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Nov. 5, 2022 - Conspirituality
01:34:05
UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 5 | Michelle Remembers: Themes & Framing

In the second of three episodes on Michelle Remembers, we recap its Catholic contexts, and Lawrence Pazder's quest to transcend the limitations of psychiatry through mystical nightmares. We then explore the front matter: how Pazder introduces his project (and himself), and the ambivalent endorsement of Remi de Roo, Archbishop of Victoria. In Pazder's many clerical alliances, a crucial theme is established: the rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, in which the former submits to the latter to restore the reality of the supernatural.We also look at the pre-emptively defensive  intro penned by the publisher, Thomas B. Congdon Jr. He claimed to have verified the substance of the book through interviews, and thought that Pazder and Smith were very earnest and forthcoming people when he hosted them for editorial meetings. Okay sure.Show NotesRemi De RooThomas B. Congdon, Editor of Best Sellers Like 'Jaws,' Dies at 77The Beginning of a Community -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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.
We'll be dropping these periodically into our main feed.
Thanks so much for your support.
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.
Hello Conspiratuality listeners, welcome to installment five of the Swan Song series.
This one is called Michelle Remembers Themes and Framing.
And just a reminder, this is part of an early access bonus series, and to our dear patrons Your financial support is so helpful to us, and if you would like to support us further, but in a non-monetary way, you can tell your friends about this new vein of research we've embarked on, if you think they might benefit from this series or from the hundreds of hours of bonus media we have stowed away on Patreon.
Hello, Julian.
Did you notice that I used the phrase bonus media instead of bonus content?
Ah, tell me more about that.
I don't know.
I think I heard you complaining about the word content somewhere.
And I was like, yeah, I don't really like it.
It sounds like we're filling space.
Yeah, I tend to always cringe when I hear people When I hear creators talking to their audience using the language that they learned in online courses about how to create content, how to maximize the ways in which you are self-promoting, I feel like content is a very generic name for something that you've created.
Right.
It's content.
Come get your content.
It's like the Soylent Green of media.
Yeah, or it feels like it would expand on its own or something like that.
Like cotton candy to fill a space or something.
Anyway, are you ready to continue beating the dead but resurrecting zombie horse of Michelle Remembers?
We just want to remember here that Teal Swan loves horses.
Oh, that's a choice metaphor.
I think there are two things that I find sort of interesting or important to point out.
One is that we're truly talking less about Teal Swan in these last couple episodes than really about the cultural conditions that we imagine could create someone like Teal Swan.
And when you say, let's remember that Teal Swan loved horses right after that zombie reference, I can't help but have the impression perhaps you're alluding, you know, consciously or not, to the many phases and faces of a person who maybe has died and been reinvented several times in the public eye through their content.
Yeah.
I mean, she was sewn into a corpse once.
That's right.
She watched Doc murder children.
She was trafficked internationally.
But all of that is in the past.
Like a half-remembered dream, except for all of the breadcrumbs on the internet.
So yeah, I feel like every day is a fresh start for those who fuck around with memory.
That's kind of the memento of spiritual influencers, right?
Like, where am I?
What's happening now?
What did I say last time?
I don't know.
I've got to consult my notes.
And I want to flag something off the top here, because we're getting a little bit of pushback here and there.
Some of our listeners are a bit confused by what we're doing.
They've seen us engage in ruthless evisceration of Anti-vaxxers, COVID denialists, cult leaders, spiritual con artists, and they're turning and saying, why do you seem to have kid gloves on with Teal Swan?
Why are you taking her side in relation to John Casby's deep end?
And have you noticed that some of her criticisms are actually bogus, is what they say.
And why didn't you hold Paola Marino's feet to the fire for her lack of journalistic investigation?
What do you respond to that?
Yeah, well, a number of things.
I actually gave a little bit of a talk on Instagram responding to those specific questions.
And I think that, you know, is it true that we criticize Teal Swan's content and her content
and her, you know, really her her uncredible backstory which is the root of her authority?
Yeah, it is.
Do we have concern about the dynamics interpersonally that she fosters within her group?
I think there's no question about that.
Whenever we've talked about Teal Swan, and we did a big segment on her early on in the podcast, I think we've been very clear that this is a problematic person.
Every.
Single.
Time.
Right, yeah, this is a problematic person.
And so, to me, none of that is news.
To me, what is news is that we now have An incredible paper trail of not only her work over time, how her story has changed, what her, you know, objects of focus have been, but we also have this growing body of literature and reporting and now, you know, AV documentation that is trying to understand who she is.
And so for me, this is kind of the next part of the cult investigators kind of pathway, which is once you establish some basic facts about how the power dynamics are flowing with regard to a charismatic leader, Then, you can also have access to, well, how are we talking about them and is that generative?
Is it reparative?
Does it hold out a hand to this person's followers?
Does it understand them as a human being or as a kind of cartoon villain?
And so, yeah, I just think with this subject particularly, It's time to go beyond that.
And with regard to, you know, why I'm not more aggressive with Paolo Marino in an interview, I mean, first of all, it was hard for both of us to lean on John Casby, even though we had, like, significant problems to raise with him.
That's just not our nature.
Like, I've never done an on-air confrontational interview.
It's not my style.
It's not what I would prefer to do.
And so it was just acceptable to me that she presented her work very transparently as being an artistic exploration of aesthetics and personality.
And then when I did lean on her a little bit about, well, you know, were you aware of Barbara Snow?
Were you aware of the problems with her backstory?
She confessed that she was not in the position to journalistically investigate, and she's open about that.
Yeah, so then what are you going to do?
Are you going to say, well, then you shouldn't have said anything at all, because obviously you don't know anything about this stuff, right?
Exactly.
I'm not going to gatekeep somebody who is, you know, an artistic videographer coming out of the music video industry and say, no, you can't choose a topic like Teal Swan.
Because the other thing is that by just, you know, hook and crook and chance and fate, she ends up having the kind of personality that allows her to To interview the Bosworths, which I think our listeners will have remembered our analysis of that interview from two episodes past.
And she achieved that because she wasn't investigating Teal Swan.
She achieved that because she went with an open lens.
Yeah, and then that gives people like us an opportunity to review that interview and think through, you know, what we think it means.
Absolutely.
And when I think about her telling me that BitSola got in touch with her to say, hey, can you pass us along any of your unused footage?
I'm like, Wow, I'm really glad that she said no, because what's actually really useful in Marino's archive is the stuff that they wouldn't have put into The Deep End, which is the boring stuff, and the subtle stuff, and the nuanced stuff, and the fact that they got actually this really transparent interview with her parents.
Yeah, they're like, we only had three years worth of footage.
Do you have anything else that we could use?
Yeah, and you know, too, that they would have combed through that footage for exactly what they wanted.
They weren't going to look through the footage in order to, you know, learn something new.
Or to change the track of their, you know, editorial process, however that ball was starting to roll.
So, yeah, I mean, I appreciate the pushback, and I understand that for those who, you know, have known about my journalistic work over the last, you know, six or seven years, that this is a different tack.
I totally appreciate that.
And yeah, I'm just saying, like Jennings Brown's reporting on Teal Swan suffices.
I don't think we need to say any more.
Now it's about like, well, what are we going to do with this particular phenomenon that's not going anywhere?
And in fact, it's probably going to expand.
My take is that people have the same experience we had.
They have a very impactful experience of watching The Deep End because of the production values and the way it's edited and the music.
All of it does actually take people on a very specific journey.
And what we've done is look at that and say, we want to talk about how the The process, the layered process of reflecting on what we watched played out for us.
And there are some things here that are complicated.
And I think for a lot of people who would appreciate the work that we usually do, they were impacted by that first impression and went, okay, we know what this is about and now the guys from Conspirituality are going to be all on board with like Here's the truth about Teal Swan as revealed by John Casby, and that that is a little disconcerting.
That we're like, well, hold on a second.
We know all of these things about Teal Swan that weren't in the documentary at all, and the real story here is not that she can be a really mean, perhaps narcissistic person sometimes.
Not news.
Not news.
Right, so there's two other things that I finished my little IG rant with, which is that from a professional perspective, as a journalist who relies on sources, people who have been in cults, who are extracting themselves from cults, who are still in cults now, to have this kind of media sloppiness on full display is really damaging for future reporting.
You know, when people are in high-demand groups, the capacity to trust an outside source with your story is already extremely stressed.
What are they going to do with this?
Do they think I'm stupid?
Where is this going to go?
Will I be embarrassed in front of my former friends and family?
That sort of thing.
And, you know, if somebody very prominent in this landscape makes such sort of demonstrably boneheaded moves with regard to, you know, accuracy and, you know, clarity in reporting boundaries and so on, The trust level goes down.
It makes the job of understanding high-demand groups a lot harder, actually.
Notwithstanding the fact that it's sensationalistic, it actually makes the future process of, like, are people going to trust what this is a lot more difficult.
And then the second thing is that, like, I've said from the beginning, I think, of our project that We're in a golden age of cult reporting, and now that's becoming a little bit tarnished by the incredible floods of money.
Yeah, it's becoming the gold rush of cult reporting.
Exactly, exactly.
And that's really, really a dangerous situation where a legitimate topic and a serious subject for study can become, you know, just kind of like a new entertainment bonanza.
And yeah, I'm not comfortable with that.
So anyway, I thank all of our listeners for sort of Catching us up and saying, wait a minute, why aren't you returning back to first principles?
Aren't you taking the side of Teal Swan by criticizing the Deep End and worried about maybe us carrying water for her in some way?
I don't think we are because of this series.
That's a very gentle way of saying it.
Yeah.
Alright, so back to Michelle Remembers.
Today we're going to cover the front matter of the book only.
But we're going to start, we should start, because the last episode we did was a little bit complex, with a little bit of a recap of the Catholic background and landscape.
Wellsprings of where this anxious material comes from, at least from within the Catholic world.
We'll talk a little bit about how that connects explicitly to the primary somatic horror in the book, which is surrounding miscarriage and abortion.
We'll talk a little bit about how Pazder positions himself as a psychiatrist who transcends his profession by re-adopting the mysticism of his Catholic heritage.
We'll also look at Pazder's own introduction to the book, and then we'll move on to notes from the Bishop of Victoria, Remy Deroux, the intro from the publisher, and the trembling, shimmering entrance of Michelle Smith herself.
Reactionary Catholic stuff going on in the 60s, 70s, leading up to the publication of Michelle Remembers in 1980.
Julian, I think some of this history was new to you the last time we spoke.
Have you had any thoughts since we last recorded, or did I go too fast over anything?
No, I didn't think you went too fast.
I think your summary for me was very illuminating in terms of how Vatican II sets the stage for the cranking up of a reactionary fundamentalism, right?
And so the impression I got is that this is about seeing the conflict or responding to the conflict between orthodoxy and perhaps a perceived heresy of progress as having dire real world consequences and the way to illustrate that
is through this fantastical supernatural drama which implies that there's this
punishment for failing to fear God in all the correct ancient ways and you're going to be
punished by being eviscerated by an even more terrifying Satan who sees liberalizing and
perhaps psychologizing in a diluting way of the one true faith as actually poking pinholes in the
veil between our reality and the gates Yeah, it's so dramatic, isn't it?
It's not just that, oh, we live in a democratic society and more and more people are thinking X. It's that we live in a society in which the sort of epistemological framework and the truth values are cracking and nothing will be left.
Yeah, absolutely.
Super anti-democratic.
It's fascinating because it's like this reactionary trad Catholic thing that you're talking about prefigures what's going to happen with the Evangelical and Pentecostal movement.
and it prefigures what's gonna happen in the New Age movement.
And for anyone who's like unsure why we're taking these layered detours,
this is in a way the mythological substrate out of which someone like Attil Swann emerges,
out of which prior to that, the satanic panic and a figure like Barbara Snow
and a figure like Lawrence Pazder can become really, really prominent on the cultural stage.
And it has implications all the way through to today's Supreme Court
and where we're at with things like QAnon.
It's all there.
By the way, I just became aware this week that 7 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices are either Catholic or nominally Catholic.
I think some are on the edge or non-practicing or something like that.
And then I think Sotomayor is Catholic, but she would be of the progressive variety.
But that's incredible!
7 out of 9.
Yeah.
I was stunned to realize that, actually.
Yeah, I've been really aware of it.
And I'm struck by sort of reflecting on how there's a weirdly progressive ecumenical attitude from the moral majority that historically saw Catholicism as insufficient to that kind of born-again, evangelical, Pentecostal zeal.
And there's something about this larger Appeal to a supernatural struggle.
for the very soul of humanity that can set aside actually quite, you know, bitter doctrinal differences and start to identify in this long project jurors who, or not jurors, actually judges, who are qualified equally by their legal CV and their ability to ascend to the highest ranks of power, but also by their Christian attitudes toward, their fundamentalist attitudes toward abortion, gay marriage, et cetera.
And it just strikes me that it takes a very special kind of true believer to straight-facedly lie in front of Congress so as to get onto the Supreme Court and then deliberately start deconstructing case law in the name of Jesus.
Right.
And it all makes a little bit more sense if we understand what kinds of cultural anxieties they're trying to tamp down within themselves and, you know, on behalf of the vision of the world they have.
And let's not forget that the Satanic Panic, which we spent a lot of time on in the previous episode, one of the things that sociologists have flagged for us about that is that this has to do with anxiety about women entering the workforce and kids being sent to daycare with strangers and who knows what's going to happen.
Right.
So, in addition to that, looking back a little bit to the Vatican II aftermath is that the takeaway is a kind of anxiety over whether the old truths can be modernized or whether the world en masse is tragically fallen and irredeemable except through grace and a return to piety and authentic ritual.
And just to underline this point, I really want to play this again.
We played it last week to illustrate the high stakes, but also the strange, absurd banalities of how all of this played out in 1970s Catholicism.
Oh yeah.
Play it again, Sam.
Right.
Amen.
with Him.
Live the unity of the Holy Spirit!
All glory and honor is Yours, Almighty Father,
forever and ever!
Amen!
Amen!
prayer that used to be very much like a magic spell in the Catholic Church.
Okay, so just as a reminder, that is the Toronto Liturgical Music Collective doing folk and chorus effect guitar over a
And I wanted to share something with you, Julian, and listeners about My own spirituality that speaks to what this music does in its function of post-Vatican II demystification, because that's what's at stake, actually, in these questions, which is that if we demystify and democratize religious sentiment, who will be in charge of things?
Satan, Matthew.
It's Satan.
Right.
But here's the wild thing that I notice.
You know, if we shared video from our last episode, the amount of bemused glee that listeners would see and the gestures and the huge grins as we are listening to that 2020 episode intro with the long clip from Rosemary's Baby, our reactions hit a certain peak around the swelling of the soundtrack, right?
And what I noticed, and this is sort of, it's a cliché, is that most Catholic horror films, and it's a bit of a paradox really if you think about it, they use ancient sounding monastic Latin chants when they want to create this foreboding sense of otherworldly danger that the satanic cult is close by.
And it's contradictory, but the emotional effect actually reveals the implicit overlap that's there, right?
Right, that's the wrathful god, right?
The sacred and the terrifying are conjoined, they're mirror images of each other.
Absolutely, and I shared last time I'd been watching the 2005 remake of The Omen for the
first time and it actually casts Mia Farrow, wouldn't you know it, from Rosemary's Baby,
as the evil servant of the devil who masquerades as Damian's nanny and brings in like the scary
black dogs who will attack everyone.
Not to go into that too much, but the climax of The Omen, as you may remember, involves
an ancient set of sacrificial daggers that have special symbology as part of how the
metal has been forged.
And Damian's father is required then to use those daggers to murder the little boy.
It has to be on the grounds of a church and it has to be in a very particular ritualized way by creating the shape of a cross once all of the blades have been inserted.
So this harkens back to something you said about how you have this inversion of fundamentalist adherence to the ancient Catholic rites.
But presented now as how the Satanists actually maintain their power because they've remained true to their evil magic and the details of their rituals.
And so the only effective response is for us to reclaim ours, however gruesome those might be because now here's Damien's daddy is going to kill him with these daggers on the grounds of a church.
But in this case, what do we have?
We have an echoing of the chorus of associations that maybe puts the little guitar effects pedal to shame, right?
Because all of these things are bouncing off of each other.
The crucifixion of Jesus, God demanding that Abraham sacrifice his son, and then at the last minute, relenting.
to prove his faith by being willing to kill him. And even more than that, deeper than
that, this ancient syntax of blood sacrifice that we shouldn't forget, you know, predates
Christianity that where you're sacrificing either humans or animals so as to bring fertility
and ultimately to save the world, to keep the stars, you know, spinning in their orbits.
The irony of Satanism for me is that all of the most powerful spiritual experiences I
have had personally, if spiritual is the right word, I'm not sure it is, but they have all
been built on moments of demystification.
The opposite of having a revelation or the revelatory experience of recognizing that something is not sacred.
You know, so these are moments in which something that I once believed was sacred suddenly appeared as very normal and mundane.
And in that moment, I realized that the division in my brain between the sacred and the mundane is artificial, it's unnecessary, it's burdensome, there's some inner authoritarianism and anxiety that's keeping that going and propping it up.
Yeah, I just need to pause you there because I so relate to this, and to me one of the ways I frame it is that it's recognizing that any symbology that refers to the sacred actually is referring to something located in the seemingly mundane everyday life of being human.
That there's a kind of awakening you're describing, an experience, and awakening of course is a tarnished word at this point.
A kind of coming to oneself and coming to the world as being in and of itself.
Sacred in a way that doesn't require the extra step somehow.
And what's wild about this, we'll talk about this a little bit more later, is that Pazder refers to Rollo May, who's actually an existentialist psychologist, who you could have just been quoting, who talks about existential anxiety as something that we need to learn how to tolerate.
or that you know for his sort of self-actualization type process, tolerating that existential
anxiety and having those kinds of encounters with reality and with our own human existence
that he defines that as a kind of breakthrough in terms of his psychological theory.
Right.
Yeah, we'll get to why Pazder actually quotes Rollo May in his preface and then seems to drop every single ball of psychological literature and training throughout the entire book and what the mystery might be there.
But yeah, I mean, I'm thinking I may be 10 years old, 11 years old, I'm a Catholic boy, I'm standing in front of an icon of the Virgin in the cathedral, and suddenly I understand that it's made of plaster.
Just like the plaster cornices at the tops of the walls.
I understand that it was painted hastily by somebody who might have been bored.
uh or underpaid uh that it was no different in substance from my school uniform or my lunchbox and this meant two things it meant that not only were sacred things everywhere and maybe nowhere but also isn't it funny and melancholic that we try to make these special amulets right It's so strange that we put so much effort in.
So what does this have to do with this liturgical music that sounds like it's from the Newport Folk Festival?
Well, I think it implies that the music of God, I think those guitar effects imply that the music of God can be anywhere, can be engaged with by anyone.
The musicians can wear jeans, sideburns, they can use a lot of effects.
And the reactionary response to that is, I think, an infantile allergy to all of those possibilities.
To saying, you know, the person is saying, the guitarist is saying, hey man, God is no big deal.
Let's hang out.
But if you have built your identity around othering yourself from people through piety and discipline, that can be a really awkward proposition.
I think it can be painful and even loathsome.
And I think we have to understand that piety generates enormous sunken costs.
And that if someone like Pazdur lets it sink in, that this line between sacred and non-sacred things is all in his head, and it was put there by somebody else, talking of intrusion and projection, he'll realize he's a hypocrite.
And I empathize with people who are stuck at that halfway point in demystification because they've gone far enough to feel ungrounded by a loss of their devotional objects, but maybe not far enough to feel that maybe reality surrounds and holds them anyway.
Yeah.
It's interesting in a much simpler and probably more contained way that was specific to a smaller phenomenon.
I feel like we watched exactly these kinds of tensions play out in the 90s in the American yoga scene.
You know, there were all these appeals to lineage, to using Sanskrit, to protecting the practice in ways that would remain consistent with the 5,000-year-old ancient tradition.
And all of that was framed in stark contrast with new developments like power yoga.
Like using music in classes, or teaching using the anglicized names for the postures instead of the Sanskrit, or failing to locate the scriptural basis of yoga in Patanjali when training teachers, even though, you know, most of the people who were training the teachers were, you know, had only a passing familiarity with that text.
And this only increased as yoga's popularity exploded and all of the new marketing gimmicks emerged and you end up with like, you know, beer yoga and goat yoga, etc.
But, oddly enough, there's a weird paradox here, too, that a more social justice-informed lens coming into the yoga sphere also then made a generation, and you and I bore witness to this with a lot of confusion, there was a generation of yoga teachers in the late 2000s who were vulnerable to taking the Hindu nationalist line as an antidote to legitimate problems with cultural appropriation.
Very strange bedfellows between yoga lefties and Hindu nationalists through the 2000s, right?
And some of that, you know, I think there were Hindu nationalist kind of operatives online who knew that they could exploit that.
Oh, for sure.
No doubt, no doubt.
On a personal note, you know, the stuff I was talking about before of a kind of like A fetishizing of a seemingly traditionally pure idea within the yoga community really turned me off.
And I didn't spend a lot of time with with quote-unquote mainstream yoga people.
It's also part of the appeal of Anna Forrest for me was that she wasn't doing any of that.
She had a very, she had a critique where she said, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these male figures who are being so idealized and turned into God-like figures, they're not so great, and in fact, they're abusive.
Like, she's one of the very first people I ever heard say anything bad about Iyengar or Batabi Joyce.
So yeah, weird.
But it seemed to me like a lot of the religious fundamentalist tropes I was familiar with from Christianity, but now they've been dressed up in organic cotton and mala beads and a little Aum tattoo on a very toned belly, right?
So perhaps we could say that the GMO panic, the anti-vax, and the hashtag save the children preoccupations kind of slip in through this same appeal to an old purity that's now in drag.
Yeah, so true.
One other point of review or reflection from last episode is that You know, following the Catholic cultural anxieties that respond to the liberalizations of Vatican II, Michelle Remembers pulls on themes that, you know, we've talked about that are popular within the Catholic horror film genre, and I just want to ping Bernard Daugherty's five elements here because they're so helpful.
So, Marian devotion, Preternatural gore, the vicarious suffering of the victim soul, the anxiousness of priests who feel they've lost touch with their vocation in a modern world, and a satanic conspiracy.
There's this great scene in The Exorcist where you see where Damian Karras lives, actually two places.
He still has a bedroom in his mom's apartment in Brooklyn or whatever it is, and then he also has some sort of dorm room somewhere, but he's just like He's just completely deracinated.
He's completely alone.
He's obviously going to become an alcoholic if he continues on as a priest without real community.
But yeah, so these priests who don't know what they're doing in robes, and then, of course, a satanic conspiracy.
And all of this stuff, just to broaden it out a little bit, as it performs reactionary functions in a Catholic context, Amongst churchgoers, you know, like, worried about the folk music, there's also a larger theme hinted at by Megan Godwin, whose book Abusing Religion is really good.
She has a phrase, the Catholicization of Public Morality, which begins in the 1970s, she says, via issues such as abortion, birth control, gay rights, as we know, are all at the heart of legal, U.S.
legal destiny.
So yeah, Julian, as we mentioned, you know, we've got seven of nine Supreme Court justices now having just torn up, or some of them, or the majority having torn up Roe v. Wade, and then they're tackling all of these other issues as well.
And it's incredible.
It's like Clarence Thomas has had his bucket list, and now that he's got the supermajority with these Catholic recent appointees, all right, let's do it.
Let's go.
Let's just keep checking boxes here.
It's amazing.
Yeah, and did he spend, what, 15 or 20 years on the bench without asking a single question?
Because all he's doing is waiting for the supermajority.
Incredible.
On this note, We've said it before, but we have to emphasize that the spectacular and bloody issue that Michelle remembers is obsessed with is dead babies.
And, you know, if that does not explicitly connect the Imaginarium of Pazder to Barbara Snow, QAnon, and then Teal Swan's claims that she watched Doc murder children, and now the Supreme Court's, you know, obsession with reproductive rights, I don't know How that connection can be clearer.
Yeah.
So, in the book, the initiating event we mentioned is Michelle's numerous miscarriages.
This is why she comes to Pastor.
And this is years after she first sees him for sort of regular mood issues.
And the memories he goes on to provoke her to quote unquote recall, then go on to center
on fantasies of, you know, wounded clubbed fetuses and murdered babies.
And they're just everywhere throughout the book.
Michelle is either identifying with them, or she's, you know, giving stillbirth to them,
even though she herself is almost always depicted as a child or certainly somebody with very
And that's whether it's in the present, in her age of 27 as she's giving her testimony, or whether she's regressed within the hypnotic trance at the age of 5.
And it's not just that there's a baby genocide going on in Michelle Remembers, it's that the Satanism is also encoded through how it happens, through the secularized horrors of medical treatment.
And here's where I want to nod to Sarah Marshall again of You're Wrong About who points out that the first recalled memory, like the first sort of hypnotic sequence in the book, sounds like she's speaking out of the alienation of a D&C procedure while under anesthetic.
And, you know, these linkages draw on a really long gothic history that express anxieties about spiritual healing being displaced by medical treatment.
And what we find when we plunge into the recalled memories is an evil world that is admined by women who are witches and nurses.
You know, there's one central witch sort of nurse who's kind of a step up from Nurse Ratched in terms of Her abject, horrifying qualities, Nurse Ratched and Cuckoo's Nest.
And that nurse is controlled by male figures, so there's a doctor who's also a demonic priest, so there's a combo character there.
And then Michelle's primary captor is a kind of maternal substitute, this nurse witch who's intent on punishing Michelle and also sacrificing babies.
And Michelle also encounters a Satanist doctor who she says sewed horns and a tail onto her.
So, Julian, do you believe that an evil doctor sewed horns and a tail onto a five-year-old Michelle Smith?
Oh, wow.
Definitely not.
It's so wild.
I mean, just, and then what happened?
Like, how long were they there?
Were they there just for one particular ritual?
Did he then remove the stitches?
Did they fall off naturally?
What on earth is going on?
Do you know, the book is so hard to read, actually, that my memory is a little bit vague.
It's such a brutal read, but my feeling is that it was for one It was for one ritual only, and then she refers in the next couple of recall sessions to the wounds of where the stitches were.
So anyway, that's a little bit altogether of the Catholic-infused backdrop and how it bleeds out, so to speak, into larger social concerns.
So I think we can turn to the front matter of the book.
And now listeners will remember that in part one, we read from that note that opens Michelle Remembers, which is a quote from Paul VI in 1972, saying that the devil is still around and should be studied.
And we also noted that like any high cleric, Paul VI seemed to have been good at political ambivalence because it's not clear from his statement about the smoke of Satan entering the church, whether he's referring to Vatican II itself or to So, he found a way of playing both sides, I think, in that statement.
So, next up in the book is a note from Bishop Remy Deroux, and he is the Archbishop of the Diocese of Victoria, and he's writing this note in 1977, the book is published in 1980, and the note specifically responds to Pazder's request for an endorsement.
They had a comment of Remy Deroux.
Bishop of the Diocese of Victoria, British Columbia on September 28, 1977.
The Church is well aware of the existence of mysterious and evil forces in the world.
Each person who has had an experience of evil imagines Satan in a slightly different way, but nobody knows precisely what his force of evil looks like.
I do not question that for Michelle this experience was real.
In time, we will know how much of it can be validated.
It will require prolonged and careful study.
In such mysterious matters, hasty conclusions could prove unwise.
It may well be that for people today, to hear this message coming from a five-year-old child is of particular significance.
It's incredibly dignified and empty at the same time.
He manages to say very, very little, but lend an air of importance to the entire thing.
There's also a kind of faux scientific note that he's hitting, right, about how we need to look at this very carefully and decide if it can be validated.
Yeah, okay.
I wish I knew a little bit more of the scholarship on this, but here's my impression is that this is the way in which educated Catholics attempt to use or tend to use scientific sounding language when they're speaking about metaphysical or theological examinations or subjects that they don't really want to come down on one side or the other of.
And part of that is that they're responding to the fact that they live in a scientific world and that if they take a stand, They're going to be proven wrong.
So, they really, I remember this kind of voice, which is, you know, well, it takes a lot of time and study, we're going to have to be very careful and meticulous about it because life is mysterious and the Word of God is numinous and so on.
So, it's a way of covering, it's using scientific language to cover one's tracks about the fact that one does not have a scientific discipline is what it is.
That's right, and this is very similar to what we said about the 2020 framing.
Satan is this force of evil that everyone who experiences him will be imagined in a slightly different way, but we're going to do some prolonged and careful study to make sure we can validate that this actually was Satan.
Right.
Now, I'm not surprised that Daru is ambivalent or a little bit arm's length with this statement because he does not appear to have been a traditionalist.
He actually seems to have been fairly progressive in views and even at one point got hauled in by Cardinal Ratzinger back when he was named by Pope John Paul II in 81 as a prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Now, this is a watchdog position.
In fact, At one point, Ratzinger was called the Pope's bulldog.
Now, he went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, and Ratzinger was critical of DeRue after DeRue came out in favor of married priests, which is not only a purity and sexuality and reproductive issue in the Catholic clergy, it's also a logistical issue.
It's also a cultural issue.
Like, it's very, very difficult for the African Catholic Church, its various diocese, to communicate to its clergy that, yeah, actually, a celibate priesthood is the way to go.
That's a hard sell in some parts of the world, especially where they want to continue to recruit priests.
So, in Daru's twilight years, his liberalism, I think, was also confirmed by his authorship of a book on the Enneagram.
So, he was a pretty diversified person, and maybe we could say left-coast Catholic, and he was also the Bishop of Victoria at the time.
So, Pazder wouldn't have gone anywhere else for higher help or validation.
Because except for the Sedevacantists, we spoke about them, they're the people who don't believe that the prelate of Rome exists anymore, traditional Catholics tend to crave ecclesial blessing no matter where it comes from because they always, always want Daddy to approve of what they're doing.
So, remember that one of Doherty's categories for the Catholic horror film is that the clergy is completely stressed out about its own secularization.
And so, the fact that Deru might actually be progressive or liberal, that's a win as well for this genre, because it's important that Pazder actually shows that even liberal clerics can get won over by his medieval myth-making.
So, there's a passage here that we can turn to, page 165 in Michelle Remembers, to think a little bit about or just get a sense of who Rémy Duru was, according to Pazder.
When Rémy Duru was 38, he became the youngest Roman Catholic bishop in Canada.
Raised on a 480-acre family farm in Manitoba with, as he had put it, one hand on the tractor and the other on a halter, he was ideal for the Diocese of Vancouver Island, a large rugged area with many isolated missions tucked into the wilderness.
He was from the start a champion of the underdog, particularly the native Indians.
Why don't we see what we are doing to destroy our own Indian people?
He once asked at a conference.
We expect them to conform to the image we set for them, and when they don't, we marginalize them.
Not Dr. Nair.
He tolerated limited use of the old ritual form of the Mass modified by the Church since Vatican II, alongside the new forms he preferred.
There's a place within the Church for us all, he said.
Michelle had never met a bishop before.
Daru was her first.
What she saw as she entered his residence was a slender man with large eyes and light hair.
His manner was intellectual but by no means austere.
Quite the contrary, he was most engaging.
There was a quiet, empathetic warmth that Michelle responded to instantly.
After some opening conversation, Dr. Pazder laid out the case for the bishop briefly in broad outline,
and then, wanting Michel to hear him say as much, sorry, make a note there,
and then, wanting Michel to hear him say this as much as he wanted the bishop to hear it,
he said, to come right to the point then, I feel that in my professional opinion,
Michelle is not crazy.
In fact, she's a sound, healthy woman.
I've listened to her for many hundreds of hours for close to a year and four years before that.
And I'm a trained listener.
And so far as I can determine, she's not making it up.
I'm convinced that she believes it to be true.
That is, I believe she's genuine.
The bishop then asked Michelle some questions, letting her tell her story herself, attending to every word.
At the end of an hour, he turned back to Dr. Pazder and said, Well, of course, I completely agree with you.
It's clear that Michelle is totally genuine.
As for the truth of her story, whether or not her dreadful memories are accurate, I'm in no position to say, nor can I speak about the ramifications of the story, nor should I. It seems possible that someday I might be called upon to make judgments upon it, and I shouldn't anticipate those judgments.
But I do want to say, he took Michelle's head between his hands.
Her eyes were still moist from the emotion of recounting her experiences.
That I'm really very sorry for all the pain you've had to go through.
You are a good person, Michelle, and you must not feel ashamed for what happened.
You are in no way responsible.
He gave Michelle his blessing, and then all eyes were moist.
The bishop offered to talk again at any time, and he gave them the use of his library for such research as they might need to do into the phenomena Michelle was encountering.
Wow.
Ooh, that's good stuff.
Like, that's straight out of one of these movies, right?
It's so out of the movies.
And such unearned intimacy as well.
I mean, on one hand, he's hanging back and he doesn't want to validate what he's heard.
But then he does want to play the empathetic patriarch.
He took Michelle's head between his hands.
Her eyes were still moist from... Okay, so This is a grown woman.
This is a bishop.
He's going to be in his getup, right?
Maybe he's got the hat on, maybe not.
But he takes her face in his hands?
As though she's, as though she's a child.
Well, we'll get to how she's depicted as a child throughout.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we're also dealing with, this is, this is supposedly, this is in the implied aftermath of her having talked about these most horrific experiences.
Um, and, and, and I picture the Bishop sort of saying, well, you know, I believe that she's genuine.
I'm not sure what to make of all of this, but oh my God, what you have been through my child.
So again, it's the same thing that we keep noticing, that there's this back and forth between, you know, it's huge if true.
Right, right.
So yeah, back to his ambivalence for a moment.
You know, he just does not come out swinging here.
I think he wants to personally ingratiate himself to Pazder and certainly to Michelle.
But in a sort of ideological sense, I have to imagine that he's pleasing many masters here.
He is confirming Michelle's authenticity and intention.
He's ingratiating himself to a psychiatrist.
He doesn't endorse the story, but he also leaves the door open for Pazder to presume an endorsement.
You know, it strikes me too that even though we have good things to say about Rami Daru, he does sound a little bit to me like someone in their Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
You know, I may be asked at some point to give some judgments on this topic, and so I shouldn't say anything that would give the appearance of bias right now.
Yeah.
I don't know how this is related, and maybe I'll cut this, but I'm getting ready to interview Kathleen Hale on her book about the Slenderman stabbings, and how the disaster of these two girls getting sucked into this online conspiracy theory and not getting mental health services is exacerbated by the fact that the Wisconsin court charges and tries them as adults, and they're 12 fucking years old.
And in the documentary, the judge that's presiding over the girl's competency to stand trial is just the most incredible character.
He reminds me, I mean, when I'm thinking of Daru in this position where he's not going to quite say anything and he's going to maintain this distance and moral dignity, But also he's going to be very warm in some other way.
This judge shows up in this court knowing that he's presiding over absolute, maybe he doesn't know, but he is presiding over this absolute corruption of trying these girls as adults when they're 12 years old.
But he wears a just killer bow tie, and his hair is brill creamed just so, and he just looks absolutely dandy, and you can tell that he just loves sitting on that seat.
And you know, so he can create this kind of interpersonal connection from the position of his authority, but what he's actually going to do with that authority, who knows?
And he doesn't really have any control over, does he?
Right?
If Daru, here's the thing, if Daru was really a Vatican II priest, I think he would have given a different answer.
Maybe he did and Pazder wrote something different, right?
But I think he would have said, Michelle, this is a very serious and concerning story.
I empathize with you.
I don't pretend to understand the subtleties of this type of therapy.
But I would ask you, Dr. Pazder, to please tread very carefully in implicating the Church in your therapeutic practice, because for too long, Catholicism has been mobilized to promote and defend all manner of moral panics with ugly political agendas, and that's not the Church I would want to bring forward into the 20th century.
But he didn't!
He didn't say that, at least in the reporting we have.
We have an answer that would satisfy those in favor of Vatican II and those who think that it's the end of the world.
And so he's really mastered like the art of saying very little and that's okay because he's got the very big hat.
But my favorite nothing burger quote is, it may well be that for people today to hear this message coming from a five-year-old child is of particular significance.
Like how many hedges could you put in I mean, I guess there's only two, but he manages to create a very dignified-sounding, completely empty sentence.
I just want to add, too, that you seemed to be implying earlier that Pastor is an unreliable narrator, is that...?
Is that your position?
Well, that's the thing, right?
I mean, we are going through the front matter that is signed off on by other people.
But when it comes to Pastor's descriptions of, I mean, even when we get to Congdon, the publisher, he's going to be reporting on what Pastor has told him about sessions and he's going to be relying on his tapes and so on.
But yeah, I would say just lastly about this meeting between Daru and Pazder and Michelle is that the crucial theme that's established is a kind of rapprochement between psychiatry and the priesthood, where the former submits to the latter in order to restore the reality of the supernatural.
And, you know, I want to remark that when I was a kid, this kind of meeting would have made sense because there was no universe in which I thought going to, or it wouldn't have made sense, it would have had a particular kind of valence to it because I wouldn't have thought of going to a priest for emotional guidance.
Because they obviously weren't good at that.
I remember going to confession, which is kind of the Catholic version of therapy, because it has confidentiality, the premise at least, that you're going to be heard and understood.
But just feeling so awkward about the notion that I would do anything I would say anything private to this weird guy who I didn't know or understand or who I might have been afraid of.
So, there's this cultural gap for Catholics because therapy often just isn't on the radar.
So, if I felt creeped out by confession, that would just be too bad.
I knew that Woody Allen had a psychiatrist, but I think that some kind of low-level anti-Semitism within me said, oh, that's for those people, that's not for me.
But interestingly, the satanic panic evolves to privilege intuitive psychotherapies that are not explicitly Catholic, but they are often aligned actually with feminist concerns in their interest in justice and promoting survivorship and especially listening to women victims of childhood abuse.
Alright, so back to the front matter.
We have plugs from Paul VI and DeRue, and we have a note from the publisher.
The guy's name is Thomas B. Congdon.
Looks like he was a pretty standard newsy guy for the time he worked for the Saturday Evening Post and then Doubleday through the 1960s and 70s.
He had a big goal or a win as the editor of the novel Jaws by Peter Benchley, and he eventually opened his own shop in 1979, which then published Michelle Remembers in 1980.
Now, Julian, you found a report that Pazder collected an advance of $342,000 for Michelle Remembers, but reports are that Congdon's house went bankrupt in 1986.
And so I want to know whether he went broke by overpaying Pazder or maybe somebody else.
I wonder if they didn't get their money back.
Something really weird about Congdon is that neither Wikipedia nor the New York Times obit in 2008, he died at the age of 77, mention that Congdon published Michelle Remembers.
So, here's a little bit from his prefatory note.
Two experienced interviewers journeyed to Victoria and talked to Dr. Pastor's colleagues, to the priests and the bishop who became involved in the case, to doctors who treated Michelle Smith when she was a child, to relatives and friends.
From local newspaper, clergy and police sources, they learned that reports of Satanism in Victoria are not infrequent, and that Satanism has apparently existed there for many years.
The source material was scrutinized.
The many thousands of pages of transcript and of the tape recordings that Dr. Pazder and Mrs. Smith made of their psychiatric sessions were read and digested.
They became the basis of this book.
The tapes themselves were listened to in good measure and the videotapes made of some of the sessions were viewed.
Both the audio and the video are powerfully convincing.
It is nearly unthinkable that the protracted agony they record could have been fabricated.
In the course of preparing the book, both doctor and patient were interviewed at great length, taken back over the story again and again.
Their account varied only in small occasional details.
Michelle's distress during these retellings, the fresh pain they obviously inflicted on her, seemed to indicate that this was not some fantasy concocted for commercial gain.
Indeed, the author's relentless insistence on adherence to the transcript and on understatement, both in the text and in the presentation of the book, the jacket text, the advertising, and so forth, was hardly the mark of a charlatan.
Understatement is an amazing word to use there.
I first met the authors two years ago, and I've had much contact with them.
During the final stages of the editing of the manuscript, the authors came to New York and for nearly a month lived in my own home, shared meals with my family, sometimes talked long into the night with us.
We came to know them well, in a way one does not come to know someone over the phone or in the office.
Even my normally skeptical teenagers found Michelle Smith and Larry Pastor the most decent and modest and genuine of people.
Along with Dr. Pastor and the church officials who know her so well, I believe that Michelle is not a hysteric, not even a neurotic.
She seems as clear as a glass of well water.
She appears to be one of those rare people like Joan of Arc and Bernadette whose authority and authenticity are such that they can tell you things that would otherwise be laughable, yet you do not laugh, you do not dismiss or forget.
Though the names in the byline are those whose experience the book relates, the book is not written in the first person.
It was decided that third person was the best way to convey this story, that since it was a two-person story, Dr. Pastor's as well as Michelle's and I narrator would be awkward and limiting.
Writing assistance was provided, but the book is principally the work of Mr. Smith and Dr. Pastor.
Their transcript, which consists purely of their own words, is the fundamental source material.
Most important, the conceptualization of the book, its tone, its level, its structure, its emphasis, is entirely theirs.
Invariably, they understood their own book better than any of us who were privileged to work with them.
Holy moly!
That is some really just earnest advocacy.
It really is.
It's so finely wrought and quite detailed and it has a real flavor of you Dost protest too much a little bit.
You know we have and you know it's like Okay, so two interviewers.
They're unnamed.
There's nothing in the sort of ephemera of the book that suggests who they are.
Unsighted reports about a long history of Satanism in Victoria, none of which I believe any of the follow-up journalism have corroborated.
There's writing assistants, Then there's a lot of character witnessing.
A lot of... Testimonial.
Testimonial.
Yeah, this is what it feels like they're like.
It just feels really, really true, and they're really great, and even my teenage kids thought that they were just swell.
Then there's transcripts.
Congdon in the preface that you just read says, their transcript, which consists purely of their own words, that's his description, is kind of...
Qualified a little bit in the book itself by Pazder, where he hedges with this footnote.
This dialogue, and similar dialogue in this book, as well as the indented material, are taken nearly verbatim from the transcript of the tape recordings made during the 14 months of psychiatric sessions.
Okay, so that's nearly verbatim.
I mean, what happened between audio tape and page is going to be lost to history.
But I think the biggest ethical omission here is that neither Congdon nor Pazder are clear about how the sessions were actually conducted.
Something is dawning on me here as we're going through all of this that hadn't quite hit me in as blatant a way as it's hitting me now, which is that The book doesn't purport just to be about the satanic panic, and it doesn't purport just to be about one patient's unusually intense sort of experiences that tell us something about satanic ritual abuse.
The book is presented as a document that is a breakthrough moment of proving something about the nature of reality with regard to Catholic theology.
Yeah, and Congdon carries water with that by giving this kind of forensics analysis or presentation of how the material is going to be delivered, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it feels like Actually, this is a scientific discovery, and our two interviewers and my teenage kids can verify it for you.
You know, neither Congdon nor Pazder, as I said, are clear about how the sessions are conducted and that's pretty crucial because you can listen to audio tapes but not understand what the conditions are in the room.
And as we're going to see in the next part of our study, Sarah Marshall points this out, there are plenty of clues that point to Pazder using hypnosis.
You know, the phrase from her depths or returning from her depths is used as she re-emerges from the recall.
As she goes into it, the words like descending or going down are used.
There's lots of staircases.
There's one moment in which Michelle remembers the doctor and the cult swinging a shiny
object that makes her sleepy as she gazes at it in the recalled memory.
So all of these are tropes of hypnotism.
So the notion of the transcript is meant to lend credibility to the data, but that's not true if they're not
disclosing what's actually going on in the recordings.
Julian, I think...
Hold on. What we definitely know, though, even though we may not know 100% for sure, right, that this was hypnotherapy.
It probably was.
But what we do know for sure is this period of therapy, he completely breaks the frame, right?
He transgresses the psychotherapeutic boundaries by going into long extended sessions, right?
Running way over time.
We're immersing ourselves now in a trance state in which these memories are being recovered.
Right.
Yeah, the boundary violations are constant and extreme, and they expand.
At some point, at one point, they're meeting every day for six hours, eight hours, ten hours, something like that.
It looks like he's giving up on every other client.
Of course, You know, they are either also at this time falling in love with each other or he is enacting, you know, another type of power in their relationship that winds up with her wearing a wedding ring.
And sitting beside him at the McMartin preschool trial.
Exactly.
Yeah, so I think we've discussed a little bit.
I think you know a little bit about the validity of and the issues with hypnosis and hypnotherapy.
I'm not so up on that.
Yeah, I mean it goes to my own history in terms of the type of stuff that my parents were sending to me in the wake of me.
Accusing them of horrific memories that I thought I was recovering about false memory syndrome, about the sort of rash of cases like this that resulted from hypnotherapy and from certain kinds of interviewing techniques.
What I'm going to do is include a link in our show notes about a statement from the American Medical Association in 85, which in a lot of ways was a response to all of this stuff, and it advised psychiatrists as follows.
The Council finds that recollections obtained during hypnosis can involve confabulations and pseudo-memories, and not only fail to be more accurate, but actually appear to be less reliable than non-hypnotic recall.
So that's from the American Medical Association, Council on Scientific Affairs, specifically about the use of hypnosis.
That's from 1995.
That statement is part of a larger body of work.
This is from the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1997.
Psychiatrists are advised to avoid engaging in any memory recovery techniques, which are based upon the expectation of past sexual abuse of which the patient has no memory.
Such memory recovery techniques may include drug-mediated interviews, hypnosis, regression
therapies, guided imagery, quote-unquote body memories, literal dream interpretation, and
journaling.
Wow.
There's no evidence, literal dream interpretation, there's the phrase for you, right?
Right.
There's no evidence that the use of consciousness-altering techniques such as drug-mediated interviews
or hypnosis can reveal or accurately elaborate factual information about any past experiences
including childhood sexual abuse.
Wow, they really went to the wall here.
Yeah, techniques on regression therapy, including age regression and hypnotic regression, are of unproved effectiveness.
So I think those two quotes kind of say it all, but I'll include the link and there's a whole, you know, history and litany of different angles on this topic.
Okay, well this brings us to how does Pazder present his experience and the project of this book.
So, let's take a look at his foreword now, Julian.
To be with human beings during their struggles and discoveries is an experience that gives much to the psychotherapist.
Both Michelle's struggles and her discoveries were of a magnitude far greater than that of most patients, and so were the rewards for me.
It was my privilege to witness as she risked the abyss, venturing far beyond her normal memory pool, her imaginings, fantasies, and dreams, to somewhere at the very core of her being.
Perhaps it was what Jungians called the base of the psyche, the meeting ground of our ancestral past and our present, the source of myth and symbol, the juncture of mind and body, heart and soul.
Most have touched it only for fleeting moments.
Michelle visited it for hundreds of hours.
Well, you actually put her there for hundreds of hours.
Anyway, sorry.
There, acting with the courage that Rollo May says allows us to move in spite of despair, she grappled with the polarities of life and death, love and hate, light and dark, good and evil.
She unearthed and relived 14 months of her past in astonishing detail.
Her deeply buried memories, virtually untouched for 22 years, this is the archaeological metaphor is so strong, right?
Right, right.
Virtually untouched for 22 years, surfaced with a purity that is a phenomenon in itself.
What she brought forth, giving birth, what she brought forth provides an understanding of how a child survives, one that seems more profound than modern psychology's emphasis on the effects of victimization.
Ouch.
Her achievement, her achievement, the psychological tenacity of a five-year-old in the face of sheer madness will confront and inform many generations.
The psychotherapy itself is a groundbreaking, momentous event in the history of humanity.
The fucking grandiosity is so deep.
Yeah.
It's a fascinating, incredibly grandiose statement.
Here's this phrase, beyond her normal memory pool.
And it's one of many sort of indications in this preface that he's also kind of generating some kind of plausible deniability with regard to, is this real?
Um, he refers to Jung and the base of the psyche.
Uh, he's, I mean, I think that points towards a collective unconscious maybe.
I feel that he's, he's almost tipping his hand here in some way.
Not that he doesn't believe in what he's about to present, but that he's also leaving some sort of backdoor.
But as we mentioned before, Rollo Mays in the preface, Carl Jung is in the preface.
Uh, you know, what do we like, How do these luminaries inform what is to follow or not, Julian?
You know, it's fascinating.
I think when we talk of it as a kind of hedging, right, as we've talked about with several other statements so far, there's something going on here that I think has continued on through the New Age, which is this The idea that you can find intellectual, psychological, and supposedly scientific, actually pseudoscientific in the form of quantum physics or what have you, or epigenetics, ways of validating claims that you want to make that are actually supernatural and paranormal.
Right.
And one of the things I really have read a lot of Jung and, you know, came to him through Joseph Campbell.
really appreciate Jung's work, but I found that so many people, certainly that I've met
on the West Coast of America, who are into Jung, it's because they believe Jung gives
the kind of intellectual and academic credibility to very fanciful kind of paranormal and supernatural
beliefs.
So, and you know, some of that may actually be justified if you really look at Jung.
Like Jung very famously went through a very dark period where he felt that he was losing
his mind, where he had an invisible friend named Philemon who would talk to him.
His whole way of using active imagination is very similar to some sort of hypnotic process
and a way of gaining knowledge about the world.
This idea of the collective unconscious, to me, always made sense in terms of talking about our ancestral history in relation to archetypal mythological Images that you see around the world, but going that next extra step where you say, well, the commonality of these archetypal images therefore implies that there's some literal sort of platonic domain of supernatural, you know, archetypes that, and so therefore religion is true in some sort of fundamentalist interpretation.
That always seemed like a weird step to me.
I would almost be certain that Pastor is using his reference to Jung in that kind of way.
Rollo May, I think of him, perhaps you can help me here, I think of him as an existential psychologist, as someone who's often sort of lumped in with the humanists like Abraham Maslow, that he's really talking about an existential confrontation with reality, with mortality, with being human in a way that sort of maybe strips away some of our defensive reactions and says, you know, in learning to embrace the truth of my mortal humanity, I can start to touch some sense of the sacred or of meaning, similar to what we alluded to in the beginning.
So I'm unsure how it relates to Paz, except for him making some sort of pop psychology reference that hopefully gives him credibility.
But I do know that Rollo May was also a huge fan of Paul Tillich's.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Okay.
Yeah, there's something there to do with a notion of a true religion, right?
A more sort of contemporary interpretation of the essence of a Christian approach to life that maybe pastor resonates with.
You know, you mentioned credibility.
I think there's also this bizarre respectability tension as well because here is a book that's going to be presented by a psychiatrist who actually wants to be a priest and who's going to recount, you know, 14 months of breaking every possible boundary that he can with this client and eventually, he doesn't report on this in the book, but eventually he marries her and there's all kinds of You know, macabre intimacies that are disclosed through the recall process.
And if he can put Jung and Rollo May in the front, there's a respectability politics that I think is being enacted as well.
It's like, oh no, I still have my corduroy jacket.
I still have my loafers.
I'm still lithe and athletic.
I'm not a barking mad, Rasputin bearded, you know, like, I don't know, religious freak.
That's part of what I get from it, too.
It's like, hmm, I can look down my glasses and quote Jung and Rollo May and frame this in a very sort of initially secular perspective as one who is actually about to be converted.
So, Lawrence Pastor is the Zach Bush of Rollo May's.
Right, that's good.
Yeah, so, you know, I also just wanted to lean on this statement a little bit about
Michelle unearthing and reliving 14 months of her past in astonishing detail.
And that what she gets from it, what she retains is this purity that is a phenomenon in itself.
Remember last time we discussed this weird thing about Pazder and other satanic panic
promoters, framing abuse, including sexual abuse, as not being about the person who suffers
It's not about who they are, but about some idealized quality within them that is being purposefully attacked.
And that feels like that's in that same vein that, you know, what the prize at the end of it is that Michelle is always and forever pure, not that she's a person.
Yeah, and I mean it was all I could do not to interrupt myself in the opening few sentences there, because what does he say?
That this is his reward, this is his privilege, this is, you know, he doesn't realize the extent to which he's so on the nose about how he's profiteering from all of this, but there's also a kind of voyeuristic kick that he's getting.
And he frames it in terms of lionizing her survivorship, but that's not what the book actually presents because all of the torturous recall really just consists of abject abuses happening to Michelle.
She remains alive to tell the tale under hypnosis, it seems, but this does not seem to be an achievement of psychological tenacity.
It seems that that is yet another projection Pazder's making, but this one upon the book itself instead of just Michelle.
Yes, well, huge if true, right?
If she went through all of this as a five-year-old child, then what does this tell us about the tenacity of her capacity to survive, right?
I mean, one cynical take that has come up for me is that it seems he might be preempting concerns about the trauma porn that he's about to unleash by talking about her resilience.
Even more cynically, and I'm going to run with Sarah Marshall's observation that Michelle is not trying to escape the satanic cult so much as the therapy that is making her believe she was in a satanic cult.
It's almost as if Pazder is saying, you know, I really tested this woman with my bizarre fantasies and she was totally game.
Oh my god, I'm sorry to laugh, but yeah, it's so twisted.
Yeah.
So a couple more, just a couple more quotes here.
Let's hear how the charming city of Victoria is described on the first page of chapter one.
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, is a jewel of a city.
A tidy metropolis on the edge of the Pacific that in its primness seems more English than Canadian.
Baskets of flowers hung from its ornate lampposts.
Its parliament building is outlined with thousands of tiny lights at night, a conceit that would have pleased the good queen for whom the city was named.
Ocean-going yachts tie up in front of the ivy-covered Empress Hotel downtown, schools of whales frolic offshore, and the air blowing in from the sea is fresh and crisp.
Many Canadians consider Victoria a modern Garden of Eden, not so far-fetched an ocean if one recalls that there was a serpent in the Garden of Eden.
on 4th Street in Victoria is the first.
Oh, no, that's good. We can stop.
We can stop with the Garden of Eden.
Oh, man.
It's a really strong opening, but I've got to give a little
more Canadian context here.
It's a great description of Victoria and its primness and its Englishness.
You can just see the pinky finger rising up off of the handle of the teacup.
Is it true that on any given day you can see schools of whales frolicking offshore?
You know, I'm sad to say that in 1977 that might have been true.
Okay, okay.
I don't know about now.
Some words that are missing from this description are white, also middle class or bourgeois, but Victoria is also known as, you know, likely the whitest city town in Canada.
It's more like England.
It is, yeah.
It is.
So, what's being set up here is a landscape of twi gardens and tea time socials that's about to be invaded.
Now, Pazder doesn't have a foiled description of any West African town or city to juxtapose, but that's kind of in the background here, as well as that sinking and nauseating feeling that without God and church and proper ritual, all of the civilizing and culturation of the world All of the rose gardens will not protect people from evil.
In fact, these accoutrements of civilization may more efficiently hide it or repress it.
So, Victoria therefore becomes a macrocosm of Michelle herself.
It's also reminiscent of all of those Catholic horror movies.
They all... Yes.
At some point in the opening 20 minutes, you're going to have some incredible scene of like, what a lovely, aesthetically pleasing, white picket fence existence is going on, and into this is going to come the darkness.
Right.
It's the clarinet at the beginning of Bambi, isn't it?
Exactly.
Yeah, I mean, as you pointed out last time, none of the physical signs of Michelle Remembers occurring in Victoria have been found, just as no medical evidence of Michelle's abuse has been found.
Yeah, and not only that, we just heard a few minutes ago, right, that Satanism has existed in Victoria for a long time.
There have been many reports of this.
And then we know, from the research that's been done, that all of these accounts she gave of very specific church courtyards, of very specific local landmarks, that nothing like what she described has ever been reported by anyone as having occurred there on special days that were set aside for that purpose by the Satanists.
Well, but, you know, people who live in Victoria, they are just meticulous about cleaning up.
They want their gardens to be restored to pristine condition.
It's just like that, you know, when the party's over, the party's over.
And they also would have motivation to do that because they wouldn't want their lovely prim English town to be associated with The Beast.
Exactly, right.
Let's finish with the entrance of Michelle, but it's actually, I mean, and I think this is apropos, it's the entrance of Lawrence Pazder into Michelle's life as she's lying in a hospital bed.
So, yeah, we have this description here of the meeting.
Dr. McCracken was a general practitioner in Victoria.
I'm calling about Michelle Smith, he told Dr. Pastor.
I've had to hospitalize her.
She's having some trouble with bleeding.
She had a miscarriage six weeks ago, and despite repeated DNCs and medication, she continues to hemorrhage.
Not only that, but her grief over the miscarriage is extremely severe and persistent.
I'm beginning to think the problem isn't just physiological, but there's some sort of psychogenic aspect.
That's why I called you.
It sounds pretty upsetting.
Did you talk to her about my coming in to see her?
Dr. Pazder asked.
Yes, I did.
In fact, she encouraged me to call.
I know about the work you did with her before, and I'd be grateful for your opinion.
What neither doctor then knew was that Michelle, the night before, had been moved into the hospital ward in which her mother had died of cancer.
Michelle had panicked and felt she was dying too.
The next morning she had asked Dr. McCracken to call Dr. Pazder.
The psychiatrist was shocked when he saw Michelle.
A pretty young woman of 27 with a heart-shaped face, a delicate mouth, and bountiful brown curls.
She had been vital and bright the last time he'd seen her, four months before, when she and her husband Doug had brought some salmon he'd caught to Dr. Pastor and his wife.
But now the face was as pale as the pillowcase and the big brown eyes were full of tears.
It's so Victorian, isn't it?
I mean, that's interesting, right?
It's these two male medical professionals talking about this hysterical woman who can't seem to get over the fact that she had a miscarriage and her bleeding may be psychogenic.
And then, of course, we have to insert the fisherman husband into the description.
Like in the middle of the description of how appealing and gorgeous this woman is.
Right.
I didn't catch that.
But yeah, it does have a real sort of Bronte flavor to it, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, so we've noted the miscarriages being the initiatory framework for the meeting.
There's a ping of the mother here who died early in Michelle's life and haunts the therapeutic encounter.
And Michelle's mother also becomes a spectral figure in all of the recalled memories as someone who fails to nurture and protect.
She's foiled by the Virgin, but also then exaggerated by the nurse.
We should remember that a key theme in satanic panic literature is the complicity of the parents, who if they're not the criminals themselves, they're often depicted as either in on the cult or blind to it.
And I think this would have to be the case.
Right, Julian?
Because every story of kidnapping or abuse seems to be an extension of a story of parental negligence.
So, yeah, it's interesting that we have, as Gen X people, we're pioneers of the category of the latchkey kid, but this points at actually two possible outcomes that can intersect, but they might not.
You know, on one hand we have, oh, I had to become independent really quickly.
And on the other hand we have, holy shit, my parents were super negligent.
And then we have satanic panic stories in which, holy shit, my parents let me be abducted into a satanic cult.
Yeah, all of that.
And then it's interesting because it does double duty, right?
So if really the villains are the parents, there's something there that says, and it's the negligence of the parents which led them to not notice.
That this was happening, that their kids were being abducted and raped and scarred and bled and that the parents just never noticed.
And it does double duty in the same way that the idea of, well, you know, the satanic ritual abusers destroyed the evidence.
They burned the bodies and things just get cleaned up and so there's no evidence left.
Same sort of thing.
The reason why the parents, we have a built-in excuse.
That answers the question, well, how come none of the parents ever noticed?
Well, because they were negligent and these were latchkey kids and they were doing this terrible thing where both parents worked.
And I just have to say here, too, I need to loop back just briefly because I got such a strong image.
We were talking about the Victorian, you mentioned Brontë, echoes in that last passage.
It makes me think of that scene.
I don't know if you know the French lieutenant's woman.
Yes, but a long, long time ago.
I'm a huge fan of this film, largely because Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons are in it together, but I think it's also a very cleverly done film, and it's based on a novel by John Fowles, who I think is just masterful.
And there's a scene where she has, where the French lieutenant's woman has disappeared.
She's been fired by her governess, who's like a fire and brimstone Christian, you know, punitive, horrible human being.
The Jeremy Irons character, who's married, goes to the psychiatrist and they have this whole conversation about the nature of this woman who is so tormented by her lost love.
And it's just so much like that scene.
But the difference is, in this story, the man who is attending to and trying to help someone who he perceives as noble and innocent and unfairly abused, this story is really a tale of how he loses his way and he
gets, he essentially gets corrupted through this, through what unfolds in the story. And that to me is really the
story of Lawrence Pazder is that he's, he is corrupted by his own
grandiosity and by his own voyeuristic perversion into what what then unfolds and actually does unleash something
really diabolical onto our world.
While he's rewarded for it.
Exactly.
There's no comeuppance, right?
I mean, that would be the big difference between this and Victorian fiction, right?
Because the person who sort of proudly went on would come to some sort of hubristic end, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
We've got to end with this description of Michelle.
The heart-shaped mouth, face rather, the delicate mouth, The beautiful brown curls.
Also, I know she's in a hospital, but pale as the pillowcase?
I mean, we can assume he's talking about the hospital sheets, but there's also something suggestive here, that her head is on a pillow.
Big brown eyes, full of tears, and maybe it's that last one.
The brown eyes, along with the heart-shaped face and the delicate mouth, it seals the deal on the portrayal of Michelle Smith as a kind of China doll slash Catholic icon.
Also, some shades of manga here, I think, which Pazder certainly would not have been aware of.
But maybe there's something archetypal going on with this kind of facial structure that is constructed to present both, you know, innocence and a sense of allure.
But reading this description of Michelle in the late 70s is like looking at concept art for the Panda Eyes children, or the victims of QAnon trafficking who are bled of their adrenochrome in the 2020s.
But the whole thing I'm so uncomfortable with because it guarantees that we never really get to meet her except through the gaze of Pastor.
We never hear Michelle Smith speak except when he has her under hypnosis or when, you know, humble and demoralized she's asking him or a priest for help.
So, You know, maybe we'll end with just the haunting thought that this book is called Michelle Remembers, but in the end, no reader can really remember anything except what Lawrence Pazder wants them to remember about his own obsessions.
Can I just say it reminds me, too, of Regan in The Exorcist, right?
That here is a character who serves only to tell the story, who serves only as the mysterious sort of undiscovered country of demonic possession for all of the other characters.
Like, is there a person there, or is this just a mouthpiece for the ideology?
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