, could be placed at the scene, basically.
But the DNA evidence did implicate one of the young boy's stepfathers and a friend of his.
And to this day, neither of them have been charged.
When the DNA evidence came out, it started a renewed five-year struggle for the young men to be exonerated.
But both the original judge and the Arkansas Supreme Court threw out the DNA evidence, saying it was irrelevant.
In a fitting irony, the West Memphis Three became a popular cause célèbre by the efforts of rock musicians who held benefit concerts for them, and they were finally released after 18 years on this weird plea.
It's called an Alford plea.
It's a legal loophole, and basically you plead guilty, saying that the evidence was sufficient to convict you, but that you're actually still innocent.
It's incredible.
And how tragic about Eccles attempting to Yeah, I mean, I think he's sort of a victim of his own intelligence, and obviously he does have some psychiatric issues, but I think under those circumstances, if you watch the documentaries, there's a lot of documentary footage about this case, he really does seem to be saying, are you people
idiots like, oh yeah, sure, I'm this horrible evil.
Right, and it's just he's too far out in front of the irony market because given the credulity
we've just seen from the 2020 team, a big part of the dynamic here is that these like
particular boomers are not getting jokes.
uh...
I mean, they themselves grew up in the 60s and yet they're insisting on literalness and completely missing the fact that transgression can be an art form.
Yeah, he's wearing black not because he's a Satanist, but because he thinks your conventional, you know, stereotypes are ludicrous.
I mean, by the time we're talking about shock rock and death metal and punk and eventually the irony of the grunge scene, we're talking about kids who are rebelling against the basic hypocrisies and moral vacuum of consumerism.
Or, they see themselves as play-acting out the id of normie and institutionalized culture.
They're saying, fuck you to Barbara Walters.
To Gordon Gekko, to American imperialism, to Cabbage Patch Dolls.
Sounds like Eccles gets convicted in part because the culture just has no capacity to self-reflect.
Yeah, and then the interesting, I mentioned it was somewhat ironic that rock bands came to their defense or turned them into this big cause and raised awareness about the injustice, because it wasn't heavy metal rockers.
It was the grunge crew.
It was people from Pearl Jam and other bands who got involved in advocating for that.
And perhaps were a little bit more connected with His, with the mental illness aspects of the case and the, you know, perhaps the emotional weight of it as well.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Now, as you said, we haven't mentioned QAnon yet, but one of the twists here is that the message boards, Something Awful and then 4chan, 8chan and 8kun are fueled by that same fountain of irony.
Sometimes depressive, sometimes ecstatic.
And some of those roots go back to metal and punk and grunge.
And as we know from Dale Buran, this is the joking-about-the-garbage-of-the-world context out of which QAnon emerges.
But when QAnon emerges, the boomers buy into it just as hard as they bought into the satanic panic, but now they can participate because it's also gamified on social media.
So in 1980, we have someone like Northrup Clutching her pearls, like Barbara Walters would be, or her New Age crystals, fretting about how Satanists are sending secret messages in backwards-playing metal records.
But then 40 years later, she's become a participant in that conspiracy content production.
And I also think we have to note how funny it is in the macabre way that QAnons were all waiting for the storm of arrests of the pedophile Democrats after Trump seized military control of the country, but that storm of arrests already happened in the 80s and the 90s through the satanic panic.
Yeah.
Okay, let's pick up a prior thread with a little bit of a dive into the Satanic Panic as a reactionary response to Vatican II.
I'll get to Vatican II details in a moment, but I want to talk first about what we know about Lawrence Pazdur's Catholicism.
We already probably know that he was Catholic enough as a young doctor to take part in what appears to be an evangelizing type mission to West Africa, but what else do we know?
We can start with his Polish roots.
Now on that theme, Pazder's faith seems more than just personal and private, it's also familial to the level of dynastic.
Because at one point in the therapy with Michelle, he starts imagining that the abominations she is purportedly recounting from the age of five in 1955 have some kind of reverse correspondence with the liturgical calendar for that year, which means if Michel describes some act of abject sacrifice, it would be more comprehensible, according to Pazder, if it is viewed as a direct desecration of the Catholic calendar.
But to check on the dates, he needs a missile from 1955.
And it's 1977, so he's out of luck.
But who has one?
His mom.
So he calls her, and he has her post it, and he does the correspondences from there.
So for non-Catholic nerds, what is a missile?
It is the newsprint booklet that's published every year for laypeople, That contains all 365 days of readings, dedications of the feast days, and other details of the calendar.
Using missals that are provided by the church and kept in the pews would be the normal way to go.
So anyone who has their own copies dating back over 20 years probably also has a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the living room.
They have an archive of the church pamphlets.
Exactly.
So Pastor describes coming from a large Polish Catholic family in Edmonton.
And for those who are interested, those roots go back to the 1890s with a wave of immigrants fleeing the aftershocks of the partitions and power shifts in 19th century Poland.
And this is a period in which Alberta actively encouraged Polish settlers who were known to be really good with farming, and those settlers brought their own curates and pastors.
Now, I want to say something else about how this sort of plays out in my own memory from a later period growing up in the 70s and 80s.
But before I do, Julian, amongst the Catholics that you knew in South Africa, did you recognize cultural distinctions or ways in which being Catholic and being of a cultural heritage were difficult to untangle?
It's a really interesting question.
I can honestly say I'm not aware of having known Catholics.
Oh wow, okay.
And I think the reason for that is that the original settlers who came to South Africa were, or the ones who came to dominate actually, they weren't the first settlers to arrive, but the ones who came to dominate were Dutch Reformed.
There were Calvinists, and they had their own religious track that really heavily underpins apartheid and justifies it.
And then there was the Anglican Church that my school was affiliated with, which is, what, Episcopalian here?
And I knew plenty of Jews, but I don't remember knowing overt Catholics.
Right.
Okay, well here's a little bit of a taste of that kind of culture as it plays out in mid to late 20th century, at least in Toronto.
You know, growing up Catholic in Toronto, you would know that The Polish church is its own thing, and that it has a legacy of very strong traditionalism and piety.
Now, when I was a boy, there were two centers of Catholic traditionalism in Toronto, and one was at the neighborhood of Dufferin and St.
Clair, where Italian working-class folks had settled in the 1960s, and then there was a block of Polish Catholics at the center of a thriving neighborhood on Roncesvalles Avenue.
Now, as a longer-term North American settler Catholic, because my father's Catholicism came from German and Polish roots in Michigan in the 19th century, but the European cultural aspects had really been diluted by the time the faith got to me.
It was just sort of Canadian Catholic.
It felt generic.
But being from a generic Catholicism, an uncultured Catholicism, I always knew when I was in an Italian or Polish church, not just because of the language or the styles of the widow's dresses and veils, black of course, but because there was a feeling of nationalistic bonding.
That we're in church and we're sticking together, not only because of church, but because of something else.
We are remembering our roots, and of course, here is our food.
But the Italians were a little bit more ironic.
About their relationships with the church, which tells me that perhaps historically it played less of a politically bonding role.
For instance, Italian humor would regularly take the piss out of nerdy or prudish priests.
There was a whole satirical tradition, probably dating back to the Middle Ages, that got off on fantasizing about monks and nuns, getting it on in secret.
And then there were the films of Fellini, of course.
And these were all attitudes of irony and satire that I just was never aware of amongst the Polish Catholic kids that I knew.
They were much more consistently pious and reverential.
You would never dream of making fun of Father Casimir behind his back.
Whereas, you know, as soon as Father Angelino left the classroom, the boys would be making fart noises.
And so, my sense is that the Polish Catholic Emigre Church was, through the 1960s and 70s, crucial to national and cultural unity in the shadow of the Soviet Union.
Because that's where they were all coming from.
They were coming from Soviet Poland.
And I remember in the 1980s, every Catholic church and business in Roncesvalles flew the Solidarnosc flag, and the portrait of Lech Walesa was everywhere, despite the fact that pious Catholics would have only tacitly endorsed Walesa, who was not primarily a Catholic politician.
Now, on the social issues front, my memory is that it would be much more likely for Polish Catholics than for perhaps any other group to show up at anti-abortion protests.
You know, misogyny was standard in all Catholic communities, but in Polish communities, there seemed to be a far higher emphasis on purity culture.
So, as a non-Italian and non-Polish Catholic boy, the guy talk on the street was that dating an Italian girl wasn't as challenging as dating a Polish girl, because with Polish parents, you'd have to jump through a number of piety tests.
Now, Italian fathers, they might worship the Virgin as well, but in a more lip service way, I think.
And they also, you know, overtly spent a lot more time worshiping Sophia Loren.
And if Loren had said abortion is a woman's indispensable right, and in fact she said exactly that to Vanity Fair not that long ago, that would not tarnish her star.
So my impression is that there's a kind of displaced Polish nationalism that regarded
the homeland as needing purification from Soviet rule, which of course had brought abortion
access too, right? So after the Soviet Union fell, Poland enacted the strictest abortion
bans in Europe in the 1990s with laws that are still largely in place. Now, I don't have
the historical or language chops to verify this particular connection, but the modern
history of abortion access in Canada, which I imagine Pazder would be extremely aware
of given his Catholicism and the time period, that history is dominated by a single figure
named Dr. Henry Morgenthaler.
When abortion was legal, yet strictly controlled by doctors' panels in the 1960s, Morgenthaler openly and defiantly advertised his for-any-reason abortion services.
He first worked in Montreal, and later across the country, where he would set up clinics to specifically challenge the law.
And he was charged over and over again, he was convicted, he was jailed many times, before eventually the Canadian Supreme Court struck down the access restrictions as violations of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Why am I bringing this up?
Because Henry Morgenthaler was a Polish Jew who survived the Lodz Ghetto.
And here's where I'd love to be able to read Polish-language Catholic newspapers from Toronto, but also across the country, Alberta as well, in the 1980s because I bet they talked some serious shit about this guy who was eventually awarded the Order of Canada.
Because Morgenthaler represented a completely different way of surviving and resisting authoritarianism, and he sought to offer autonomy to women.
So, there's something else happening for Catholics, whether they're Polish or not, during the post-war era.
There's a little meeting of bureaucrats in pointy hats called Vatican II, and Julian, what do you know about Vatican II?
Oh gosh, you know, as a non-Catholic, I just have a sense that it was a liberalizing moment.
My memory seems to tell me it had something to do with accepting various aspects of scientific and political progress, Maybe making Catholicism less fundamentalist and severe, more accepting of women's rights.
I associate it with John Paul II, although I'm maybe way off as being a sort of kindly religious rock star.
Like, how am I doing with all that?
Well, John Paul II is the 1980s.
He's the Polish Pope, actually.
So, are you thinking of Paul XXIII as being a religious rock star?
I'm not sure.
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
It all runs together in my mind.
Yeah.
Yeah, kind-faced religious rock star does not stand out amongst any of the popes of the 20th century for me, but... Yeah, no, no, it's, yeah.
Who knows who you're thinking about?
All right, so Vatican II, in short, was a three-year-long conference of cardinals, bishops, and abbots initiated by Paul XXIII in the hope, you're quite right about this, Julian, of reforming the Church for engagement with the modern world.
The aims were to make the Catholic liturgy more accessible and participatory for the everyday faithful, to explore and strengthen the ecumenical movement, to increase dialogue between the denominations and heal historical schisms, to perhaps tone down the antisemitism, and to renew popular interest in biblical studies by sponsoring new translations and commentaries.
And this was a huge deal.
This is thousands of cardinals and bishops gathering in Rome, I think twice a year over the three years, something like that.
It was a lot of work.
And it was the first broadly accepted, but also theologically contested meeting in modern history.
And it was compelled by the shadow of several centuries of Protestant revolt, secularization, increasing scientific literacy amongst the clerical class, not only the congregations, and the recent horrors of global war.
And to give you a sense of just how momentous it felt for everyday Catholics, when the council opened on a full moon evening in October of 1962, tens of thousands of the faithful came out to St.
Peter's Square to cheer the council members gathering under the dome late into the night.
And Paul XXIII himself came out to the balcony to tell them to go home and kiss their babies on his behalf.
Which is pretty classic Catholic stuff right there, right on that line between sweet and creepy.
I want to interrupt you here, Matthew.
I know we're going to talk about horror films in a little bit, but I have to say that this starting on the full moon night and the increasing scientific literacy, I just started watching the remake Of the Omen.
Oh!
Last night, actually.
Okay, great.
And it starts in the Vatican Observatory with the roof opening up so that the priest can gaze up through the telescope.
And it then uses several things that were happening in the 80s as symbolizing the return of the beast, or the beginning of the apocalypse, or what have you, including the Actually, no.
It's more recent than that, because they use 9-11 as one of the signs that the apocalypse is about to begin, and they use the Challenger explosion as an example.
That part of the panic has to do with the embrace of science and with the clergy becoming more scientifically literate, right?
Yes, but there's an ambivalence there because will their scientific insight displace the ritual knowledge that they should be clinging on to, right?
Exactly, exactly.
Right.
So, the three goals are liturgical liberalization, ecumenism, Bible studies, and they all flowed together to drive a sharp wedge between those who believed that the Church was being freed from its medieval claustrophobia and those who believed that they were bearing witness to a final desacralization of the world.
Those who believed that the Catholic Church was some sort of last bastion of the old order to defend the human soul against complete secularization.
And the most radical of those In that category ended up forming these reactionary Catholic movements like the Pius XII movement that followed the Pope that was seated before Paul XXIII.
There's a movement called the Sedefocantists who are even more extreme.
They literally believe that the seat of the papacy is now empty and it has been since Pius XII.
I just want to practice saying Sedevacantist.
It almost sounds like it could be Sanskrit.
who the world's most famous Sedevacantist is?
I just want to practice saying Sedevacantist.
That's an amazing, it almost sounds like it could be Sanskrit.
Who is the world's most famous Sedevacantist?
Mel Gibson.
Oh!
Following after his father.
Wow.
So for all of you who wondered why Passion of the Christ felt so angry and so foreboding and was filled with extras made to look like stereotypical Jews in Nazi propaganda, that's why.
Check.
Gibson's crowd believes that the pure Church and its pure understanding of Jesus and Christianity as the pure path was muddied and defiled by the heretical Vatican II Council.
Do you remember that film, Julian?
I mean, for me it felt like something new was happening there, but I did not understand the politics at all or who Mel Gibson was.
I just remember it as this incredibly beautifully shot HD torture porn film.
It seemed to be trying to take the viewer into an almost minute by minute experience
of Christ suffering on humanity's behalf at the hands of these evildoers.
This whole thing seems like such a mindfuck to me always, that God so loved the world
that he sent his only son to die for our sins, yet the people who participated in that grand
plan are absolutely awful.
To me, the Passion of the Christ, which is Mel Gibson's movie, really goes subterranean
on the psychology of human blood sacrifice and then the glory of death and the rationalizing
of trauma as somehow, in the end, representing grace.
Yeah, it's all of a piece with the themes of Michelle Remembers as well.
All of these things are absolutely necessary, and her resilience and her refusal to, or her ability to maintain some kind of internal And it's that same taking, it's inverting the metaphorical versus literal kind of syntax and amplifying it in such intense ways.
So this, what I've just been talking about, is the broad, broad context for a volatile cocktail of 1970s Catholic progressive aspirations versus reactionary anxieties.
Maybe with that dichotomy we can say, you know, this 1970s is really the beginning of Catholic conspirituality.
So, how did this play out on the ground amongst people like me and my family, non-theologians, non-church nerds?
I think that the most important daily life impact for people like us took place in liturgical terms because following the end of the Council in 1965, There's an almost decade-long process to make the prayers and music of everyday worship more participatory, and this means that the Mass is said in local languages, the homilies are meant to be more thematic and aspirational, the priest is facing the congregation as kind of like a choir leader,
They've taken down the the the rude screen in many places so that there's no separation between the congregation and the altar or not as much at least.
So like churches are actually redesigned and reconfigured and it's a big expense.
Altar decorations are now being made in Sunday school by children using felting supplies and crafting glue and sometimes glitter I can't help but feel like this is almost like the progression from Freud's couch with the psychoanalyst behind him out of view to a more kind of humanistic psychology and then eventually on to like children's art therapy, right?
Yeah, it's really like that.
That's a great comparison.
Priests are starting to wear jeans under their sometimes pastel colored robes.
But we can really hear it in the transitions, the changes in music.
So I want to play for you three versions of a prayer called the Doxology, which is a short hymn of praise to the Trinity.
And this is kind of a liturgical diamond through the ages.
It's a mantra or a kind of meme that has remained largely unchanged in church history.
But by 1977, we've got three versions, at least three versions, and these are in various These are in different forms, and they are still competing for ascendancy in churches around the world.
So the first one that I'll play for you is the oldest version.
This is from what's called the Roman Rite.
It's in Latin.
the chant tune dates back to God knows, you know, fifth or sixth century.
The chant tune dates back to the time of the great flood.
The chant tune dates back Now, if we update that somewhat, keep the ancient melody, but translate the prayer, we get this.
us.
Through him and with him and in him, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, all glory and honor is yours forever and ever.
Amen.
Amen.
Okay, now I took my first communion at a place called the Newman Center in Toronto,
It was the Catholic community that was associated with the University of Toronto where my parents were in graduate school.
And there was a band there that played every Sunday that was called the Toronto Liturgical Music Collective.
And I think the year that I took my first communion, they cut a record.
This is 1977.
And at some point I'll do some history on this music.
There were actually battles over this in the diocese and a minor scandal, but here's their doxology.
The Doxology of the Holy Spirit.
To Him and with Him Live the unity of the Holy Spirit
Of glory and honor Is Yours, Almighty Father
Forever and ever Amen
Amen So, Julian, you're much more of a musician than I am.
You definitely know more.
You know more about minor ninth chords.
What do you hear in this historical transition?
Oh, come on, that maxed out chorus effect on the guitar.
It's just so classic late 70s, early 80s, you know, when that was like the neat new thing and then everyone overused it.
I would say off the top of my head, you're losing some of the dissonance with each, it's like you're losing some of that ancient, yeah, just that dissonant kind of willingness to hang out in some of the minor sixths, you know, and the Whatever the scale might be, and it starts to just become a little bit more what Hepcat musicians would call very vanilla, as you lose that ornamentation.
And with each successive iteration, I hear that as happening.
Yeah.
The record, as I said, I'm going to do more on this particular record because I think it's, I mean, it's burned into my brain as a child, but also there's something very interesting about the almost complete commitment to a folk vision of liturgical music.
And there's something in that, I mean, I guess the question, maybe the top line question is, Is this a music that invokes for you the possibility that something is deeply at stake in the world?
That if you get this wrong, that if you don't say the proper prayers and do the proper rituals, that something terrible will happen?
Or is this the music of hanging out together?
Yeah, it's interesting.
Immediately I think of how it makes me wonder if Catholics in general felt like, you know, this hippie style Christianity that's much more liberal and much more egalitarian It's appealing to the culture in a way that we have to compete with.
So there's that.
But then, yeah, there's something about the ancient version that you played that still carries the sense that there's some kind of word and melody magic that is really important, that is arcane.
Then that's gradually being lost through, you know, you go from Latin into English and of course I think a lot of people would applaud that and say that it's more inclusive because you're not just using the language that only the clergy understands or the Latin scholars.
And it just, but then when you start to get into more of a folk, you know, modern musical context for that period, it does seem like, I would understand how a more conventional person would say, you know, the element of the sacred is being sacrificed here on the altar of some kind of, you know, being more hip.
It feels like between the three versions, we're going from casting a spell to... I don't know what the second one would be.
Gesturing towards the spell in the ancient past?
Yeah, gesturing towards the spell.
And then the third one is like sharing some cool chords.
And those are different projects, you know?
Yeah.
But it's also being non-threatening and saying, hey, I want to tell you about this really groovy thing.
Come a little closer.
It's for everyone.
It is!
It is!
So, what anxious Catholics like Mel Gibson's father, Mel himself, and I would bet, I'm willing to bet, Lawrence Pazder, heard in the music of the Toronto Liturgical Music Collective, those Minor Ninths, What did you say, chorus effect?
Is there wah-wah in there or something?
I don't know.
No, it's just chorus.
It's a way of creating that very layered, kind of shimmery sound.
I think what they hear in that is a trivialization of the sacred.
I think they can smell that the frankincense is being replaced by pot smoke and that the true enigmatic, sometimes wrathful presence of Jesus was evaporating into clouds of love and light.
There's a whole study to be done too on church, I don't know what the proper word is, decorations isn't quite it, but the iconography and how it shifts in this period.
The main shift being Are you walking into a church in which the crucified Jesus is hanging over your head?
Or are you walking into a church in which there is a stylized cross with Jesus's robe hanging from it because the message is that he has resurrected, he's gone actually.
Because at the Newman Center there was this gorgeous, probably taken from old um barn beam barn beams or something like that uh carved with ivy cross with no indication that a crucifixion had taken place on it um this was not a place of of torture and sacrifice
So, the question becomes, what can resurrect the sacred for these poor, stressed-out Catholics?
And I think we have our answer, or at least part of our answer, in a good satanic scare.
Because if Catholics were no longer spellbound by the sacredness of the faith, The pious could always turn to those who were for a kind of provocative and urgent inspiration, and those people would be Satanists.
And this is where reactionary Catholicism takes on the structures of a conspiracy theory as well.
And there's just one hint at how that starts to work.
The liturgical changes that made that folk music possible was part of a project that came out of Vatican II that was called the Sacrosanctum Concilium, which is the committee in charge of implementing liturgical changes.
So that's language ritual music.
And the archbishop who was put in charge of that project, his name was Annibale Bugnini, and he was so loathed by the reactionaries in the church that an Italian propagandist named Tito Cassini started spreading around the rumor that Bugnini was a Freemason based on An unnamed source rummaging through a fucking briefcase that Bognini left open in a conference room in the Vatican.
So this like real cloak and dagger shit that links those guitars and those minor ninths in churches to a devolution of the sacred and destruction of the world through a shadowy cabal of Freemasons in the Vatican.
So, that is the historical background hovering there behind Michelle Remembers.
If we take Lawrence Pazdur's Catholicism seriously, and I think we have to, it is absolutely central to this story, the whole Ordeal that Michelle goes through is only resolved because she has a vision of the Virgin Mary in the end.
We'll talk about why that actually works and how it gets her out of this trap that he has ensnared, Pazder has ensnared her in.
So you're basically painting a picture of a sort of cultural religious crisis in which there's part of the backlash against this Making of Catholicism more contemporary, both politically and culturally, is to say the stakes are still at this incredibly high, supernatural, gruesome level, and don't fucking forget that.
Yes, and it's a big mistake to have undertaken Vatican II during the Cold War as well.
Because it's not through liberalization that the Catholic Church is going to offer resistance to global communism.
It's actually through doubling down on the fetishization of metaphysical reality as opposed to material reality, right?
And as is borne out today in the Christofascist resurgence happening in the former Soviet states.
So, here I want to turn to a really brilliant essay by a scholar named Bernard Doherty.
It's called The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen, the Catholic Horror Film Vatican II and the Revival of Demonology.
And I want to shout out to Dan Penaton, who will be a guest on the podcast shortly for finding the PDF.
So, Smoke of Satan.
By the way, listeners, we are getting to the book because this sets up what's on the first page of the book.
Smoke of Satan, as Doherty says in his abstract, alludes specifically to an infamous speech made by Pope Paul VI to a Vatican audience in 72.
So Pope Paul VI takes over from Paul XXIII, who initiates Vatican II.
Pope Paul VI presides over its completion.
and in 1972 he notes that quote, Satan's smoke has made its way into the temple of God
through some crack.
This remark, repeated ad nauseum ever since in conservative Roman Catholic circles, was indicative of
the apprehensions and misgivings which many Catholics experienced in the wake
of the widespread changes set in motion by Vatican II.
The speech, Dougherty writes, went on to note that, quote, something preternatural has come into the world to destroy and strangle the very fruits of the ecumenical council and to stop the Church from breaking out into a hymn of joy, By sowing doubt, uncertainty, problems, unrest, and discontent.
Now, this is not academic.
This is not just padding so that we can get up our word count and you know have more episodes for for Patreon. I am referring to the smoke of Satan's speech
because an excerpt from it is literally the first thing that is printed in Michelle
Bonham's book.
Yes, dear listeners, all of this preamble is necessary to set up understanding the very
opening of the book, which starts like this.
Really?
Right?
To really get it.
Statement of Pope Paul VI, November 15, 1972.
This is page one of Michelle Remembers.
Evil is an effective agent, a living spiritual being, perverted and perverting, a terrible reality.
One of the greatest needs is defense from the evil, which is called the devil.
The question of the devil and the influence he can exert on individual persons as well as on communities, whole societies, or events is very important.
It should be studied again.
Okay, here's a statement that comes seven years after the closing of the council that he presided over, Paul VI, having attained the papacy after the death of Paul XXIII in 63.
Now, if you listen to Julian read it carefully, you'll hear that it's actually ambivalent.
Not about the devil.
Uh, but about whether he's expressing doubts about the validity of Vatican II or whether the devil is palpable in the highly charged responses to it.
Pazder clearly would side with the former view and take this statement by Paul VI to mean literally that he has a personal mandate to study Satan within the body of Michelle Smith.
Right.
So, Doherty's study shows how all of this Vatican intrigue and Catholic anxiety were fetishized within the genre of the Catholic horror film, which I would argue sets the stage for and really sort of primes an audience for Michelle Remembers.
And this genre begins with Rosemary's Baby in 1968, which is part of the reason that ABC quotes it.
Now, Doherty's filmography for the essay goes back, or goes up to 2018.
But the films he studies that immediately precede Michelle Remembers
and that surround it are The Exorcist, 73, The Omen, 76, The Exorcist, 2, 77,
The Omen, 2, 78, Amityville Horror, 79, and The Omen, 3, The Final Conflict.
Now, you just started watching the remake of The Omen, Julian, but how many of those
did you see back in the day?
Oh, I've seen all of them.
I've seen all of them.
But mostly, I think, in retrospect, probably over the last 30 or 40 years, so probably not when they originally came out.
And I've also seen the Amityville remake from 2005.
I think it's interesting to look at what changes from the time period that we're immersed in right now to then, you know, how it gets remixed because we know that all of this stuff, with all of this stuff, everything old is new again.
I have to say, though, I've definitely seen that first Exorcist film multiple times.
It's a fascinating piece.
Yeah, and that's why we'll base an episode on it.
I think it's fascinating as well.
It's very haunting.
I think it's worth distinguishing these films in Doherty's list from what I see as a parallel nihilistic slasher genre.
I'm not a horror film person, but I just know that these are separate from things like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween, which were distinctly non-religious.
They were explicitly about secular psychology.
That's right, that's right.
So they all have monstrous kind of serial killer types who are horribly disfigured or are seeking revenge.
But what a lot of people will point out about those slasher films, which I think is definitely a much more degraded genre, there's much less to dig into there in terms of analysis, Um, is that most often it's a group of young kids who are indulging their sexual desires and they get killed off one by one by this horrible monstrous figure.
So there's still some of that religiosity in there.
There's a link.
Yeah, there's a bleed over.
You're absolutely right.
Because, yeah, it's the babysitter, the boyfriend is coming over.
But they were a lot more scary to me personally because, you know, Michael Myers, for instance, in Halloween had no reason to be doing what he's doing.
Satan didn't make him do it.
It's just the way he was.
But when we get to the Catholic horror films, because there is a metaphysical narrative around them, that provides some sort of padding, a kind of distance from, oh, we're not really talking about how these people are dying or being beaten up.
It's like Pazder is saying, the purpose of abuse is not really to abuse, but it's to degrade the church within the person or something like that.
And I know a lot of people who say, Oh God, I can't, I can't watch those films.
They freak me out too much.
I get too scared.
And for me, as someone who'd never believed in any of the underpinning, the supernatural metaphysical underpinning of these kinds of stories, I just have always been like, wow, that's really cool.
That's really like, This is so bizarre, this is so mythological, this is so psychological.
I might have some of those moments because we have these cognitive vulnerabilities just built into us by evolution where I might afterwards be like, oh God, is there a shadow in the corner or something?
But it wouldn't stay with me in a way where I was like, maybe there really are demons in the world.
It's just laughable.
Right, yeah, so you were able to engage with a Catholic horror film genre as kind of like a Jungian playground for self-examination.
And thought it was just fascinating.
And thrilling, but not like, oh my god, that's so terrifying!
Yeah.
So, Doherty says that there are five meaning-making themes in this genre.
And so, you know, if there's going to be horror, at least we'll get some religion out of it.
And as we'll see all of these themes, this is why this essay is so useful, they all track back to Michel Remembers.
So, first of all, he says that the Catholic horror film always features traditional or often, most often, features traditional Marian devotion and piety.
And that's because Mary is kind of like the top-shelf antidote to the fallen, possessed world.
Now, ma mère is the saving apparition at the end of Michelle Remembers.
She first appears about two-thirds of the way in, and she doesn't really put an end to it then because there's this whole sort of narrative around how things have to play out according to destiny.
It's very Christ-like and crucifixion-like that way.
It's unclear why Michelle Smith recalls her in French.
Although Marian devotion throughout the 19th century has some major French strongholds that peak at Lourdes, I can also say that Marian devotion was very, very popular amongst Eastern European Catholics as they bonded against communism in various ways through the Church.
Secondly, there is preternatural phenomena surrounding manifestations of evil, according to Dougherty.
You know, we were speaking about the Exorcist, there's green projectile vomit, there's the writhing tongue of Regan, her head spins around and cracks, and then there's a final vision of Pazuzu, the demon from Iraq, no less, unleashed by the excavation of Father Merrin.
There's more green goo in Amityville, also horrible shit smells.
With Michelle Remembers, there's snakes in cages, there's lots of bugs under the skin, also lots of poop.
But in general, there are impurities that are monstrous and they surround and penetrate the possessed, but they never completely erase the host.
For instance, in The Exorcist, at one point the nanny calls Father Damien in to see welts on the abdomen of Regan that rise up to say, help me, so there's somebody who's still in there.
And in Michelle Remembers, Michelle is consistently depicted as maintaining innocence through protestation of what she's witnessing.
And it's one of the things that seems to turn Pazderon a lot, which is the idea that there's some kind of innocent person stamping her foot, staying noble, even pretty, and saying no to Satan.
But in general, the impurities and abominations must be purged from the world as the macrocosm and the subject, the microcosm.
Yeah, and so maybe if you fight the good fight, your little girl never has to grow up and mature sexually.
Thirdly, this is, I think, central and so painful, I think, and it's heavy.
The theology of vicarious and atoning suffering.
So, you know, Regan, with help me, raised up on her abdomen.
Father Mancuso in Amityville develops stigmata after attempting to bless the haunted house with holy water.
Michelle Smith really is a classic victim soul who really mirrors or embodies the sadomasochistic spectacle of the Christian sacrifice by redeeming others and the world through A suffering that is presented as voluntary, but she's also a scapegoat, and she also ends up bearing the rash of the devil on her neck, although there aren't any other medical tracks of what's happened to her.
But whether or not her ordeal is voluntary is also framed through her consent to therapy.
And in that, she keeps saying no, which we'll see in part three.
She keeps saying, I don't want to do this therapy anymore to Pazdur.
And Sarah Marshall flags the overtones of rape here.
And I'll just point out that in the Christian passion, there is no ritual and therefore no church without Jesus the child being willingly sacrificed by God the parent.
So, number four is fascinating.
It's the vocational insecurity of the Catholic priest.
So, I do want to see the remake of the Omen to see what the observatory at the Vatican actually sort of signifies, right?
And the main priest in that remake is Pete Postlethwaite, and he's unbelievable.
So, we have Damian Karras in The Exorcist is a trained psychiatrist, but his training proves useless.
It's his priesthood that has to triumph in the end.
And he actually argues with the diocese to bring Father Marin in, played by Max von Zito.
But until Cedau arrives, he doesn't really believe in the liturgy.
He hasn't even read the Roman Rite.
It's like they have to go into some forbidden library to even dig out the text.
So the Exorcist is as much about the renewal of the vocation of the priesthood as it's about anything else.
It's against the post-Vatican II hippie pastor who let those acoustic guitars into the church.
And an echo for this, cutting in a slightly different way, is the vocational insecurity of Lawrence Pasner, who obviously doesn't trust his own psychiatric training anymore, and is therefore spending all of his time trying to resurrect Catholic metaphysics as a therapeutic, and he's spending a lot of time fawning before clerics for validation.
But in his appeals, he's always reaching out to various priests.
What do you think of this?
And, you know, this is what my client is experiencing.
And this is how he eventually brings her to Father Leo or Father Gi.
I can't remember who it is who actually baptizes her.
But the priests express a kind of spectrum of commitment to traditionalism.
So Father Leo is in jeans, he's in a turtleneck, he wears cowboy boots.
And then there's Bishop Remy Leroux, who's wearing the whole hat and the robes and the red and the whole ermine and whatever.
Everyone comes on side, however, with the reactionary vision.
So, if you have secularized within the Church, you wake up to the error of your ways, and if you are traditional, you are vindicated.
The last thing is that Doherty says the Catholic horror film has is the existence, or it postulates the existence of a satanic conspiracy of evil.
And I think we have to recognize that if the anxiety is about the evil being literal, then the opposite of what is evil or the presence of the body of Christ in the church can be restored.
And so, these are films and products that attempt to prove God really by proving Satan.
Marshall and Hobbes point out, and Michelle remembers, that it's really funny, it's pretty strange that the Satanists seem to be the true believers, the real squares, because if they weren't, they wouldn't go to such liturgical and ritual lengths.
to get everything precisely right.
Like, they believe in spells.
They believe in liturgy so perfectly that they're actually forcing Pazdur to go to his mom and get the missile to make sure that the calendar is matching up because they actually believe in it.
So they display enviable levels of faith by recreating hyper-traditional rituals in reverse.
And, you know, to me, I think this is one of the biggest revelations of studying this is that, you know, when you see that literalists from traditional Catholics to Anons who are lusting after Q, they desperately need the demons to be real.
Because if they aren't, who are they really for?
What can they really actually support or believe in?
What can they place their yearning for meaning in?
So, it really feels like every fever dream that we talk about on this podcast for the conspiritualist, for the traditional Catholic, for the person who believes in the satanic panic, every fever dream is necessary to the fantasy of both personal and communal triumph.
Yeah, it's not only for the fever dream, but I see it echoed too in the creating of moral panics politically.
It's whatever can be done to evoke the sense of an incredibly, of an almost An evil that you can't even imagine that is really behind the agenda of our political enemies.
It's something we come back to again and again and it's never a sign of peace to come.
It's very ominous and to think that this is all there in these sort of 70s and 80s horror movies who are telling this story.
About how we need to return to the old ways, we need to return to having not only the fear of God, but fear of the demonic forces that prove the existence of God, because now without God, what the hell are you going to do?
It makes me think also in a sort of orthogonal way of Tom Waits, who says, if I exercise my demons, well, my angels might leave too.
Let's pause there and pick it up next time with some framing from the beginning of the book.
We'll look at the prefatory passages and we'll also talk a little bit more about the somatic focus of all of this Catholic anxiety and how it centers around reproductive concerns, miscarriage, and abortion because that's actually the initiating theme of Michelle Remembers.
