The Sacrifice
People are always talking about Satanists sacrificing infants to the devil. What the hell does that guy want with babies? He’s the Lord of Darkness! The Prince of Lies! All those babies crawling around might make it a little bit difficult to maintain his street cred. Is he running a nursery down there or something? I mean, come on, man.
Really, the Satanists should be sacrificing some real bad-asses. Then they could hang out with the devil and form some kind of posse and wear leather with spikes on it.
Pop culture today (particularly crime related movies and television shows) sometimes likes to bring up Satanism and Satanic cults to give whatever fiction is being created that extra edginess you can’t really get with normal gangs and thugs. When a biker gang just isn’t enough: think Devil worship! Thanks to two thousand years of Christian mythology packed into western culture, there’s a fairly immediate response to the mere mention of Satanism, but what are the modern implications of Satanic practice in pop culture and where did they come from?
Nowadays when demonic rituals are mentioned, a few major activities are usually on the schedule: blood rituals, pentagrams and demonic symbolism scrawled on surfaces, and that most nefarious action, ritual killing, particularly of infants and children. Why these activities? Aside from the simple answer that they’re clearly amoral and awful things to do and that the devil tends to be associated with everything amoral and awful, it comes down to history and superstition.
Around the year 1000, Christianity began to develop the idea of the modern devil, his imagery and purpose continued to evolve and by the time the 1200’s rolled around, he’d become a central figure in Christian mythology. In the 1500’s, the idea of witchcraft shifted from being a practice of pagans or innocent people deceived by the Devil’s tricks into something else entirely. The new witch of the 15th century was a conscious and willing follower of Satan with a seriously evil outlook. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, in Europe, the charge of Satanic worship and witchcraft was leveled against thousands of people resulting in a whole lot of folks being burnt to a crisp. Surprisingly, many of the charges against these supposed Satanists are close to the sort of things we see in pop culture today 300 years later: forming a demonic pact, blasphemy against God, participation in dark rituals or Sabbaths, practicing harmful magic, and the killing of children (both those already born and those still in the womb).
All of this stuff probably should have died out with the end of the witch trials, but it has somehow made a lasting impression on western culture and saw a recent revival in that armpit of the last fifty years: the 1980’s. During the 80’s, a phenomenon known as SRA or Satanic Ritual Abuse began to cause a serious panic in the United States. SRA constituted a wide array of events and definitions but was mostly defined by the idea of Satanic cults skulking about, performing dark rituals and abusing children sexually or outright murdering them as an offering to the Devil. It seems strange now, but the level of anxiety caused by the pretty unsubstantiated rumors associated with SRA was significant. At the time, people would undergo hypnotherapy or regression therapy, uncovering traumatic memories that they’d supposedly locked away of being children involved in these horrific cults. Needless to say, no evidence of these supposedly widespread cults or the ridiculous conspiracy theories relating them to some kind of secret society that rules the world were ever found. Claims made by people about childhood abuses were largely found to be either outright lies or to be child abuse without the Satanic connections.
It was this panic in the 1980’s and the early 90’s that has given us the gift of Satanic cults we see in pop culture today. While there are Satanists and Satanic cults out there, they’re mostly benign and misunderstood, if a little ridiculous. There are surely some crackpots and weirdos out there that subscribe to the more awful iteration of Satanism but they’re very few and far between.
As for infant sacrifice, it’s been a pretty overinflated part of history for a long time, though it did happen. Many cultures never got into serious ritual killing and of the ones that did, infant sacrifice was pretty rare.
Besides, what kind of god or demon even wants babies as sacrifices? Changing diapers for eternity? No thanks!
Discussion (38) ¬
You didn’t touch on the whole, voluptuous virgin imagery, you always see the kinky lady all tied up ready for some, presumably devil dong :/
haha I seriously had about 3 or 4 pages of material for this blog post but had to cut it down, it’s already over a full typed page in Word!
Aliester Crowley wrote that the best age for sacrifice was 6-7, yea the same guy the Beatles adored, Ozzy wrote a song about him, Robert Plant bought his mansion and good ol Jay-z has a hoodie with his law of thelema quote.
I tossed back my head and laughed out loud at this
Sshhh! You’ll wake everybody on the east coast up!
Maybe the devil sacrifices the dead babies in satanic rituals. I mean, if devil-worship is considered evil, and the devil is definitely evil, then maybe the devil worships some other, worser, baby-crazy ultra-devil. Superdevil? Double Devil?
Oh, the Deity you are looking for is Meta-Evil,
I’ve heard he’s way past the Earth’s core, in the deepest parts of Hell.
Though if you go too deep, you’ll pass him and end up, going up!
I think you underestimate the usefulness of sacrificed babies to The Opposer…
Between the unearthly, ear-piercing shreiking and emission of unpleasant substances, can you imagine the horror that a whole army of demon-babies would represent?!?!
I laughed out loud at work, which was no biggie. Some folks came over, they had a laugh as well.
Then Bob pointed out that we happen to be laughing at a child being sacrificed and murdered.
Way to go Bob.
It’s understandable why you thought of not keeping the entire original post intact (what with how long you meant it to be), but I sincerely think it would benefit this post if you had explained the past incidents of Blood Libel.
For those of you who don’t know this, at some point in the past, Jews and other groups (pagans, “witches” [long story that…] et cetera) were focused upon, as K said, but with a very similar set of accusations, amongst which, apparently, and especially of Jews (originally), the most prominent was the sacrifice and eating of infants, thought to be some form of a blasphemous perversion of the Eucharist (perhaps alluding to how the Jews, in these people’s minds, spilt the blood of Christ).
These inane beliefs are the foundation of this sort of myth; of course, such panics are not uncommon in the world, though it’s fascinating that it does happen to be the USA where it happened (the place where you can also find such panics about various sex acts).
right now i’m picturing two neighboring bronze-age farming villages making up terrible stories about one another.
From what i’ve read most cultures have practiced infanticide at one point or another as a form of population control, it makes me wonder if that might be a potential source of the ritual child sacrifice myths, too.
Stuff like this occurs even in the modern era, just google up the history of Adidas and Puma shoes.
Yeah there was a rather large paragraph detailing some of this information in my original Word write-up, along with some stuff about Carthage and the supposed infant sacrifices that occurred there in the name of Hammon (the Carthaginian version of Cronus – a ritual that would actually kind of make sense if you think about it). Unfortunately, it’s mostly a comic about the Christian Devil, so I decided to streamline it a bit. Three pages of text in the blog post is just a bit too much.
I’m sure I’ll end up doing some more writing and comic stuff about human sacrifice in the future, it’s just too interesting to pass up haha
Thanks for bringing it up down here though, people that read the comments will learn something important!
That looks like the premise of a Pixar movie waiting to happen.
I am seriously considering making some fanfiction using your depiction of the devil.
Who needs those babies?
They scream and poop all over.
I gotta make one…?
Just hail Satin.
A smooth and glossy fabric.
Thought I meant Satan?
Calypso, how do you do it!
Those 3 liners….
I second hailing Satin!
Such a nice fabric…
As for the kiddos, they may be a bundle of joy at birth,
but give them two or three years, and you’ll have Chaos at it’s finest!
Not to mention, Discord, Strife, Headaches, Sleep Deprivation, Temper-tantrums…. *keeps going on*
Five syllables, then
seven. You don’t need to rhyme.
It’s easy, try it.
Oh pardon me dear!
Realize, I not, a Haiku!
Twas what I thought was,
a triple liner was not.
Maybe, since babies are more or less sin free, the idea is that the sacrificed babies get sent to heaven. In turn, this swamps God down with having to deal with a hoard of infants, giving Satan some leeway to do his evil deeds.
haha I like this theory.
If I recall correctly in the computer world,
that would be called a DDoS attack, or at least the common method,
of literally spamming the target network/server with requests
(like loading the web-page), in such a mass that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable… this usually leads to a server overload and possibly a catastrophic failure of the network/server.
On a side not Anonymous and it’s “legion” tend to favour this type of attack.
(Maybe they are trying to “distract” someone/thing while thin g/ something?)
They should send toddlers. Don’t they know they’re demons? It’s called the terrible twos for a reason!
your comics with Satan are always my favorite
The babies you draw are so cute, it should be illegal.
Favorite of your comics so far. I really like that baby snuggling his cheek.
Cruel humans. They could have killed at least some Kindergartenteacher for him.
In Europe, there were never any cases of witches being burnt. Most of the people who were accused of witchcraft were actually acquitted. There are only a few cases of people being accused of witchcraft being executed, and they were hung, not burned.
This is untrue. There are over 10,000 -recorded- cases of witches being executed across Europe over the course of the late 1500’s and early 1700’s and estimates of actual cases of execution have ranged from anywhere between 30,000 all the way up to several hundred thousand, though those upper limits seem to be seriously exaggerated. Most of the executions involved burning, though not all of them were burned alive. Fire as a cleansing property was very important when dealing with suspected witches and warlocks and was used in almost every case, whether it was to kill the victim outright or to cleanse the body afterward.
Not sure where you heard this stuff about the European witch hunts. Maybe you’re thinking of the grossly inflated Salem Witch Trials that occurred in the late 1600’s in America? In that case, over a hundred people were accused of being witches but only 20 were executed and, as you’ve said, they were mostly hung, not burned.
Wasn’t this before the invention of the new hanging technique that broke necks? Before it victims would dangle up to 20 minutes before succumbing to asphyxiation.
Except for one, who had his chest crushed by heavy stones.
Giles Corey, right?
Crushed while he asked for “more weight.”
A badass old man.
I think Satan has some actual usage for a horde of babies. After all, what would be worse way to torture those who have ended up in hell than putting them to listen the cries of countless babies.
I just love your devil comics, he is such a hapless cutie :3
Aaaaah, this reminds me of an acquaintance of mine in college that very proudly would introduce herself as a Satanist. I was actually really intrigued when she told me about this! I’d heard in High School about a New Wave Satanic movement that instead believed that Satan was an underdog-esque hero figure trying to save humanity from an ill-meaning (and not all that honest for an omnipotent figure, apparently,) God, and I wondered if maybe she subscribed to that particular way of thinking.
You can imagine my disappointment when I learned that she just really liked drawing pentagrams and goat skulls :c
Getting back on topic here, I just wanted to say that I loved this particular strip! I probably laughed for a good straight minute or so XD
Poor Satan though- I can’t imagine that all those dirty diapers are going to help that fire and brimstone smell any.
this person apparently has 0 pagan/wiccan friends. if they did they might not anymore.