Content area
Full text
Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History. By David Frankfurter. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2006. xviii + 286 pp. $29.95 cloth.
From 1987 well into the 1990s, American televisions and newspapers regularly reported widespread claims about underground satanic conspiracies that were supposed to result in "Satanic Ritual Abuse" (SRA)-even in child day care centers. In spite of the fact that the rumors later proved to be unfounded, a veritable industry of experts and "survivors" sprang up. In his fascinating new book, David Frankfurter places such events within the history of the social construction of "pure evil." The book is an engaging study, thoroughly researched and informative. It is a fine example of outstanding comparative scholarship in religious studies.
Frankfurter discusses rumors about atrocities committed by Christians in the early Roman Empire; early Christian claims about "heretics"; medieval persecution of Jews accused of bloody parodies of the Mass; "witch conspiracies" in sixteenth-century Basque villages; and witch trials and panic in colonial New England and 1990s Kenya. Frankfurter asks, "such a conspiracy-of witches, Satanists, Jews, Christians, heretics, or whatever-has never existed.... So is there something common to all these incidents of conspiracy rumors and panics, a im/th of evil conspiracy that, if not transcending history, kicks into action under certain circumstances? How do we explain the similarities across cultures and time periods?" (4).
Frankfurter uses a combination of theoretical tools borrowed from social functionalism combined with modern psychoanalysis. "Demonologies," for instance, function to control the chaos of normal life experiences such as "misfortune, temptation,...