ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

Protecting our children is a basic impulse. When we perceive a threat to our children, we respond viscerally and from our deep beings. We also lose our sense of perspective sometimes. And sometimes we are manipulated. Sometimes, it is the children who find themselves on the front line of the Cosmic War.

Kia Ora Tatou, and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War, with Karen Effie.

This article includes historical and current information about antisemitism.

Last year, my work colleague was greatly enthused about a movie she had seen. Her son had told her the movie had been censored because powerful people didn’t want it shown. Movie theatres wouldn’t show it because of - consequences. (She was vague about this). The makers of the movie had been persecuted. Nevertheless, she was able to see it at a local movie theatre. Like it was an ordinary movie, really. Turns out it was a box office hit, received 77% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was quite popular really.

The movie was The Sound of Freedom, a movie about a maverick ex US government agent turned child rescuer. It is based on the life of a guy called Tim Ballard, who was a bit controversial with his methods of saving children, and who may have not been quite as effective as he said, but whatever, lots of heroes turn out to be not so much. The movie is described by Rolling Stone as “a superhero movies for dads with brainworms, and the byline goes on:

The QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer

Dearie me. So it was a right wing Christian movie about saving children from evil, and it was strongly supported by conservative churches, who bulk-bought tickets to it, and claimed it was somehow being suppressed. A conspiracy of suppression, saving the children, here we go.

As I have said, the Cosmic War takes place in three places: the metaphysical realm, the physical world, and the human heart. Often, aspects of the Cosmic War happen across all three places. Those who believe in the Cosmic War, fight it through their religious practices, and through their behaviour in this world, and also how they feel, how they make moral decisions and what they prioritize. While God and the devil are duking it out in heaven, individual human people are playing their parts. Remember that the end times are coming very soon, and they have been coming very soon for a few thousand years now, so wherever we are in history, the need for action on behalf of God is urgent.

There is nothing worse than the torture and killing of children. Even back in medieval times, when children were treated like adults much earlier, the torture and killing of children was always the worst thing. Children have always been seen as blameless, even by those who believe we are all born in sin.

This brings us to the nocturnal ritual fantasy, and that is almost as weird as you think it is. Norman Cohn who literally wrote the book on the Cosmic War, (although not from my perspective) wrote about this recurrent conspiracy theory, that the Romans said it about the Christians, and the later Christians said it about heretics, Jews, and “witches”. It is the claim that a secret cabal of marginalized people, who are yet somehow also sometimes quite powerful, meet, usually at night, to plot to overthrow society. As a part of this plot, these members of the cabal abuse, kill and eat children. French writer Guibert of Nogent wrote in 1114 about his local heretics:

Some loose woman lies down for all to watch, and so it is said, uncovers her buttocks, and they present their candles at her from behind; and as soon as the candles are put out, they shout “Chaos” from all sides, and everyone fornicates with whatever person comes first to hand.

After that, if a woman becomes pregnant, the child is killed by being tossed through a fire, and then – remember this bit – bread is made from the ashes. This bread becomes a parody of communion.

The horrible “Malleus Maleficarum” from 1486 also reported that witches would kill and eat children or use their body parts for magic, as part of their orgiastic rituals. This book has a lot to answer for.

Now we come to the notion of Jewish blood libel. This is an interesting example of an obscure and unpleasant idea that has had longstanding reach, and that starts with one particular incident, which we can pinpoint. Here is Michael Barbezat, in “The Public Medievalist”:

These tales began in England with the fabricated story of the kidnap, ritual abuse and murder of the Christian boy William of Norwich, written and elaborated by Thomas of Monmouth between the early 1150s and 1174. In the middle of his imagining of William’s ritual crucifixion, Thomas has the Jews of Norwich pause to remark upon the fact that in the torture and murder of little William they are, finally, just as wicked as Christians expect them to be, saying: “That which they ascribe to us we will inflict on them.” In his write up, Thomas manifested his own negative opinions of Jews by putting them into the very mouths of imaginary Jews he presented as real. This is a circular logic that provides justification for prejudice based upon evidence generated by prejudice.

The belief that Jews tortured Christian children, which has come to be known as the “blood libel”, often featured a sexual component as well. In some versions of the blood libel accusation, kidnapped Christian boys were reportedly circumcised against their wills as depicted in a woodcut of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent in 1475. The Jews supposedly used the blood from this circumcision and other tortures to make the matzos for Passover.

The fact that this never happened did not deter the nocturnal ritual fantasy from having its effects in actual life. Real women died because men in power thought they were witches. Real Jews were further marginalised and persecuted. Bad ideas – well, we live in a world full of the things. They grow.

Let’s move on forward, past the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, past the stories I was told as a child about the Hun spearing babies on their bayonets in World War One, past the Nazi death camps, and we will see how our contemporary examples developed.

Back in the early 1990s, I was a newbie working in child protection. A special event was about to take place. An American police officer and a psychologist were giving a training session about a vast and terrifying network of Satanists in the USA who were kidnapping children and abusing them in bizarre ways. It was the most salacious thing I had ever heard. Some of my more senior colleagues were going to this training. The next day, I asked about it. My colleague told me that the police officer had incontrovertible evidence that this Satanic ritual abuse was taking place. However, the night before the talk, the Satanists had broken into the hotel where he and the psychologist were staying, and destroyed the evidence. My colleague was sincere. She believed this was what had happened. It must have turned the training session into a bit of a squib. Even now I would love to see incontrovertible evidence of Satanic ritual child abuse. (Actually, no, I wouldn’t).

That was the end of my flirtation with Satanic ritual child abuse. Firstly, I did not believe that Satanists had broken into the hotel and stolen the only extant piece of incontrovertible evidence of their heinous activities. I have met a fair few Satanists in my time. They are either way too disorganised, or they would consider it to be beneath them. Secondly, it was a conspiracy too baroque and unlikely to be true. This is a known cost of conspiracism. The more elaborate the conspiracy, the more costly the commitment. The moon landing and 9/11 conspiracies are good examples of this. The number of people who would have to be sworn to secrecy, the number of levels of cover-up, makes the conspiracy less likely.

It was, however, the heyday of the Satanic Panic. It was on TV and everything. Satanists were in heavy metal music (well, true, occasionally, but they don’t bother civilians). Satanists were in everyday communities, and in running daycare centres. Their forms of ritual child abuse weren’t ordinary. Children were disclosing gruesome and frankly unlikely forms of torture to evidential interviewers, social workers and police. Teal Swan, a well-known spiritual influencer and author, now specialises in trauma healing and runs retreats and courses. She claims to have been part of a Satanic cult as a small child, where among other horrors, she was sewn into the carcass of an animal. Swan is interesting in that she bridges the gap between the ritual abuse scare, and the internet age of spiritual and wellness influencing. The Satanic Panic was a recurring conspiracy, the nocturnal ritual fantasy in our daycare centres. At a time when daycare for children was relatively new, conservative commenters were concerned about the changing roles of women and that parenting was losing its grip.

We had our own Satanic Panic here in Aotearoa New Zealand, in 1993. Several staff members of the Civic Creche in Christchurch were accused of sexually abusing children there in bizarre and ritualistic ways, most of which could not have happened. Peter Ellis, one of the creche workers, was the first to be accused. Children were evidentially interviewed, and disclosed that Peter Ellis had sexually abused them in various locations, the he had cut off a boy’s penis and reattached it with Sellotape, that he owned a real giraffe, that he killed children with an axe. He was found guilty based solely on the children’s testimonies and imprisoned, where he died before he was finally exonerated. None of the creche workers were accused of being Satanists or part of a network of abusers. However, the alleged abuse had ritualistic elements, and it occurred at the height of the Satanic Panic. You don’t have to be religious, you see, to be involved in parts of the Cosmic War. The child protection workers were good solid feminists who started with the idea that you believe the children. It was practice wisdom in those days, that children don’t lie about important things. The Satanic Panic became a weird alliance between secular feminists and conservative Christians.

Further back, in the 1970s, movies like The Exorcist and The Omen portrayed a perversion of childhood by Satan. Regan in The Exorcist was vulnerable because she was an innocent child. Damien in The Exorcist had his whole destiny perverted by Satan. The perversion of childhood is especially terrifying. We do not want to be afraid of our children. They must remain innocent.

From the 1970’s onward, the conservative Christian church struggled with liberatory trends, especially for middle class white women. Women were using contraception, exercising their reproductive rights, working outside the home in increasing numbers, filing for divorce. I keep wanting to say the Satanic Panic was a reaction to rapid social change, but so were the Hollywood Catholic horrors, and the cultic milieu of the 1970’s, and the growing conspiracism and cynicism. We have had a lot of change and an increasing sense of precarity, and we hang on to what we know, and that is God, and the family, and our precious children.

Moving along, we come to the Hampstead hoax. This provides a kind of bridge between the Satanic Panic and the more recent panics we call Pizzagate and the QAnon conspiracies. In 2014, the mother of two school children in Hampstead, North London, accused her ex-husband of being the ringleader of a large Satanic paedophile cult, that involved teachers at her children’s school, church figures, and child protection workers. Her children disclosed ritual sexual abuse to the Police, who investigated, but found their elaborate and gruesome disclosures to be entirely untrue. However the audio of the children went out into the internet, which did what it does best. Paedophile hunters came from as far as the USA, and the parents and others in this rather staid community who had been accused by name received credible death threats. Their children were also named as victims. The online and in person persecution of the Hampstead parent community continued until 2022. The mother of the two original children, a wellness influencer, and her partner, who was also complicit in the accusations, had by this time fled the country. They were supported by a computer scientist called Sabine McNeill, who made public the names of the alleged paedophiles and their children. McNeill also fled the country, but was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison. McNeill is interesting to watch. She is very forceful and passionate and often almost tearful when interviewed or testifying in court. She has claimed she speaks for the thousand children kidnapped by paedophiles every month. When confronted by the lack of evidence, she becomes emotional and resorts to her sense of compassion for the children. Compassion for children is all you need, apparently.

2016 saw the Pizzagate conspiracy, where Hillary and Bill Clinton and other top Democrats were accused of trafficking and abusing children out of a pizza restaurant. This is often seen as a precursor to QAnon, which is was a gamified movement that continued to see Hillary Clinton as an evil child trafficker, and most of the “global elite” and the “deep state” trafficking and bleeding children and consuming parts of them. We are back to medieval times here, to witches and the blood libel. QAnon has been so well studied, I will not go into it here, but it has since metastasized into a much more diffuse supermarket of ideas, similar to the spiritual community’s spiritual supermarket, and sometimes overlaps it. Child trafficking conspiracies are part of the general vibe now, but they are joined by vaccine conspiracies and conspiracies about what is here called relationships and sexuality education in schools. Today while walking I saw two signs next to each other, handmade: “Protect Our Children”, and RSE =” Paedophilia”.

My final point is that this part of the Cosmic War is harmful in the real world to real people. Real Jews and real women were persecuted in medieval times. During the Satanic Panic, daycare workers were prosecuted and some were convicted, despite lack of evidence. Children were deeply affected by the interviews and court cases. The Satanic Panic also harmed those who were a bit different, those who were outsiders, like the West Memphis Three. The West Memphis Three were three teenage boys who were convicted of murdering three small boys, despite lack of evidence. They have now been freed, but they all spent a long time in jail and one of them, Damien Echols, was on death row for years. At the time of the murders, they were misfits, metalheads, and Damien Echols practised Wicca. All of this made investigators think they were Satanists. More recently, Pizzagate led a man to break into the pizza restaurant and shoot a lock off a storage cupboard, because he thought there were children in the basement. And QAnon itself has been hugely damaging: it has been divisive of friends and families, folded itself into anti vax movements which have endangered public health, and inspired the Jan 6 Capitol riot. It has also led people like my work colleague who watched The Sound of Freedom, and whoever wrote the signs I saw today, to be fooled and manipulated.

If you think you have an ultimate mission, if you think only you can do it, if you think you have special knowledge, if you think you are in a Cosmic War, you are in a toxic Story.

Thank you for reading this, and what a whistle stop tour it was. I may go into the sub-topics, such as QAnon, further, but things are moving so fast in the world I have to keep up with what is relevant as well as teasing out points in ancient history. I hope you come back! Ma te wa.

Further exploration:

https://publicmedievalist.com/pizzagate-cults/ is Michael Barzebat’s article on the Nocturnal Ritual Fantasy

Van Badham”s “Qanon and On” is a good history of this movement

“Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile Hoax” by Channel 4 is a documentary that sets out how it happened and what the accused parents did about it.