According to David Frankfurter, the satanic ritual abuse ascribed to day-care workers in California did not take place--and neither did the witches’ Sabbaths where infants were supposedly bled, roasted, and eaten. What is real is the human need to ascribe such evil to others, to incarnate it in specific individuals, and to see these persons as part of a threatening conspiracy which must be stopped. Evil Incarnate, then, examines human nature and tries to determine why people are willing to believe that others are capable of the worst deeds imaginable. It also seeks to understand how a belief in evil can lead to horrific acts. It is in the acts taken against presumed demonic conspiracy, Frankfurter argues, that we find truly evil deeds.
Evil Incarnate is not a history of witchcraft or of demonic conspiracy. Frankfurter does use material that ranges from ancient Mediterranean religions and early Christianity, his own area of specialization, to the accusations of satanic ritual abuse that dominated American and British media in the 1980s and 1990s. His approach is roughly chronological, working from perceptions of spiritually potent places and fears of anomalous individuals to beliefs in global satanic conspiracy. Yet the structure of the book is not so much historical as rhetorical. Evil, Frankfurter states, “is a discourse, a way of representing things and shaping our experience of things, not a force in itself.” He then proceeds to demonstrate how this discourse has been implemented.
Chapter 2 begins by looking at the creation of lists of demons and how these helped take vague perceptions of power, power that had previously been seen as ambiguous, and define what was evil. Writing enabled the creation of lists, and priests, the people who controlled writing, were able to locate power over evil forces in their temples and rituals. But the definition of evil was not enough to mobilize people to act against it and, in the next chapter, Frankfurter explores the role of experts, often self-professed, who identified evil and argued agency, painting a picture of conspiracy and saying that evil did not act at random, but had a defined agenda. In this chapter Frankfurter brings in modern material, drawing parallels between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch-finders in Europe, witch-finders in modern Africa, and the child-protection workers, therapists, law-enforcement officers, and others who argued for the existence of an organized satanic cult, intent on ritual abuse of children, in modern America and Britain.
The next two chapters (4 and 5) look at ritual and how ideas of witches’ Sabbaths and other satanic rites helped foster fears of evil conspiracy. To be truly frightening, evil must be seen as organized, the author argues. A local malevolent individual is hardly as ominous as an organization, one extending beyond local, and ultimately national, borders. Proof of the existence of an organization can be found in organized behavior: ritual. Frankfurter makes a number of interesting observations about ritual. He argues that satanic ritual is characterized by inversion and this is not just the inversion of the normality of the everyday, as Victor Turner would explain, but the inversion of mainstream ritual practice, often the rites of the Christian church. In satanic rites, people are reputed to partake of human flesh; they are said to dance naked and backwards, and to commit lewd acts, including incest. Such evil rites can be ascribed to peoples in distant lands to demonstrate their otherness and these descriptions can be found in travelogues. And evil rituals can be ascribed to those in our midst who are considered other. Engaging in these rituals is explained as serving Satan for the sake of power, money, or lust. The whole satanic tableau, then, permits people to engage in forbidden fantasies while simultaneously repudiating them. There is much more going on in the discussion of ritual than can be summarized here. Frankfurter talks about the testimonies of those who purportedly escaped from satanic cults after being forcibly initiated into them. He describes accusations against Jews who were said to capture and bleed children and to steal the Eucharist so as to stab it and extract its blood. There are many other examples of tales of evil rites and reproductions of woodcuts and paintings to illustrate the author’s points.
Chapter 6 deals with the performance of evil. It describes how individuals enacted the scenarios thrust upon them. In the case of European witchcraft trials, the accused was forced to accept her role as witch by inquisitors actually putting her through the rituals that they believed occurred during satanic Sabbaths. For example, they literally made suspected witches perform the steps of the dances that they presumed occurred. As she enacted what she was reputed to have done, the accused performed the role of witch, her ultimate performance being the trip to the pyre where her death cleansed the community. Some performers of evil claimed to be former cult members, now saved, who told the horrific stories that society wanted to hear. Such persons always ran the risk of being accused of too much knowledge and failure to break with their reputed past. The book ends with a chapter on mobilizing against evil, the destruction of the accused to cleanse the group. Here, Frankfurter repeats, is where truly evil acts occur.
For the folklorists reading this review, I must report that this is not a folklore study, though it is very important because it does deal with belief and its expression both verbally and in ritual acts. This book is also important because it marks a significant turn in scholarship. For a long time scholars have assumed that human behavior is governed by a desire for power and have then examined how this power is asserted and negotiated in specific instances. Frankfurter, fortunately, realizes that human thought is more multi-faceted and that the thirst for power alone does not explain all that we do. His focus on evil may be a symptom of our times, but it is a welcome step in the direction of seeing human nature as more nuanced and complex.
--------
[Review length: 1007 words • Review posted on January 28, 2008]