Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History
In Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Ritual Abuse in History (2006), David Frankfurter sets out to explain why people throughout history have constructed beliefs about secret, evil groups that engage in remarkably similar lurid acts of violence and depravity, often involving infant sacrifice, blood-drinking and cannibalism, and sexual perversity. While providing some insights into this unsettling pattern, which has recently repeated itself with QAnon, the book ultimately fails to provide a convincing over-arching explanation, instead padding out its text with repetition and sometimes tortuous block quotes.
Frankfurter’s analysis focuses on “demonic conspiracy” beliefs driving early modern witch hunts in Europe, medieval accusations of ritual abuse of Christians by Jewish people, the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, late twentieth century witch hunts in “Africa,” (particularly Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, and Cameroon, but he often refers to the entire continent without specification), and Ancient Roman rumors about early Christians. Part of the failure to provide a cohesive explanation, I believe, results from attempting to fit into one mold this wide range of historical contexts, which includes the persecution both of people who live openly as minority groups, such as Jewish people in Christian Europe, and people who are members of the Christian majority but are believed to secretly worship Satan. His choice to throw Ancient Roman persecutors into the mix also belies the reality that, overwhelmingly, this phenomenon takes the form of Christians, motivated by uniquely Christian perspectives and preoccupations, believing in Satanic conspiracies.
Frankfurter makes some plausible observations about why people construct and engage in beliefs of depraved Satanic conspiracies—these beliefs smooth over frighteningly complex realities into a simple moral universe of good vs. evil, providing people with a single organized enemy embodying a level of almost comically unspeakable evil, and believers can cast themselves as brave crusading heroes while also having an excuse to obsess over forbidden sex while remaining righteous. However, these explanations tend to be based in common sense rather than historical argument. His less obvious theories tend to fit only some of his examples. For example, take his supposition that conspiracies emerge where a totalizing religious system attempting to consolidate power redefines a local community’s existing system of morally ambiguous spirits and supernatural forces as evil. This may apply to mainstream Christianity’s takeover of rural Europe and colonized countries in Africa, but not to the Satanic Panic or Ancient Rome. He ultimately concludes that such conspiracy theories emerge when a community encounters a “new social problem” and frames it in terms of “conspiracy and evil” (211). But when isn’t society facing new social problems, and why do these specific kinds of beliefs only erupt in certain situations?
Frankfurter also bases some of his conclusions on Freudian “primary process” psychoanalytic theories, arguing that that beliefs about cannibalism and sexual abuse arise from universal “infantile mind experiences” of “oral-anal-sexual transgressions” (143). I have to admit that few things make me want to close a supposedly factual book faster than a reliance on these kinds of Freudian theories. Setting aside the deep misogyny that poisons how his theories apply to half of the world’s population, Freud’s theories are fundamentally unfalsifiable, with no way to test, prove, or disprove them, and so I would argue they don’t belong in a work of historical or sociological scholarship.
The book can also feel at times like the author was trying to reach a word count—ideas are repeated multiple times and long block quotes run rampant. The quotes are especially tiresome when Frankfurter uses them to repetitively showcase the kinds of outlandishly disgusting acts that people ascribe to witches and Satanists—two block quotes describing (and be forewarned that this next bit is very gross) grinding up aborted fetuses with a mortar and pestle to eat them is certainly one block quote too many, and arguably two, about grinding up aborted fetuses with a mortar and pestle to eat them (see how that repetition was probably unnecessary?).
To sum up: if you’re interested in the prevalence of beliefs about bizarre demonic conspiracies, or the return of the Satanic Panic in QAnon guise has left you disturbed and looking to history for an explanation, Evil Incarnate is worth a read (or a skim). But while you might encounter some interesting ideas about how such conspiracy theories emerge and why people fall for them, you will not find a convincing answer as to why they emerge in the first place. Perhaps that was too much to ask from one book.
The accompanying image is © The Trustees of the British Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This drawing (c.1575-1600) by an anonymous artist depicts the temptation of St. Anthony by various demons and monsters.
The Temptation of St. Anthony is depicted in the Netherlandish style in this c.1575-1600 drawing by an anonymous artist.