Toxic Blood: That is Satanic
Chapter 8
I could not even begin to guess exactly how many times Mother denied various innocent requests based on “satanic” qualities. Suffice it to say, it was a lot, and was usually applied in baffling and seemingly arbitrary ways. When it was not arbitrary, it usually aligned with some Satanic Panic hysteria in the news at the time.
It is not all that unusual to hear accusations of satanic affiliation from someone who is fanatically Christian and conservative, but theoretically that was not Mother. Father often said he was agnostic, and the rest of the time he said he was atheist. Mother said she did not know what to believe, but spent much of my very young childhood bouncing from Christian church to Christian church looking for the “true faith”. She was even waiting to baptize my brothers and I in hopes she could have it done at the True Church. One of the last churches she took us to was either Greek or Roman Orthodox; I do not remember specifically which. She only attended for a few months, but it was long enough for them to convince her she needed to baptize her children somewhere, anywhere, even if it was not at their church. So, my brothers and I were baptized there.
I was little enough that I do not remember a great deal about my experiences with those myriad churches. I do remember at one point being in a day care or bible study setting while the adults were receiving services, and being rather ostracized by the other children and adult supervision for being an outsider. I also remember being very impressed by the ornate decorations and iconography at the orthodox church where I was baptized, and feeling spit upon that I was not allowed to participate in the rituals.
Those orthodox Christians were also some of the nicest and most welcoming people we had met at any church. I remember a couple older women helping Mother when she was having trouble figuring out how to keep a scarf on her head on Sunday. She had never used head coverings before in her life. I remember the pool out back where we were baptized, and the smell of the chlorine, but I do not remember the baptism itself.
Despite Father’s declarations of agnosticism, Christianity was the only religion that had any mention in my family home when I was little. Christianity in general was so prevalent that I had no idea other faiths existed until I was about seven or eight, because I had never been introduced to even the possibility of other religions. “Agnosticism” functionally translated to “I don’t know which particular denomination of Christianity might be True and Right.”
On the bright side, Father’s “agnosticism”, and Mother’s habit of bouncing from church to church taught me at a very impressionable young age that you could and should question dogma. Each church had a different approach to God, and different dogma, and it was not only correct, but perfectly natural to think critically about that dogma and whether or not it worked for you. If it did not, you were entirely within your rights to walk away, and that did not mean you were going to hell.
But a lot of other things meant you were risking going to hell.
I think I first heard the “satanic” justification when I was still a small child. My family was living in Sonoma County, California, and the majority of the extended family was living in the Los Angeles area. Despite the long drive, my parents felt obligated to make the trip every year or so until Older Brother was hitting puberty. One of the perks of making the trip was that we usually spent one day at Disneyland.
As we got older, my brothers and I very much wanted to visit Magic Mountain instead, but that option was dismissed outright by Mother. She had gone there once, and the place gave her a “horrible feeling”. It must have been “built on an Indian Burial Ground” or “something like that”. It had “demonic influences” and was “bad luck”.
There are so many layers of religious and cultural fuckery involved in her beliefs around Magic Mountain, which, frankly, all went over my head at the time. Instead I was left with an overwhelming feeling of bafflement, and it was one of the rare occasions growing up when I was positive that Mother was out of her mind. Older Brother and I badgered her about it in hopes of being allowed to go there, but she held firm. Evil had been done there, and there was no doubt of that in her mind.
Given things I have learned about Mother in the many years since, including her youthful propensity for drug use in general and magic mushroom use in particular, I would be willing to wager that she just had a very bad drug trip the one time she visited that park. Fixating on the location being an “evil desecrated Indian burial ground” might have been how she coped with the drug-induced mental trauma.
Other frequent targets of “Satanic” accusations were Halloween costumes. In Mother’s opinion, any “evil” costumes were strictly off-limits. This included not just actual devil costumes, but ghosts, skeletons, wizards, witches, mummies, vampires, werewolves, and anything else creepy or supernatural. Sure, the kids wearing the costumes probably were not demonic, but it was some sort of a slippery slope from wearing an outfit to worshiping Satan.
One year, probably fourth or fifth grade, I desperately wanted to be a witch for Halloween, but I was completely denied. Mother was not going to be irresponsible like those other parents and allow evil costumes. She vetoed every costume I wanted, and finally suggested cat. I liked cats, and I did not want to be without a costume, so I went as a black cat. The costume consisted of black tights, a black leotard, black shoes, a disappointingly small tail, cat ears, and very clumsy cat makeup. I was dressed as the child version of a sexy black cat that year, and literally a child harem girl the next, so clearly she had no problem with sexualizing a pre-pubescent child, but she saved my soul by not letting me flirt with the devil by dressing as a witch!
The next big bone of contention in the Satanic department was, predictably, Dungeons & Dragons. Older Brother had taken an interest in the game and purchased a starter box set. This time it was not Mother who made a big deal, I suspect at least in part because it was one of her sons who brought it home, and not me, her daughter. No, it was my “agnostic” or “atheist” Father who took issue with the evil nature of Dungeons & Dragons.
Father was painfully, cripplingly, non-confrontational, so he rarely laid down the law in a firm manner. Instead, he would passive-aggressively and deceptively manipulate you into doing what he wanted. He preferred to feign reasonable thought processes that left his victim boxed into a corner, his desire the only option remaining that had not been eliminated via heavily twisted and biased logic. In the case of D&D, I remember Father pulling out the monster manual, all serious demeanor, to explain to Older Brother and I how you could tell that D&D was “evil” and a gateway to Satanism. All you had to do was look at the art!
Despite having been an artist in his youth, he did not admire the amazing nature of the art of Dungeons & Dragons, how incredible it was that so many artists were creating such realistic works of purely fantastic imagery. He did not delight in the complexity of it, and the beautiful imaginations behind the monsters and other images. No. He looked for demonic images hidden in the meticulously detailed paintings.
Father asserted that the occasional pentagram and plentiful skulls were the obvious symbols of the evil contained within, but it was not just that. He literally told me that if you relaxed and just let your eye float around the painting, it would stop naturally at the places where demonic imagery was secretly hidden. It did not matter if that spot was just a dark shadow at the armpit of an armored warrior – something demonic was hidden there, or your eye would not pause on that spot. Having demonic imagery in the paintings was dangerous and would lead the unsuspecting down the path towards Satanism.
It genuinely boggles my mind that Father not only hung his hat on that idea, but that he justified it in such an amazingly ridiculous way. In good art, your eye will always move around the piece, and pause in locations of high contrast or motion. They are called “focal points”, and it is pretty much universal in art pieces, good and bad, of any subject matter. I can say with confidence that he was blowing smoke up his own ass and ours, in some twisted attempt to defend his indefensible position that D&D was designed to indoctrinate players into worshiping Satan.
Thanks to the prevailing hysteria around D&D being satanic, Older Brother armed himself with anti-satanism arguments before bringing the game home. Aside from the art focal point thing, Father was pretty much pulling from the standard arguments against D&D, so Older Brother had a counterpoint to every single one. Instead of being able to box us into a corner, Father found himself boxed into a corner. Since he was not willing to be directly confrontational about it, he was forced to acquiesce, and reluctantly allowed us to play the game.
Some months later Older Brother talked Mother and Father into doing a game as a family, all five of us, so they could see first-hand that the game was beneficial, not evil. Older Brother set up a whole campaign. The five of us played one session, after which Mother and Father both said they had had fun and understood why we wanted to play the game. They agreed the whole family should play it again, but of course we never did. Our parents were too busy with their own things for family activities.
We never again heard anything about D&D being satanic, but accusations of Satanism continued to be thrown around at some of the most ridiculous things.
Mother and Father first saw a marriage therapist when I was in the first grade. For years they saw therapists both together and separately, and later on just separately. They changed therapists and psychiatrists now and again over the years as their needs changed. For a brief while, Mother was regularly seeing a memory regression therapist. Through memory regression therapy she “remembered” being satanically abused by her parents as a small child, an event so traumatizing that she completely forgot they were anything other than devout Christians until that therapy session! She was so traumatized by her memory that she now wanted to tell everyone it had happened, maybe not all the horrible details, but definitely that it had happened, with a glint in her eye and a spring in her step!
Of course, she “recovered” those memories during the late 80’s early 90’s Satanic Panic, when there was a wave of hysteria accusing people of satanic ritual abuse of children, and the general public was not at all skeptical. She garnered a lot of sympathy for that one.
Movies and TV were another target of “satanic” accusations. The logic followed a similar vein to the Halloween costumes. If it was creepy or supernatural, it was most likely not allowed. Sex or graphic violence were also off-limits. That meant shows like The Adams Family were banned, along with slasher films, vampire flicks, and pornography. The movie Teen Wolf was a hard one for her since it featured a werewolf protagonist, but she anxiously agreed that the comedy teen drama PG-rated movie was most likely harmless.
I honestly cannot say when Mother stopped being hard lined about “satanic” media, because she never talked about it. However, when Younger Brother decided The Craft (1996) was his favorite movie, he played it repeatedly on the livingroom television. I do not remember her ever watching it, but she also never said anything bad about it, at least in front of me.
As far as I know, she also never said anything to Younger Brother about his comics when he started collecting those. His favorites were The New Mutants, Spawn, and Witchblade, the latter two of which should easily have qualified as “satanic”, but it was never an issue. In Spawn, the protagonist is given his power by a demonic source. If Mother had been consistent, she would have been immediately triggered by the word “witch” in Witchblade, without any desire to look further into it. Younger Brother even had giant posters of the protagonists pinned up on his wall, full of the sort of imagery that Father had taken issue with in the past. At this point I cannot help but wonder if Mother and Father ignoring the “satanic” potential had more to do with favored Younger Brother bringing those items home, than any willingness to acknowledge that they had been unreasonable in the past.
Older Brother started pushing other boundaries at about the same time. He had come across ceremonial magick, and decided he wanted to study it. It made Mother and Father uncomfortable, but as far as I know, there was never any real confrontation about it, even when he was teaching himself Enochian and literally investigating how to summon and control demons. Father just gave him side-eye when Older Brother switched from ceremonial to chaos magick and started flaunting whatever snippets of whatever traditions he felt like appropriating that day.
I was the one who introduced Mother to the New Age movement. There was not a real occult shop in Santa Rosa at the time, but there was a New Age store. It was not too far from my school, so I went there on a fairly regular basis. New Age is as palatable as alternative spirituality gets when you are coming from a paranoid Christian background. Not only is there an overwhelming amount of angel worship to keep you grounded in the familiar, but it is riddled with white savior complexes and white colonialist perspectives via cultural appropriation and reverence for the “noble savage”.
Mother ate it up. She started attending a New Age church and giving them 10% of her income, because the church leader had said you needed to give money to receive money. She wanted to give them 10% of the household money, but Father put his foot down over his money, and was merely passive-aggressive about her own paycheck. She started brewing her own kombucha, at least until she realized it had alcohol in it, however miniscule the amount. She started collecting crystals and would have started seeing psychics if Father had not badgered her constantly, believing that all psychics were charlatans.
The one good thing about getting Mother into New Age was that she entirely calmed down about things being “satanic”. I think it taught her that she had been too narrow-minded, and most of the things she was interpreting as “evil” were actually either pure fantasy, or simply another way of looking at reality. She had always publicly prided herself on being open-minded. It was one of the details she convincingly hinged her public persona on, and she was very good at presenting herself as an open-minded person. In embracing New Age thought, she was forced to accept that she could no longer vilify most of the things she had seen as “evil” or “satanic”, whether or not she still wanted to.
She never did apologize about the Magic Mountain thing, though, or really, any of it.