The homestretch of our study of Michelle Remembers zeroes in on the literal symbols—and symbols gone literal—of the Satanic Panic. (This is episode 6 of the Swan Song Series.)Archetypes, gore, anxieties about sex and babies and filth: Lawrence Pazder mined it all, using modes of abstraction and dehumanization as old as religion itself to weave a story he claimed was all about Michelle—but was really an exercise of his own fetishes.Michelle Smith could have received proper care for her understandable stresses. She could have offered up her feelings and sensations and images from dreams for discussion and contemplation, and an actual therapist would have held that material safely for her to explore. But in Pazder, Smith found someone who wasn’t interested in common human complexity. He was interested in cosmic warfare, and the role he could LARP within it.But Pazder was so blind to his craven narcissism that he couldn’t help but tell on himself. In the final passage we analyze, Pazder records Smith demanding to end therapy. “If I could tear out my tongue,” she says, “I would never have to speak again.” But in the very next paragraph, the man who is forcing her to “remember” symbolically tears out her tongue, rejecting her plea to end the sessions, interpreting her demand as though it were coming from Satan himself.She imagines herself getting in a car and driving and driving, anywhere. Away from this psychiatrist who wanted to be an exorcist, away from his story, perhaps to find her own. Show NotesHIGHEST GAME IN TOWN‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’How to Lose Weight (Weight Loss and Obesity) - Teal SwanThe Cause of Obesity - Teal Swan Articles
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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.
Hey everybody, welcome to installment six of the Swan Song series.
This one is called Michelle Remembers Literal Symbols.
And just a reminder that this is part of an early access bonus series.
And dear Patreons, you can further support this new vein of research by telling friends about it if you think they might benefit from this series or the hundreds of hours of bonus media we have stowed away on Patreon so far.
Hello, Julian.
Hi, here we are again.
Here we are.
It's the gift that keeps on giving.
I know.
It's going to end, though.
It's going to end as we come to this last examination of Michelle Remembers.
Matthew, it never ends.
It's continuously resurrected.
This is the thing.
But I'm going to change direction a little bit from, I think, an indication that I gave in the last segment.
on this towering achievement of brain-melted literature.
I had previously referred to some plan of scanning the text in linear fashion, but maybe a little bit more concisely than in the brilliant work that we find in the five-part series that's put out by You're Wrong About by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes.
As I kept contemplating this material and what we have already discussed and digested, I decided that it would be better to pivot a bit and close our study of this book out by just acknowledging that Your Wrong About already provides the gold standard summarization of the content.
And what we can add beyond the history and cultural conditions that we've covered already is a study of how the symbology of Michelle Remembers functions and how that translates forward in both form and content into the age of Teal Swan and QAnon.
So, I took the 130-page reading guide that I created and I boiled it down over and over again for thematic density.
And so, I want to walk us through those themes after we discuss the more general issues that come up in relation to what happens when an entire movement slips into the symbolic order.
So, also for clarity and pacing, I have headings today.
Okay, so before we start, however, there's a correction because in the last episode on Michelle Remembers, a number of you, including my dad—hello, dad—wrote in to inform me that I made some pope mistakes in episode 4.
So, it's Pius X and not XII who was the last legitimate pope, according to Mel Gibson and other sedevacantists.
And it was John XXIII, not Paul XXIII, who opened the Vatican II proceedings, so thank you for the correction.
Also, we came across some slow-breaking news after our analysis of the book's preface by publisher Thomas Congdon, because a Patreon supporter wrote in to say that, first of all, they had added Michelle remembers to his Wikipedia page.
So wait, wait, the Patreon supporter who wrote you the comment themselves had gone in and edited past.
Oh, this is great.
We are affecting the zeitgeist, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
And then the second thing that this that this supporter did was that they said that to source that addition to Wikipedia because of course they did it properly with with good sourcing.
They had found a Washington Post Do you want to read the highlighted part?
1979, it's a gossip column about the publishing industry in New York, in which Congdon was
quoted about the book.
And so, do you want to read the highlighted part there?
It's pretty revealing.
Michelle Remembers is the biggest piece of nonfiction I've ever had.
It's about a little girl whose parents gave her to a satanic church where she was made part of the rituals.
She buried it all in her subconscious and, when she was grown, a psychiatrist pulled it all back out again, bit by tortured bit.
It has overtones of Sybil, Gosh, what it feels like to have a great big trembling piece of commerce on your plate.
You can hear Tom licking his chops over the telephone.
And kind of chomping a cigar too, right?
It's like, Michelle remembers is the biggest piece of nonfiction I've ever had.
It's about a little Goyle whose parents, anyway, so.
You should have, you should have cued me to do that particular impression.
I mean, it's, it's all really very accurate.
If you just replace the words nonfiction and commerce with the word shit, it's what it's like to have a big trembling piece of shit on your plate.
It's amazing.
Also, it's not part of what you read, but this column references that Barbara Wyden, somebody named Barbara Wyden, is the co-author.
And that was a new name for me.
It wasn't a name that showed up in the text itself.
And the best I could find is that she was a fairly prolific author and editor in the 1970s.
And I guess maybe the co-authorship didn't work out, so maybe Congdon was speaking out of turn here or anticipating some author's support that didn't materialize in the end, but it got me thinking about all of the co-authoring and ghostwriting that is always happening in these worlds.
I recently realized that Kelly Brogan's latest book, Own Yourself, has a co-author attached to it.
Nancy Marriott, and so I emailed her to ask about it, and Nancy wrote back to say, I have no connection with Kelly other than I was hired by her as an editor.
Her decision to bill me as co-author for Own Yourself, which at the time I thought was very generous, her more controversial messaging that came out during the pandemic occurred only after our work on the book was finished.
And her anti-vax for COVID views was not promoted in the book.
I've had little or no communication with her since 2019, pre-pandemic.
So anyway, book people are book people.
They get roped into weird things?
You know, it strikes me there's just something that would have been even more weird about this particular text, having both an author which is sort of like a hypnotized witness to the demonic realm, and also a ghost writer.
Right, right, exactly.
And who would have more input too, right?
Probably the person who wasn't named.
Anyway, when he says Michelle remembers has overtones of Sybil, there he's referring to a non-fiction book from 1973 that also has huge, I guess, non-fiction or credibility issues.
And that's a book that put the topic of dissociative identity disorder on the map.
So Congdon knows he's in super lucrative territory.
Yeah, I mean, this was also turned into a three and a quarter hour long two part made for TV film based on the book, which was incredibly widely viewed and successful.
That movie was released in 1976.
And, you know, this is really about the other, you said dissociative identity disorder, at the time it was referred to as having multiple personalities, right?
And it was the other sensationalist psychological exploitation topic of the time that had therapists turning themselves into exploitive authors.
In this story and in the movie, Sybil has 16 alters or, you know, other personalities all living inside her psyche.
And, you know, later analysis by the College of Criminal Justice concluded that most of the book was fabricated by this unethical psychoanalyst who used hypnosis and amobarbital, which is the notorious truth serum used in interrogations during World War II, to coax traumatic stories and alternate personalities out of the patient Shirley Mason, who wrote in 1958 that she made it all up.
No.
Yeah.
In a letter, a 2011 exposé by journalist Debbie Nathan characterizes that book as a knowing fraud that created a business involving t-shirts, stickers, board games, they had merch for the multiple personalities.
Board games?
Board games.
I need to look it up and find out more about that.
But you chose different, like, you'd have different pieces, like, that you could have for your altars, or just one?
I don't know.
I was not able to uncover any more detail on that, but this is what this journalist claimed to have found.
And, of course, the film was also part of that.
Merchandising kind of bonanza.
The film starred Sally Field and Joan Woodward.
It was nominated for awards in nine categories that year.
It won four Emmys and a Peabody, but fell short of getting the Golden Globe that it was nominated for.
And then in keeping with our themes here, and this goes back to Teal and Barbara Snow, Debbie Nathan, who's the journalist I'm referring to, describes Sybil as creating the industry of repressed memories.
Amazing.
So, Congdon is basically saying, this was a hit, and I've got another barn burner on my hands.
Huge, if true.
Here we go.
Right.
Okay, so I said I had headings.
First heading, thesis.
Moral panics turn people into abstractions.
Okay, so our focus today is on the fact that from Sybil to Lawrence Pazder to the McMartin trial to the Martinsville trial to Barbara Snow to Teal Swan, we are moving through testimony and literature that takes the reality of power and sex abuse and twists it into exaggerated fantasies that generate emotional contagion, moral panickery, and a lot of lucrative media.
And my sense is that on a social level, it's a way of pretending to address a painful problem while really only kind of guiltily enjoying its spectacle.
And when I say pretending, I'm not implying intentional lying, but rather like feeling as if one is doing a thing.
Because I think that we can be sure that the moral panickery is a pretense that can't solve the problem because the problem always comes back in new but familiar forms.
So on one level, this arc from Sybil to Lawrence Pazder to McMartin to Martinsville to Barbara Snow to Teal Swan describes the ongoing suffering of a culture plagued by domestic, intimate forms of partner and child abuse.
But on another level, that same arc describes a perennial inability to actually dig in and face the very common tragedies in our own backyards, the things we have to overlook so the lights stay on.
Now, a few episodes ago, we contrasted the Catholic horror film genre with the rise of the 1970s slasher film.
And I think the point that we batted back and forth was that the Catholic horror film is built on the idea of metaphysical warfare.
Whilst the slasher genre seems to capitalize on this pure existential dread, but those slashers were also a deflection in a sense because they emerged during a period of intense disillusionment with the American dream and post-war promises And they come from a country that knows that its boys, its boys from the neighborhood, boys that they knew, are on kind of a Joseph Campbell, or no, the other one, Joseph Conrad, yeah, Joseph Conrad type mission in Vietnam, shooting civilians in villages.
So, how much easier it is to offload that guilt into, or onto, the psychotic Michael Myers, who cuts down innocents in the suburbs.
So, it seems that both the slasher and the satanic panic attempt to expiate guilt, but in so doing, they kind of kick the can down the road.
Now, this is interesting, Matthew, because you've used this word slasher several times, and I feel like in terms of the evolution of the horror genre during this period, right, you have You have the films that we've mostly referenced, which they're possession films, right?
They're films about the child who is possessed by a demon.
They're films about the reactionary, old school, more fundamentalist, more initiated into the ways of the supernatural priest coming along to do battle with Satan.
And then there's the next turning of the wheel in terms of this religious Preoccupation and how it shows up in horror movies where you now have these slashers like Michael Myers that you're referring to It's interesting Yeah, it's because because then with then then you have it's not just the child who has been corrupted By a demon the innocent child usually a girl who is possessed now you have these usually more male
Young men who are turned into sort of demonic serial killers.
It's like the demon-possessed child grows up and somehow switches genders, right?
Well, or that the boy that you knew comes home from war and he doesn't have a face.
There you go.
And instead of admitting that you sent him there to kill people, you pretend that he's killing people in your neighborhood.
It's a very convenient kind of expiation effort.
Yeah.
And then the next turn of that wheel is going to be that all of the teenagers who are engaging in, you know, illicit sex and having parties while the parents are out of town, they're going to be the victims in the slasher film that ends up having more of this kind of postmodern sort of self, you know, it's like tongue in cheek in a certain way, but it's very, very gory.
There was something else just a little further back here, too.
Oh, I just wanted to say, you drew this line from Sybil to Pazder to McMartin to Martinsville to Barbara Snow to Teal Swan.
Somewhere in that mix, too, are the West Memphis Three.
Right, who are sent to jail, accused of being satanic murderers, accused of killing these three young boys in a satanic ritual, when most likely it seems like one of the boys' stepfathers, to your point, right?
That the domestic, the ugliness of just the normal, banal, horrific domestic abuse and violence is projected onto this gory fantasy.
Right.
I mean, whether it involves Satan or the neighborhood psychotic, I think we're always looking at forms of mass transference and bypassing.
We're looking at distractions, convenient fictions, and I think in relation to our overall project here at the podcast, it's a core dynamic we run up against over and over again.
That the culture knows something is amiss with government, with healthcare, with education, with capitalism, with consumerism.
And the culture is not wrong, but it has this amazing talent for inventing solutions that offload guilt and perpetuate tragedy.
You know, it's kind of fascinating because we've spent a lot of time looping back to think about, okay, what has made like yoga and wellness or the new age, however we want to refer to this demographic, what has made them susceptible to getting red-pilled?
and to turning into these conspiritualist influencers and acolytes that we've covered.
And I think there's an interesting potential aspect of spiritual bypass here where if we're
bypassing the ordinary suffering of being human.
If we're bypassing the reality that bad things do happen to good people and that you can't control your reality through the power of your thoughts and that actually you might have to deal with your grief and face your trauma in very real and unglamorous ways and do the gradual work of like, you know, making peace with the difficulties of your life, perhaps in sort of a psychotherapeutic process or just a maturing process that I think a lot of new age spiritual bypassing tendencies really limit, they really prevent that process
from happening.
And I think it's actually what, you know, individually and collectively a lot of people
are longing for without realizing it.
The deeper you go into that, I feel like at some point all of the disowned material has
to go somewhere.
And so that's also part of the vulnerability to QAnon style stuff and to the sort of thing that we see Teal Swan getting swept up in, or there's a remixing of the Satanic Panic.
And doesn't it make sense that if it's all buried or compressed in similar ways within a similar demographic, that a particular story will begin to grasp the fascination and lead people out of that kind of pressure?
Yeah, and you know what, I'm having a realization right now that's actually very helpful.
So in terms of the stuff I shared about being in Anna Forrest's orbit and the process I went through around my family and around sort of false memory syndrome.
I'm realizing right now that I saw entering into a spirituality that had this component of like dealing with your repressed memories, dealing with your disowned shadow.
I saw it as an antidote to New Age spiritual bypass, which I had been caught up in in my early 20s.
But really, it's sort of the next, it's the next stage of this kind of dynamic.
And it's now like The way to become a heroic enlightened spiritual seeker is to confront this gruesome fantastical story that we can all share in collectively within a sort of cultish mentality.
That's wild.
You know, there's one phrase that kind of haunts me from my yoga career, which is that Whenever somebody needed to market something that was new, they would use the phrase something like, it's time to deepen your practice.
And I think the thing is that there's a Almost a feedback loop or a mebius strip of attention upon internal states and intuitive discoveries that
If it's monetized in a particular way, and it doesn't have any outside reflection, and nobody is leading those exercises or workshops or trainings that is responsible to a college or can be called out or anything like that, that it makes sense that the next round of influencer can take Julian by the hand and say, you know what?
You were really bypassing your shit, you know, years ago.
And what I'd like you to do is to show you how much you can deepen your practice.
And then they're in the position of having to invent the way in which you're going to kind of attain that deeper sense of being productive or getting something done.
It's very strange.
Like, it's not like the notion of spiritual bypassing itself is protective against somebody who would manipulate the premise that there's something deeper for you to uncover.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And of course, you know, deep in your practice does double duty, both as this kind of vague gesture towards like some undiscovered territory that we're now going to get into.
This is like the next level.
But, you know, without any sort of, as you said, external reference points or ways of validating or having guardrails.
Or literature or, you know, research.
Which is, again, part of what makes it so marketable because it's esoteric.
Yeah, right.
Simultaneously, you know, superficial in one way and sort of esoteric in gesturing towards the depths in the other.
But it also does double duty as a way of saying, continue with these workshop And retreat and training events and can continue buying into this seemingly like almost academic coursework, even though
You may not want to professionalize as a teacher.
Right.
Because deepening your practice is the other reason to come and learn all of this information that is sort of being channeled and remixed.
And then wouldn't you know it, oh this has loops back to Patanjali talking about the skandhas or what have you.
You know that it's, that like here actually this is part of the deep ancient wisdom that we're going to deepen into.
Uncovering these traumatic associations and part of me was through over the course of like a 10 year period as I was exploring all of this stuff and as I was educating myself and sort of synthesizing and looking into trauma psychology and the relationship with neuroscience and part of me was aware that like, oh this has this has now become A very mainstreamed notion that now everyone is talking about trauma, but it's in this way that is, I don't know, there's, there's a, there's, it's been recontextualized with magical thinking and with, with vague reference points and with, with, with outrageous claims of how that trauma can now be healed.
Well, it's a commodity.
It's something to be mined for, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, and, and I have the technique.
We're going to tap on, on your forehead three times and on your chin four times, and we're going to, we're going to release, you know, victim consciousness and whatever.
It's like, it all just becomes folded into that particular commodified spiritual bypass, you know, false promises, lack of, lack of accredited expertise, all the rest of it.
So, I wanted to look today at, I think, one of the primary ways in which this happens on the level of communications.
Um, which is the overuse of the symbolic order to give meaning to phenomena that can be described more simply, more directly, more materially.
So, the starting point for this idea for me was that Michelle Smith has multiple miscarriages.
In the one that occurs before she reconnects with Dr. Pazder, she suffers from a prolonged hemorrhage and she also comes to him not only with this physical ailment but with deeply conflicted feelings about her expectations for womanhood and motherhood And surely those are informed by all of the gender ideals and patriarchal expectations of the time and even now.
And so she needs help.
And she's not necessarily looking for Pazdur.
Actually, he finds her because her OBGYN refers her.
But instead of exploring this obvious, real, and tender tragedy of what the body means and what it can create or not create and how it suffers or expresses sadness, Pazder turns her symptoms into symbols For something completely unrelated, something he is obsessed about, something that is not about her body and mind and her sense of agency at all, but rather about some abstract cosmic war that he actually wants to play a role in, he wants to LARP in.
So, not only does this symbolic intrusion upon Michelle Smith spawn the satanic panic, It also erases whoever she is or was.
And so now, I feel like she hovers in history as this kind of ambivalent figure about whom we can imagine so many things.
In the original readership, I imagine there were many people who looked on her as though she was a saint.
A little bit later, there would have been more people who were concerned that perhaps she had been manipulated by this person.
There's the question about, you know, did she want a kind of attention from Pazder as a therapist, but then also as a co-author?
But the truth is that because all of this happened, because of Lawrence Pazder, we actually have no idea at all who Michelle Smith was or could have been.
And that's because, you know, maximal symbolic order writing And therapy, I guess.
It dehumanizes people.
An obsession with symbols can turn people into symbols.
And the other sort of touchpoint for this was, Julian, do you remember, maybe it was the last episode or the one before, I was wondering out loud about why Pazder was so obsessed with Michelle's inner child or soul.
Yeah.
And that the alleged abuse that was perpetrated on her by the Satanic cult and on other children was bad, but not because it violated their agency or dehumanized them as people, but because it was intended to lead them away from their faith in God.
Do you remember that bit?
Yeah, it's so bad.
It's basically just a reiteration of the religious apologetics that claims that you need religious belief in order not to be an awful person, right?
But then it propagates the obscene and dehumanizing notion that alleged horrific child abuse is bad, not because of the traumatizing violence itself.
But because it could make the child stray from their belief in the One True God and His own blood-sacrificed Son, basically then giving the lie to the argument in the first place, because you don't really need to say anything else about it, because if as the proponent of this belief that is going to make you a decent person, you are Perpetuating this horrific kind of inversion around the reality of child suffering, it's just absolutely awful.
And it makes me think too, in line with the stuff we're bouncing back and forth on, about how in the new age community, you know, For a while, I've heard people's traumas, people's real traumas framed as, oh, but to really heal, you need to understand how this is part of a past life pattern that is still showing up in this life because you haven't fully released the past life.
Emotions or energy or whatever's unresolved from back then or your actions or your sins you haven't exactly so maybe in a past life Maybe in a past life you were traumatized or maybe in a past life You're a really horrible person and that's why it's been flipped on you this time around right You know, there's there's I think there's also a simpler way of saying some of this which is that this attitude that pastor has towards Child abuse also makes it about him.
It makes it about his values.
What he wants is for Michelle Smith to validate his particular religious beliefs.
He wants her to be in alignment He wants her to be a faithful person.
If she can join him in that, then she will be safe.
He will feel more safe or more taken care of or something like that.
So really, the abuse isn't about her autonomy.
It's about what the abuse says about her capacity to participate in his world.
You're exposing something really fascinating here that I think has Multiple sort of it's an underlying kind of dynamic that we can see in lots of different places so.
You know, so much of the alternative medicine world and the idea of being holistic that we hear from people all the time, right, is that more Western or scientific approaches look at symptoms, but we're looking at the deeper cause.
And what's the deeper cause?
it's embedded into this particular philosophical perspective
that says, well- Yeah, the deeper cause actually is exposable through me.
Yes.
The deeper cause is my, the deeper cause is like contingent
on my view of the world actually.
And the thing that's so, so horribly ironic about that is that the forward facing spiritual perspective is,
no, we're gonna be very open and holistic and look at the whole person
and really try to do this like thoughtful contemplation on what may be going on.
But the answer is always the same.
It's that you're out of balance in terms of this particular set of beliefs
or that you have past life stuff or that you have secretly been invaded by demons.
So there's actually only one place that we're gonna get to,
but in the context that I'm describing, it's presented as a kind of,
oh, we're gonna be much less reductionistic, but it's super fucking reductionistic.
It's, it's absolutely reductionistic.
And, and I'm, I didn't, I don't think either of us plan to discuss this, but I think we should go with it because like, I think this is really important and I don't think we've really articulated this before, but the, The claim that to focus on the symptoms is reductionistic is actually a way of disowning the complexity of symptoms.
Because the actual symptoms that Michelle Smith is experiencing are complicated enough to actually absorb and to address and to care for and to provide counsel to and to hold space for on their own.
In an actual holistic way which might include an analysis of cultural misogyny.
Right?
And it might also involve, like, okay, did you get adequate help from your OBGYN or are you safe at home?
All of those things.
The holistic view of we're going to get to root symptoms or to root causes, rather, always presents itself as being kind of this empathetic, moral high ground.
No, actually it's usually narcissistic, because it's contingent on the person who's speaking, laying out, this is the way the world works, according to me.
Yeah, and so we need to cleanse your liver, or we need to exercise your demons, or we need to rebalance your chi, or this is all a product of you not being vegan.
It's so self-serving and reductive.
Yeah, because it would actually, you don't have the training to get the person the help they need with the domestic violence that they have suffered.
You don't have the training to, or you don't have it within you existentially to simply say, Some people suffer so deeply in childhood that they develop disorganized attachment patterns, and that's actually really hard to deal with in therapy.
And maybe I should find a specialist for them.
Because if you actually go out of your way to say all of that and even learn that that's what might be going on for a person, then your speech about cleansing the liver or doing pranayama so that your chi is cleansed, that all goes out the window.
That's all bullshit.
And that's really, you really don't want it to be bullshit.
Yeah, and to come back to your point about narcissism, and it's through me that we can resolve this, the difference, the kind of professional existential honesty and sort of embrace of facing complexity that you're describing is one in which the interpersonal The interpersonal exchange doesn't have that satisfying
Resolution where no it doesn't oh we have the answer and now everything's going to be okay it has the thing of like and this is and this is this is like goes back to the pandemic and Fauci and everything right it's like it's it's it's basically someone sitting there saying we don't have all the information the data is still coming in in your case uh we're not sure exactly what's going on uh but let's get you to a specialist who can who can try to help us make sense of this because there is no easy answer there is no final solution there is no underlying cause that has that validates some metaphysical faith Yeah, and hello, that's actually what really good therapy does.
Exactly.
Because it models in the humility of not providing an answer, it models, we're actually in a relationship here in which I'm going to share power by helping share knowledge.
Yeah, so my role is to support you while we enter the unknown together, rather than saying, I have a map.
Because believe it or not, I'm at a loss, actually.
And if I'm at a loss, and I can reflect back to you that I'm with you in you being at a loss, because I'm also at a loss, and here we are together, that's very different than I have the answer for you, child.
Right.
So, backtracking just a little bit into the sort of very Catholic point of view that Pazder brings to the symbology of who Michelle is as opposed to her personhood, we have a listener named Carmel who describes themselves as a former Catholic, and they wrote in with this amazing comment that I just wanted to read.
So, they write, it is obvious to me that many Catholics see canon law, so by that they mean the legalistic framework by which the rituals and the administration of the Catholic Church functions, is morally higher to secular law.
One of the things I see repeatedly is that the clergy being concerned about child sex abuse is comes out of being concerned about it corrupting the child and leading them to sin.
Because as the only non-sinful sex act is between a married couple, then any other situation is sinful.
So they actually see that the adult is leading the child to participate in something sexual as a way to understand what is happening as if consent is completely irrelevant.
Because the Church feels it has the higher ground ethically, its structured, misogynistic mindset can't be challenged from the outside, as the rejoinder is that they are more concerned with the child and perpetrator's eternal lives, in other words, their symbolic being.
Yeah, their souls, their souls.
And what is so disturbing about what Carmel was just laying out there is that it's almost as if the sexual abuse is framed as seduction.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
In that way that is so grotesquely confusing for children anyway.
Right.
You know, most listeners will, sadly enough, be familiar, probably, with the Christian right-wing new media figure Matt Walsh.
Do you know him?
Uh, you know, this is the guy who to own the libs has the phrase theocratic fascist in his Twitter bio because someone once accused him of that.
Yeah, that's a riot.
That's a real, that's really funny.
And of course, he's the guy behind this transphobic gotcha style documentary where they basically like ambushed all of these different interview subjects called what is a woman and we should put documentary in quotes, of course.
I mention him because his whole social media presence is about supposedly protecting innocent little children from the supposed grooming of teachers and drag queens and from the horrors of gender-affirming medical care.
But meanwhile, tweets of his from a couple years ago were just resurfaced in which he says that Catholic priests who abuse children were not really pedophiles because in most cases the kids were teenagers or young adults at the time, according to Walsh.
He says the real problem, though, After giving them a pass or reframing pedophilia in some weird way, the real problem is gay priests.
And he says, that's a really serious problem that we need to deal with.
And of course, this gives the lie to his like, reasonable guy who's just asking questions about transgender affirming care, but because he's actually he's a raging homophobe.
He also gave Josh Dugar, who's part of that 19 kids and counting Christian reality TV show where they all have so many kids because you can't use contraception.
He also gave Josh Dugar a pass because he's from a good Christian family. After it was
discovered that he had molested multiple underage girls as a teenager, including one who
was under five years old, and he's like, well, at least Josh Dugar is, you know, trying to, he comes
from a good Christian family and he's doing his best, you know, to live a good life. I read Carmel's
comment and it feels like this very old musty room is opening in my brain.
And in that room, there's like a golem of my former self made of sand and gravel.
I've been watching a lot of Sandman.
It's dry, it's stiff, but I can still feel the miserable things that it felt and thought.
In particular, there's this one paradox that I was taught to hold, and I think it's actually crucial for understanding some of these tensions and also a core paradox in the satanic panic, which is that, you know, how so many people went so far off the deep end with the claim that they were protecting children by feeding them nightmares through leading questions.
And then more broadly, how children become extras in this metaphysical morality movie.
There's the actual abuse.
And this golem in my brain, it comes from a world that was just simply divided into good and evil, into righteousness and temptation, into the divine and the worldly.
So, the church sacraments that began with baptism, they rehabilitate the Catholic baby from the worldly realm.
Because the baby descends through carnal birth but then is absolved of that origin at baptism and then clings to the right side of the world through communion, confirmation, marriage, and so on.
So every part of the path is dedicated to keeping the human being pure of its worldliness,
and a primary way in which this happens is by disciplining desire and sex.
So this is all a very old story about people and children who are not biological and social
entities learning about and adapting to their environments and engaging in bio and social
reproduction.
We are actually taught to identify ourselves almost as aliens in a dangerous and corrupt
world, and the threshold of that world is carnality.
And so when Michelle Smith as a five-year-old is reportedly subjected to physical and sexual abuse, it's not that this is an attack on her agency or her ability to experience and act within the world with dignity, it's that she's being dragged down into the world that we all Yeah, and in keeping with what you were saying about Pazdur, it's like he's on the lookout.
He's waiting.
He's waiting for the golden child that he can exploit that is lying in wait inside of whatever patients might come along who we can project this
story onto and it makes me think about Barbara Snow as well and think about like, you
know, we've taken some flack in terms of how we've approached the Teal Swan material
because there are people who want us to just serve up the kind of very neat and tidy
description of her as this cult leader as exposed because of her horrible treatment in the
love triangle sort of situation in the deep end because of how she treated those people and
who seem to say, well, you're enabling her in some way.
But I think.
It's a good question.
In terms of what we're talking about today, here you have this very complex story of a young child who is obviously very different and very lonely and who seems to most likely have experienced some actual literal abuse.
Or at least, you know, had some very confusing experiences at a young age that made her act the way she did according to her best friend's accounts and according to, you know, the journals that she kept.
And there's just so much going on there.
And instead of finding a therapist who could help her unpack all of that, she found, like Pastor, a Barbara Snow who's lying in wait for someone to come along to then just say, This is, here we have it.
This is evidence of you as having gone through all of this ritual satanic abuse, which then allows me to be this heroic figure who is exposing this and guiding you towards healing by, as you put it, feeding you all of these horrific prompts that will then allow a lurid and grotesque imagination to just keep fractalizing in these really terrible ways.
You know, I just want to backtrack, and I think you used language around Pazder waiting for her to come, and we should just clarify that this is a speculation, but that it's very plausible because, you know, this is a man who essentially ends his career as a regular psychiatrist once he meets this client.
This is somebody who within a matter of months has seemingly cancelled every other client and is now sitting with Michelle six hours per day and then goes on to marry her and then goes on book tour with her.
It's, you know, whether he's consciously waiting or not, she walks into his life and everything that he's sort of built up in the cupboard, he can really start cooking it with gas, right?
It's like he's unleashed.
That's it.
That's it.
And I feel like I'm a little bit playing your role here because yeah.
I don't think it's conscious, necessarily.
I don't think he's necessarily planning it and going, well, when someone comes along I can then, but it is.
It's gestating inside of him that there is something, there is some greater destiny that he has, and there's some way that he needs to demonstrate this intuition he has that beyond mere Real world psychotherapy.
There is this understanding of the deeper holistic cause behind human suffering.
Just to reiterate, the assaulter is not seen as the depriver of rights and dignity, but rather someone who has already fallen into that corrupt world.
So, the assaulter, whether they are in a satanic cult or, you know, whether or not, or if they're a priest who's quote-unquote gone astray, they're already sinful.
And like an alcoholic offering liquor to a child, they are tempting them to express a fallen nature which is always ready to burst forth and is always only just barely contained by the purification boundaries of the Church.
And I think the further subtext is that this corrupt nature will not only be enlivened when it is tapped, but that the child will feel pleasure when it is.
And that begins to explain why satanic panic fantasies not only involve reports about abuses against children, but about how children are recruited into enthusiastically participating in the abuse, sometimes to the point of infanticide.
And I think we can even say that once they report their participation, they are no longer calling out abusers, but rather confessing to this kind of ground zero of sinfulness that they are participating in a violent and carnal world.
Giving that confession to Idaho Public News, right, in that video that we've covered in a couple different episodes.
That's exactly how it goes.
It's not only a story of these terrible things that happened to her, it's her telling of how she became a participant and that she's guilty of all kinds of horrific crimes.
It makes me think of something I remember reading about the differences between liberal and conservative parenting styles, you know, that liberals kind of tend to see the child as born whole and good, trailing clouds of glory, I believe is the term, requiring mostly affirmation and empathy in order to stay in their sort of fundamental goodness.
And of course, if you take that too far, You have the kind of kitschy notion that many New Agers embrace of the indigo child who's come along, born enlightened to serve as the guru to the parents who just need to keep listening and letting go of everything they've learned, like an unlearning process to be deprogrammed so they can reawaken through the golden child.
I just have to say, as a parent, what a nightmare vision that is.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, obviously our children deprogram us, but it's not that simple.
But then the more conservative parenting style sees kids as being born inherently sinful, that they need to be disciplined and trained and punished and taught the fear of God in order to not stay inherently sinful or to go down that pathway, right?
It's this constant battle of vigilance that the parent requires to keep the child, you
know, basically from Satan.
So when the satanic ritual abusers come along within that narrative, why they're taking
a child born of original sin and amplifying its evil tendencies by removing it from the
light of God.
Yeah, and I think the Catholic version of parenting threads that liberal conservative
political needle because the baby is born in sin in the conservative vision of things,
but then it's cleansed by sacraments into a kind of innocence.
And so there's an oscillation between those two states that is very confusing, but I feel that the primary outcome is to actually dehumanize the child by making them into the symbolic agent of either the world you want to see as a parent or the world that you want to avoid as a parent.
Meanwhile, of course, the kid is growing up in a world that many parents are almost trying to avoid understanding.
Which brings us back to lawsuits against Judas Priest for something somebody's drunk uncle heard when playing a record backwards.
And boomers were really good at that, inventing complex demonologies around popular kids' culture items that actually had much more direct messaging driving them, which was usually, like, we hate you, you fucking hypocrites.
Okay, so next heading, Abstractions Make Survivors Anonymous.
Okay, so Pazder, we've said this, I think we've beaten it a bit, makes a big deal over how well Michelle was able to retain her goodness and purity.
Part of this helps to explain, in addition to structural misogyny and the institutional sloth that just protects the asses of the powerful, that church has had such a terrible track record in dealing with abusers in its midst.
Because the premise of abuse is not that the abuser has violated the human rights of a child and must therefore be stopped through social and legal accountability.
It's much more fatalistic.
It's that they have fallen into an understandable and even expected mode of behavior.
And just like the children who might wind up buried in mass graves at residential schools in Canada or thrown into the wells at Irish laundries, the priests are abstract.
They are not remarkable people.
They can remain anonymous.
And I believe that that premise of anonymity, which is really the premise of conspiracism as well, or it's one of the functional aspects of it.
In other words, like, I know something big is happening, but I don't know who is doing it or where they are doing it, and I don't have any details.
It also sheds light on the fact that none of these movements seem to care about the names, about the forensic evidence, about the details.
People who follow QAnon did not need evidence.
People who believed in the Wayfair trafficking conspiracy did not need receipts.
When the satanic panic is investigated and turns up nothing in terms of forensic evidence, that doesn't hinder the storytelling.
Because all of the storytelling is happening in an alternate universe that is not about people and their agency.
It's about abstract forces battling towards a spiritual endpoint.
And so, there's this relationship between the namelessness and the abstraction of satanic panic perpetrators, like hundreds of people gathering in Victoria, but we don't have any of their names.
They all had their third fingers removed, but we can't find a single one of them.
They just vanished into the mists of the sea.
Which makes it more believable, more compelling.
Exactly, exactly.
They are so good at hiding their tracks that they all disappear, that we don't have a single shred of evidence.
So there's a parallel there between that and the Byzantine labyrinths that hide abusive priests.
And I think this is another layer of projection because the premise that we can never find the satanic panic perpetrators is a projective displacement and a disguise for the fact that the Catholic Church has expertly buried its own evidence of abuse.
It's hidden the names, the places, and even the bodies, the real bodies that the satanic panic never produced but are now discoverable through like MRI machines that they bring out to residential schools.
I mean, if all the world's a stage for this larger metaphysical battle between archetypal forces, then all the players on the stage are merely disposable soldiers.
It's not that far from a kind of aristocratic view of the peasantry as being just these disposable drones, or perhaps how Republican elites today look at the over 800 deluded insurrectionists who are sitting in jail because they believe the big lie.
Right, and they can create theatre out of the image of that prisoner by, was it at CPAC that they constructed like a fake prison cage where they had some guy as a January 6th prisoner?
Oh, I missed that.
Weeping in a fake prison cage, and then Marjorie Taylor Greene pretty much dressing up like the Virgin Mary, going into the cell and receiving his confession or giving him comfort or something like that.
You missed that, huh?
I missed that.
It would have either been CPAC or maybe like the...
What's the Nazi youth version?
Oh, Turning Point?
Turning Point USA, yeah.
That was where she got up and exhorted all of the young people in attendance to embrace calling themselves Christian Nationalists.
Right.
So, you know, I think my larger point is that neither the Satanic Panic nor the Catholic Church can be populated with living and breathing subjects who can speak for themselves.
With the Catholic Church, we have histories and actions that are absorbed into paperwork.
There are vast libraries governed by bean counters and apple polishers.
There's this scene it reminds me of in, I don't know if your daughter is old enough, for the series of Unfortunate Events books by Daniel Handler.
But I'm sure that will come later.
Yeah.
But it features the Baudelaire children, talk about symbolic order, who are attempting, once again, to find out what happened to their deceased parents.
You know, what secret society, what cult they're part of.
And they're doing this while they're trying to escape, like, the absurd abusiveness of the villain, the cartoon villain, Count Olaf and his captive acting troupe.
And they wind up in this hospital where they hope to find medical records, but the library is this nearly-infinite Kafkaesque hellscape of cabinets and boxes and vacuum tubes and arcane borrowing rules, and it's totally hopeless.
And it's a funny episode, but it's, you know, reflective of something that is actually a thousand times more hopeless, which is happening everywhere in various contexts, as in You know, when recently, after the Pope made his journey to Alberta to offer an in-person apology to the First Nations peoples colonized and genocided in Canada with the help of the Catholic Church, the diocese offices in Alberta are still refusing to release the files that detail exactly how bad it was.
So, that history is foregrounded and even apologized for by the head of state in the Catholic Church, but the details have disappeared into file folders and abstraction.
And so, why wouldn't people invent histories, perhaps alternate histories, that they can manage and control, in which they can be situated as perhaps resurrecting or rehabilitated as gaining power.
Why would it be a surprise that back in the summer of 2020, QAnon materials began to penetrate some First Nations spaces in Northern Ontario?
It makes me think of Tin Nguyen and the thing that you really seized upon that he talks about with regard to outrage porn and how we sort of played a little bit with the idea that, you know, some of this conspiracy, fantastical conspiracy stuff is sort of investigative journalism porn, right?
It's sort of gesturing towards like, oh, we've discovered this deep, dark secret when it's a complete distraction from the actual deep, dark secrets that can be uncovered.
Through solid journalism and discovering of evidence and really telling the truth.
So there's so much distraction, and amidst it, it's not just that the victims are dismissed and ignored, it's also that the perpetrators themselves can be dehumanized as automatons, and that everyone is condemned to this abstract oblivion of history.
It's a world in which people have no details, like no identity apart from being, like, fallen.
I just have to say, this depersonalizing bureaucratic nightmare you're describing as being the method of obfuscation via record-keeping itself, you're turning me into a postmodernist, you cultural Marxist, you!
Yeah, well, there's a straight line from Kafka to Foucault in that way, and I find it insightful, but also strangely empathetic, because it really focuses blame on something systemic, like beyond the reach and intention of any single person.
Or even a cabal.
So for me, it's a line of inquiry that helps me keep the internet itself in perspective because it seems to be performing the same function.
It's an anonymity machine.
It's a black box of infinite data.
It's like an endless maze.
Okay, next heading.
If the Church didn't have a satanic panic, it would make one.
Okay, so the abstraction of people into puppets in a morality play is necessary to make the abstractions of the Catholic Church and its vague promises of salvation real.
So in previous episodes, we've outlined how the satanic panic rises on this wave of generalized anxiety about the status of the sacred in the Catholic experience.
People are celebrating Mass in English and Spanish and Mandarin and Mongolian and Swahili.
They're bringing guitars into church, and the experiential center defined by ritual and Latin is not holding.
So if no one is in charge, doesn't that mean that Satan is in charge?
But when we're talking about a largely symbolic Manichean world in which the Church is providing sanctuary from otherwise global and pervasive fallenness, the panic is not just a reactionary surge embedded in a single historical moment, I would say it's also part of a longer term dialectic by which the world has to regularly reveal itself as corrupted in order for the Church to be the Church.
I think there's a sense in which if the panic hadn't emerged through the contingencies of the Cold War, The rise of the double-income household, the rise of daycare, the sexual revolution, people suddenly discovering that women have orgasms and they might want to fulfill themselves and also control their reproductive destinies.
If all of that hadn't created this inflection point of materialistic reconsideration of reality, the dialectic that separates off the Church as a sacred space and a refuge would have had to be fed in some other way.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's this huge irony throughout all of this stuff that we've been touching on already, that Christian nationalism and QAnon and Trumpism and all the claims of pedophilia and election fraud and a dark cabal wanting to maintain power is really all in service of an actual dark cabal that wants to maintain power.
Through this psychological manipulation of superstitious terror and moral panic and change and the stranger and the immigrant and the unfamiliar.
It's the sleight of hand misdirection and the propagandistic strategy of denying everything and accusing your opponents of doing and being exactly what you're doing and being.
Usually sort of out in the open, but somehow it's this magic trick.
So, symbology itself, there's specific details within Michelle Remembers to get to.
In episode four, I went on a bit of a jag about how, for me, spiritual epiphany has always been about moments in which spiritual ideas themselves or language evaporates.
So, for instance, I said that when I could see that the plaster icon of Mary was actually just plaster and paint, and the plaster and paint themselves could then somehow become mysterious and inexplicable, a sign of human effort and skill, but also perhaps yearning, maybe also boredom.
And you broke in to say that you identified with this, but you put it really beautifully, so nicely in fact that I think someone else on Patreon actually transcribed it for posterity.
So you wrote, 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.
There's a kind of awakening to the world as being in and of itself sacred in a way that doesn't require the extra step of elaborating how it must be merely standing in for something greater.
And yeah, I heard that ringing in my ear afterwards, and it put me in mind of one of my favorite, and by favorite I mean irritating, poems in contemporary Catholic literature.
By an Irishman, a boy really, named Joseph Marie Plunkett.
Okay, so he was born in Dublin in 1887, he's an anti-Britisher, he's a signatory of the proclamation of the Irish Republic, and he was executed by hanging in 1916 for his part in the Easter uprising, even though he sat most of it out due to his tuberculosis.
And like seven hours, it's a very famous story, seven hours before his, oh sorry, firing squad, seven hours before his execution on May 4th, he married his fiancée, Grace Gifford, in the chapel of the Kilmainham jail.
He was 28 years old.
So you can imagine he's left his own Jesus-like legacy in Ireland.
And his most famous poem is I See His Blood Upon the Rose, and I think it's the most concise and implosive expression of pathetic and metaphysical fallacy that I've come across.
And I just want to go over it briefly because if we're talking about symbology, I really want to talk about its process of abstraction and how that works.
Okay, so it goes.
I see his blood upon the rose, and in the stars the glory of his eyes.
His body gleams amid eternal snows.
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower, the thunder and the singing of the birds are but his voice, and carven by his power, rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn, his strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, his crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, his cross is every tree.
Have you heard that, Julian?
I have heard it before and I have to say totally perversely, of course, it reminds me of a song and tell me if you've heard this.
I feel it in my fingers.
I feel it in my toes.
Christmas is all around us.
And so the feeling grows.
It's written in the wind.
It's everywhere I go.
So if you really love Christmas, come on and let it snow.
You know this from Love Actually?
Right.
Right?
It's like trying to make it the number one song for Christmas, but it's the same kind of kitsch notion that there's this, we are, Jesus is everywhere, and his blood, he's in every, every tree is a crucifixion, and his blood is sort of written into the very fabric of reality.
Yeah, and it's because it's not enough that the rose is a rose, or that rain is a rain.
You're right.
Trees have to be crosses.
Birds would be silent if they weren't being pumped like accordions by Jesus.
Things are not valuable or meaningful unless God is pulling the strings.
Yeah, unless he can see the tiny feathers on the head of the little birds, right?
Right.
There's another poet who famously wrote this, which really goes to what we're talking about here, and it's often misquoted.
He says, to gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice or add another hue unto the rainbow, or with tapered light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
Oh yeah, who's that?
That's William Shakespeare.
Plunkett has done a nicely crafted poem here that seems to be pulling the veil away to reveal a divine mystery and presence, but it's actually doing the opposite.
And very importantly, I think that unveiling is meant to be liberatory But in reality, it actually reveals a world that's not real, unless it is animated fatalistically by God.
It's not a world in which people can be people, acting with agency and conscience and a sense of selfhood.
Plunkett's world is a world in which people and things can only ever perform a symbolic function.
And it makes me think of how, you know, in terms of where Teal Swan ended up maybe like five or 10 years ago, her whole message that she's sending out through YouTube very, very effectively drawing in people who are, who are usually emotionally desperate is that your suffering, your feeling of isolation and, and meaninglessness is not just about the trauma that she's going to help you reconcile.
It's also, about some kind of larger story involving aliens
and how she is able to leave her body while she's sleeping and go into the etheric realm
and she's actually working with the people who are watching her YouTube videos.
From the etheric realm, she's reading the Akashic records, that everything gets blown out into this.
It's not enough to actually learn how to deal with your suffering in a compassionate way.
It has to be about some grand metaphysical extra layer that's on top of everything
and that's really going to solve your problems.
It's built for the medium in the sense that she can't have relationships
with the people that she's communicating with.
And so the abstraction is actually really useful.
Yeah, that the internet is sort of like the digital manifestation of the Akashic Records and delivery systems like YouTube are actually a way of immaterially, you know, having these healing relationships.
Right.
So Plunkett's poem is a really great example of this clunky, didactic, but also seductive literary world, poetic world, that Catholics in the 20th century inherit.
Um, and this is the world in which Pazder dreams up an entire mythological machine that subsumes the possibility that Michelle can have any of her own history or, you know, it's a place in which Victoria in 1955 has been replaced by like a horror film stage set.
And is now populated with hundreds of people, again with their middle fingers severed, where the Virgin Mary herself comes down to restore balance and grace to the world.
It's an alternate reality rooted in the symbolic order.
And when we fast forward, as you're saying, 30 years to Teal Swan, we have an equally alternate reality.
A world of symbols where the forms might be different, but the religious instincts are the same.
So, small-town Utah in the early 2000s is analogous to Victoria in the 1950s.
The Satanic networks are everywhere, but nobody can see them.
And then you jump forward again to 2018, and the Satanic networks once again captivate the Imaginarium through the lens of Q. Once again, nobody can see them.
Yeah, what's weird to me about all of this, if we go back to Teal, is that her family's not Mormon, but she comes into this particular landscape.
There's something about how the very young Teal Swan is interacting with this strange new mythology that she's encountering at school and in her community.
How she then remixes it with the New Age books she seems to be reading.
And how, over time, we get the sense that she's, I'm speculating here, she's conditioning her family and friends to see her as this kind of chosen child, this unique maybe Joan of Arc sort of figure who finds, then, her baptism and confirmation in the holy office of Barbara Snow.
And then, as I said before, confesses her revelation on Adeho public news as part of her coming out as this public figure.
And in a way, she's as much of a cannibalizer and pastiche weaver of mythology porn as the QAnon influencers are.
Now, there's another twist here under the heading of symbols only work when they are literal.
And that's about the fact that the world that will save the conspiritualist is etched in symbols, but the symbols are not understood as such.
Obvious symbols have to take on literal meaning.
So there's a scene in Michelle Remembers in which she recalls her mother as being the focus of the satanic cult that goes on to abuse her.
She sees that her mother is pregnant and then watches in horror as the cursed nurses and the priest dudes strike her with wooden clubs.
And then we find out in a cliffhanger that the lump is a small child wearing red shoes.
So it's not just an abortion reference.
It also seems to be a classic Jungian dream constellation.
Michelle sees a small child obscured beneath her ambivalent mother's dress, and if Pazder is any kind of psychologist, isn't that symbology easy for him?
As we said a couple of episodes back, he references Jung within the first few sentences of his preface.
Yeah.
And then never again.
And then never again.
So, isn't it that the dream state is one of this person generating a scenario of how it felt to be that mother's child?
To be both the victim and the perpetrator of her own self-image?
Now, I'm not a dream analyst, but it seems to me that some basic rules that Pazder ignores are that dream figures are the aspects of the self, or at most, representations of close object relations.
He misses that the lump under the mother's dress points to pregnancy, not only to Michelle's recent miscarriages, but also her own infant-state relationship to her mother, who died when Michelle was a young teenager.
In other words, an aborted relationship.
There's the fact that the lump is wearing red shoes, which also allows it to rhyme with Michelle's child self.
And that being under the dress might be symbolic of being under the mother's shadow in psychoanalytic terms, maybe swallowed up by not being permitted to be born, swallowed up by her mother's power, perhaps her sexuality.
And Michelle feels impelled to beat the lump first, and this seems to give permission for the cabal to go for it as well.
And so then Michelle is horrified.
And so it seems like the psychological question is, did your own lack of integration encourage others to scapegoat you?
But, you know, no.
Pazder encourages a literalist reading of events, which makes him the white knight instead of a facilitator.
Yet, you know, there's more support for this symbolic reading of the lump that comes much later in the book where this cursed nurse figure forces Michelle to walk in front of her but then inside her cloak.
So there's always this image appearing of a little girl underneath the cloak of an older woman whose power is ambivalent and perhaps harmful, but also
might provide some protection. It's very rich stuff and it completely gets lost, of course.
Yeah, I mean, the way in which so many people I've come across who do something similar to this,
the way in which they'll refer back to Jung as if Jung is sort of a, gives credibility to this
incredibly literal reading of symbolic content.
It's just astonishing.
As you say, there's so much here that if you had one hundredth Of this kind of active imagination stuff that you were bringing to a real Jungian, you know, a therapist steeped in Jungian theory.
There'd be so much to explore, because it would be tied back repeatedly to your actual life, to your actual family of origin conflicts, to what's going on inside of you that is being outpictured by these sort of dreamlike images.
And to just keep mining all of this stuff and at no point tying it back to reality is, in a way, it's really the crime.
You know, the other thing that occurs to me is that, you know, the therapy that I've personally done has not been with a Jungian, so my knowledge of it is really just sort of literary and anecdotal.
But my sense is that for that material to be covered within the context of a therapeutic relationship, It would feel not necessarily wonderful, but the exploration would just be rich.
You can imagine the good therapist saying, wow, that's incredible.
What an amazing image.
Wow.
She was wearing red shoes, huh?
Wow.
Goodness, what does that remind you of?
I mean, it's like the whole sort of relational process of expressing wonderment over how incredibly creative your brain is when you're figuring out your fucking stresses, you know?
And the whole feeling of the encounter would not be this Oh my God, what happened then?
You know, you must stay for another six hours under hypnosis while I torture you to tell me about the end of the story.
Keep going.
There's got to be more.
There's got to be more.
Keep going.
Red shoes with the shoes covered in blood.
What do you think it means?
And here's the weird thing is that the, I feel like we're talking about paradoxes so much today.
The openness to be in not knowing around, oh, Wow, what a wonderful image, what a striking image your unconscious has given us.
Let's sit with it.
Oddly enough, that open-ended attitude is actually containing, whereas this like motivated kind of pursuit of ever seeking more and more, it becomes completely, you know, overwhelmingly uncontained, such that Michelle in this case is just awash in all of this horrific imagining.
It's not just uncontained, it puts her in a position which is where we'll kind of wind up, where she feels like she's being ripped apart.
So it's not just not containing, it's like, it's centrifugal, it's spinning.
Yeah, and when you said at the top, literal symbols, I just thought that there's such a good juxtaposition there too, right?
And so much of what we're talking about is Not only mistaking the symbolic for the literal, but also misinterpreting the literal as symbolic.
Because she feels like she's being torn apart, because he really is tearing her apart.
Because he's really doing it, exactly.
It's not evidence of, you know, the stuff he wants it to evidence.
All right, so let's turn to the material more specifically.
We've talked about birth.
There's also a lot of parents involved in the stories that Pazder pulls out of The Hypnotic Trance.
There's an abusive father who leaves very early on and that opens You know, clearly a pastor-sized hole in Smith's psyche.
The father in The Recovered Memories is echoed by abusive doctors and priests.
There's an ambivalent, overworked, critical mother.
And then juxtaposed with the mother, there's this very morbid nurse Throughout the entire visionary sequence, always psychologically foiled against the mother as a cold caregiver, really digging into medical alienation and distrust.
And the irony is that she has the interpersonal demeanor often attributed to Catholic nuns throughout the text because the nurse is in charge of etiquette and cleanliness, education and ritual, but of course all inverted towards evil purposes.
And the mother appears periodically, always ambivalent or criticizing, always obstructed by the other characters from giving care and love to Michelle.
All of this is very rich material.
But I also just want to say that with all of the focus on parents in the book, we have to note, I think this is relevant for the Teal Swan story as well, that a core component of satanic panic literature is kind of a displaced rage at parents.
Swan comes close to blaming her parents for, as she described it, not noticing what was happening between her and Doc.
While forgiving him.
While forgiving him.
There's another prominent story I'm familiar with in which a Satanic Panic influencer squarely blames her mother for trafficking her into an Epstein-like network.
I'm not saying that that can't possibly happen, but it is a theme in the literature.
And we just know that the emergence of the double-income household is stretching maternal responsibilities and trust throughout the 60s and 70s.
We know that daycare is a new thing, as we've said.
But I have to just wonder what else is happening in the 1970s and 80s, more generally, to encourage this kind of Just spasm of rage and accusation against parents.
Like, is there anything comparable to it historically, do you think?
I mean, these are late boomer, early Gen X kids.
And I guess one image that comes to mind for me is the kids of Don and Betty Draper in Mad Men, Sally and Bobby.
Growing up in the late 50s, they have a drunk, gigolo dad lying about who he is to sell advertising for bullshit.
And the mom is so repressed that she shoots Mockingbirds with air guns to blow off steam.
And that scene is so curated and yet so deeply corrupt and soulless on a Freudian level, it's easy to imagine that generation just exploding in a kind of anti-parent rage.
But also having perhaps to invent macabre rationalizations for just how terrible Don and Betty's banal neglectfulness felt to be around day after day.
I think that the Mad Men reference is It's really on point here, right?
And the show, I think, has been so incredibly acclaimed for a variety of reasons, but especially for how carefully they depict all of those cultural and familial dynamics, you know, whether it's the tranquilizers or the three martini lunch and, you know, coming home and then having a scotch and just the extent to which Young parents of that generation were so incredibly checked out and just, yeah, just so not attending to the emotional needs of their kids.
Not that the generation before did much better, but yeah.
But there's something specific about the Draper scenario in which The symbolism of having survived the war and entered into a proposed golden age was just meant to create these family tableaus that would generate their own perfection somehow.
Do you remember that scene where they go for a picnic, and Betty spreads out the checkered cloth, and they're in some gorgeous park, and of course their gorgeous car is parked right beside the picnic spot.
And they have paper plates and paper cups and probably not plastic forks.
Um, but there's beer cans and there's soda bottles and stuff like that and the family just gets through mowing through their picnic lunch and it's in the middle of the park and the kids get up and leave.
Betty Draper puts her purse on her shoulder.
Uh, they're heading back to the car and with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, Dawn just picks up the checkered blanket and just shakes it out, and the garbage just stays there in the middle of the lawn.
And then he turns around and goes... And it's like, it was such a small, perfect moment that was so expressive of the complete hypocrisy of the postcard, you know?
And so here we come to it.
Next heading, Dismemberment and Memory.
And we'll start with an excerpt.
So it's a longish excerpt and what it is is Michelle Smith ostensibly speaking into a tape recorder and accurately transcribed, although we have our questions about that.
But Pazder has gone on vacation and she has gone to his office to continue a kind of one-sided version of their sessions.
So here she is.
I tried not to have it happen, but this process I am realizing more and more is not consciously controllable.
I kind of think of it as me trying to come out and be whole.
It's funny how it starts.
It's the same every time.
First of all, I get really cold.
Nothing keeps me warm.
My whole body is cold.
I turn up the heat, put on an extra pair of socks, pull the afghan over me.
Warmth helps.
I need the warmth.
Then comes the wrenching in my stomach and chest.
My insides just keep grinding away.
That's what surprises me.
This is such a physical thing, and if it weren't for the physical signs, I wouldn't have a clue.
There's the rash, so itchy I can't help wondering what it is trying to say.
I used to put ointments on, cover it up, hide it, pretend it wasn't there, make excuses or ignore it.
But now I want to scratch.
Now I know if I don't work through the rash, it will always bother me.
I'm so inflamed, swollen, incredibly itchy.
I feel tormented, angry, guilty, unclean.
And definitely like something is wrong with me.
The other thing I've realized is there's no possible way my rashes could have been any other than the way they look.
And here I just have to associate inflamed, anger, red, blood, ooze, where they show up and their patterns all explain something to me.
My body is my only clue.
It's the one thing I couldn't compromise or rationalize.
It was there.
My mind and feelings could go away, but my body was there and had to be there the whole time.
I could shut my eyes, but my body could see what was happening.
You see, my inside me.
could shut everything off but there was still my body and it had its own life outside of me, outside of me inside.
It's my outside that really knows.
It's my eyes that saw, my mouth that felt, spoke and took in, my arms that have memories too.
Before I can let my inside me remember, my body's memories have to come out.
The reason the connections don't always seem to fit Is because my arms don't have the same experience my mouth had, and my eyes didn't feel what my stomach felt.
I have felt like I was fractured into so many pieces, but it was the different parts of me remembering.
I had to fracture that way.
You see, me could not look after it all at once.
And then it's so hard putting the body memories together.
That's why they came out separately.
So that when my eyes, ears, nose, mouth, arms have all had their versions, that is when I will understand me.
That is when I will be whole again.
Remember all those times I begged you to help me put it all together?
Well, it's not just understanding it.
And putting things together that way, I'm beginning to realize that it is a much more literal request.
Help put me, my body, the parts of my body, my memories, and my body memories, or imprints, back together.
There's so much there.
It's wild.
It's so prophetic of where this is going, not only in terms of the epistemology of the satanic panic, but also where it's going in terms of How the entire yoga and wellness world come to begin to understand the rehabilitation of memory, the recovery of trauma, how the body keeps the score, how what we really need is help in putting something back together.
And so it's like quite chilling to realize that the basic language of somatic intelligence is being appealed to here to drive This completely cursed and inaccurate outcome, but I think we can see how it also sets up this whole demographic that really appeals to or it comes to treasure the refrain of trusting the body, even when it's not the body talking at all, even when it might be somebody like Lawrence Pazder, who's just making shit up.
And even when it might just be as simple as you're having a histamine response to something you're allergic to that's giving you a rash, it's like, no, no, no, we have to interpret the rash as being how your body is somatizing some dreadful, horrible memory that is now surfacing through, almost like Regan in The Exorcist with Help Me imprinted on her belly, that every little Physical symptom must be evidence of the unconscious trying to come through with repressed memories or unresolved energies, right?
Right.
And it ends up making Michelle's body into a kind of book on a shelf for Pazder to read But not something that he will admit to writing in with his, you know, increasing physical closeness because, you know, it's not just that he's feeding her all of these ideas or asking her leading questions or putting her under hypnosis.
As treatment progresses, he's also pulling his chair close to the couch and then he sits on the couch beside her and later they move to the floor and it goes from there.
Yeah, and what, I mean, I can think of very few more twisted versions of a courtship process than this.
Yeah.
Like, he's turning her into his bride through this.
Yeah.
And he did.
And he did.
Okay, so two more headings.
One is Bodily Blasphemy and Purification, and then we're going to end with, this is a good heading, Michelle's Symbolic Language Bites Back.
Okay, so Bodily Blasphemy and Purification.
So, in the second session only, they open by talking about Michelle worried about being fat.
So, I don't think it's news to anyone that we would be able to cross-check this with contemporaneous ideas about fatness and spiritual illness through, you know, things like Marianne Williamson's book, A Course in Weight Loss, which comes out later than 1980, but it's in this vein.
And also, you know, Teal Swan's statements about weight loss.
We'll put in a couple of links.
The general notion is that the fatness is a blockage, that fat people are blocked.
They're making excuses.
Uh, and that fatness is a sign of ritual abuse that's repressed in the memory and the body.
Yeah, I've heard it framed too, that the fatness is a way of building a shield and keeping people away.
It's a protective device.
Because it makes you repulsive.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
So, so awful.
So awful.
So awful.
Anyway, yeah, exactly.
In the Course in Miracles cult I was in, it was really common for people to laugh at fat members saying that they were hiding themselves or protecting themselves from the world, from the truth, from the past.
So, I didn't participate in that because it just felt so gross.
And it was also just obvious and depressing to see the targeted person either slink away in demoralization or take on the interpretation as an empowered kind of acceptance of how much they needed the cult.
And the weird part was is that the master teacher himself was a very big guy and he would joke about how if he wasn't he would like float away in some cloud of light.
He's so spiritual he needs to be heavy to like keep him grounded.
Yeah it was the opposite so he used the opposite it wasn't he wasn't he was it wasn't him hiding in his body he was actually giving himself ballast what a load of shit anyway.
Yeah the only way someone so incredibly spiritual could incarnate and stay in the world was to be Heavy.
Right.
I think Adi Das started saying the same thing about himself too.
Did you ever hear that?
No, but it makes perfect sense.
There's this anxiety around fatness that comes out in the explicit part of the therapy, but then the visions are also obsessed with impurity and the eating of bad things.
There's the nurse and the priest named Malachi who lead her through basements.
She's eating noxious slop.
Smashing her doll's head so that spiders can skitter out.
They're bringing her to a graveyard.
It's like horror film bingo, but it all involves bodily disgust.
And the blasphemy aspect is also a returning theme because the nurse is also asking her to denounce God.
At one point, she forces an enema on the child, but then yanks the bedpan away so that Michelle shits on a Bible in Crucifix.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Gotcha.
Made you shit on a Bible.
Ha ha.
It's wild.
And this is where you know that Pazder's just making stuff up.
I mean, it's like, come on.
Come on.
Anyway, blasphemy and bodily blasphemy and purification.
But then there's a turnaround, and Pazder is too dumb to see it.
He puts it in the book.
He leaves it there for posterity.
So this section is called Michelle's Symbolic Language Bites Back.
And so as we wrap this up, Just once again, I'm going to point you back to the play-by-play of You're Wrong About for the full rundown on how all of these visions escalate with incredible horror and repetitive boredom.
There's this whole chunk of the book in which the transcript is said to record these very long, very dumb rhyming couplets from Satan himself, who of course makes a grand entrance finally.
You know, they also cover how the book is littered with the corpses of literally hundreds of babies, some of whom are consumed in a frenzied parody of the Catholic Eucharist.
But how does it end?
It ends with Michelle having the acceptable vision to end it.
That Mother Mary comes to fold up the spectacle.
And tell her that she must remember everything for posterity, to let others know, I guess presumably us included, right, Julianne, about the reality of the cosmic Catholic war.
But within this whole symbolic order shit pile, I just want to pull one pearl out to finish, and that is the way in which Somehow, Michelle is able to use symbolic language to tell Pazder to his face that he is poisoning her mind and exploiting her.
And she's so good at this, and he's such a self-centered numbskull literalist, That she writes it out faithfully?
He does.
That he writes it out faithfully and completely misses the point.
So, it's a longish excerpt, it's from chapter 20, and it opens with Michelle desperate to end the therapy.
On June 30th, Michelle had called Dr. Pazder.
For the past days, she said, she had been afflicted by strange distressing urges.
She'd felt a repeated impulse to get in the car and drive somewhere.
She didn't know where.
She had kept twisting her hands harshly, the one inside the other.
Dr. Pazder did his best to reassure her.
And then, an hour later, she abruptly arrived at his office, without an appointment, very upset.
I don't want to continue this remembering, she said.
I'm not going to do it anymore.
I wish I didn't even have a tongue.
If I could tear out my tongue, I'd never have to talk again.
Dr. Pazder knew that the Satanists had used sophisticated techniques of psychological manipulation to try to inhibit Michelle, not merely to make her forget, but if she should remember to make her not tell.
Michelle had found the strength to talk.
Despite them, she was telling, but their manipulations had made it extremely difficult for her.
It was undoubtedly this extreme difficulty that she was reflecting in her refusal to continue.
Boom!
Dr. Pazder telling on himself in incredible style.
She had felt a repeated impulse to get in the car and drive somewhere she didn't know where.
Anywhere.
Where do you think?
Just away from him.
If I could tear out my tongue.
And here he is interpreting her literal statements about wanting to stop this awful process as being symbolic.
Incredible.
Yeah, yeah.
If I could tear out my tongue, I'd never have to talk again.
And he, yeah, he tears out her tongue in the next paragraph.
He knew that the Satanists had used sophisticated—he's talking about himself, dude—sophisticated techniques of psychological manipulation to try to inhibit Michelle.
Not merely to make her forget, but if she could remember to make her not tell.
Michelle had found the strength to talk.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, and so Michelle, through the process, through the forcocta process of so-called therapy that they're in, Michelle finally has a moment of lucidity in which she tells the truth, in which her actual authentic self comes forward and says, I just can't do this anymore.
This is not right for me.
And he interprets, oh, that's your resistance. That's evidence of the satanic, the sway that
these sophisticated satanic techniques have over your psyche. And I just want to point out that
it's either right after this, at the end of this chapter, or as she goes into the next vision,
that Michelle visualizes the one of her torturers in the cult as hypnotizing her.
Wow.
It's immediately after this, where Michelle actually presents a memory, a quote-unquote memory, In which she is being asked to keep counting backwards, and she doesn't want to count backwards.
And he writes all of this down, and he hands it to Thomas Congdon, and they publish it.
I mean, I think it's good evidence that he has no idea what he's doing.
You know, like he's completely blind to what he's doing because she's telling him just outright to stop.
And he's turning that again into his own story.
Anyway, I mean, I'm just left with this image of it would have been amazing if Michelle Smith had been able to get in a car and just drive.
And drive.
And, you know, if Victoria's on Vancouver Island, she would have had to get to a ferry port.
And perhaps that amazing Sia song from the end of Six Feet Under would have been playing as she just drove.
Yeah, because who is the character who is driving?
Claire is driving east, isn't she?
Right?
Like, against the current of the American dream?
And against the frontier promise?
Yeah.
Okay, I think that's probably predictive of the fact that next episode will be a movie episode.
