Thanks, Harry, for this very lucid analysis.

My late father, a psychotherapist, worked with some of these people, and reached similar conclusions: that while the *experiences* they reported felt real to them, the alleged perpetrators of the attacks, whether Satanists, witches, aliens or gangs of Nazis living hidden in plain view, were figments of their imagination, fed by cultural fantasies.  The real culprits were most likely family members and friends, but that reality was far too painful for the victims to consciously acknowledge.

The only thing I would add is that these narratives of evil-doers far predate the existence of literature; their roots lie in folklore and oral tradition.  Nearly every culture has its version of some evil Other on whom the worst imaginable violations of social norms are projected.  See Alan Dundes, "Projection in Folklore," in _Interpreting Folklore_ (Indiana UP, 1980), as well as his larger work _The Blood Libel_, which takes up the notorious accusations made against Jews through the ages.

This does not, of course, mean that there are no Satanists, witches, Nazis, or criminals who commit evil acts (I'll reserve judgment on the space aliens). In the case of the former two, human beings have always been moved to enact cultural fantasy; see Linda Degh and Andrew Vazsonyi's work on ostension, the mechanism by which legends are enacted.

What is interesting is how these cultural fantasies worm their way into the autonomous imagination [see Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen, ed., _The Religious Imaginatoin in New Guinea_ (Rutgers, 1989), esp. Stephen's essay "Self, Sacred Other and the Autonomous Imagination," 41-64], so that people who have indeed been victimized in the worst way actually experience the abuse as coming from some evil Other -- whatever evil Other their particular cultural and religious background considers most egregiously culpable.

On the incubus/succubus experience, see David Hufford, _The Terror that Comes in the Night: an Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions_ (U Pennsylvania Press, 1982).  Hufford argues that real physiological experiences may underlie these feelings of being under supernatural attack.  The interpretation, again, follows cultural lines.  Shelly Adler explored how this played out among Hmong immigrants to Central California in an article in Barbara Walker, ed., _Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural_ (Utah State U P, 1995).

Sabina Magliocco
Professor and Chair
Department of Anthropology
California State University - Northridge
18111 Nordhoff St.
Northridge, CA  91330-8244
________________________________________
From: Society for The Academic Study of Magic [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Harry Roth [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 2:38 PM
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Subject: Re: [ACADEMIC-STUDY-MAGIC] OTO news. Couple jailed for contempt in vilificati...

Mary Christine Erikson wrote:
>
> May I ask how it could be otherwise [that people claiming SRA have mental health problems], if all this is true?

In my job, I am regularly contacted by
people who believe they are the victims
of magic or the supernatural and who
want my help. The first thing I have to
do is to sort out for myself whether the
individual is indeed the victim of magic
or the supernatural or if something else
is going on. One of the things I hear
surprisingly often is the story of the
malign coven. People call who are
absolutely certain that they are the
victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by a
coven of witches located nearby that
nightly sends succubi/incubi out to
sexually torment them, rape them, and
generally suck the life out of them.
They call very upset asking for advice
about how they can make these witches
stop these attacks, but no amount of
magic ever helps these people. Often
they say that they have tried all sorts
of remedies to no avail (sort of like
those people with possessed children or
houses haunted by demons we had in the
seventies).

The witches who are allegedly
perpetrating these horrors are always
motivated by sheer malice. It is never
that the individual has actually done
anything to offend the coven in
question, or even that the coven is
getting something substantial out of
tormenting the person, like money or
property. No, the witches are just
cussedly evil--sort of like they are in
movies and stories. And what happens to
these individuals at night in their bed
is just like what happens in movies and
stories to such victims. These folks
even see these movies and stories about
supernatural sexual attack as basically
documentary evidence that sexual attacks
perpetrated by witches are not uncommon.
They don't recognize these films and
stories as their inspiration.

What I have noticed about these stories
is the same thing I have noticed about
the stories of victims of SRA. They are
too literary to be believable.

These people are not faking their
distress, and I don't think they are
consciously making up these stories. I
don't even believe that they are the
victims of night terrors. I think it is
far more subtle than that--that they
have found a story in their culture that
makes sense of their experience,
whatever it might be. One thing I feel
sure of--that experience does not have
anything to do with witches or succubi.
Those are simply literary symbols.

I don't see any significant difference
between these stories of sexual assault
by demon and the SRA stories. For that
matter, they both have much in common
with alien abduction stories. Always, an
individual is singled out for some
ghastly fate for no good reason, nothing
that they themselves have done. There is
a group of people who know what is going
on. No one talks about it. It's covered
up. And no one does anything to stop it.
Same story in various forms. Only the
trappings are different. This is the
story of molestation itself. It has
nothing to do with Satanists, witches,
or aliens.

It is not that I disbelieve in
molestation. Far from it. But I think
one of the reasons why people choose to
see molestation through the lens of
aliens or witches or Satanists is
because to see it directly, as the
result of actions perpetrated by
ordinary people in one's own family,
generally, who are not demonstrably
depraved in other ways, not noticeably
abnormal or evil, is too horrible to
contemplate. It is easier for people to
believe in conspiracies of Satanists or
attacks by groups of witches or aliens
in flying saucers nabbing them from
their beds than it is to believe that
they were sexually victimized by
relative, an average person for no
reason at all, just because they were there.

One thing I learned from studying
literature that has proved a very
helpful tool for me--art does not
imitate life. On the contrary, life does
everything it can to imitate art,
because art makes sense in a way that
life never can. That is why people
choose these stories about Satanist
conspiracies and whatnot. They make
sense of the horrifically senseless. But
that literariness is also what points
these out AS stories and not as
non-literary, life experiences.

Harry Roth