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Comment by sehugg | Hacker News Reader

The D&D controversy intersected a much wider (now discredited) moral panic about Satanism. Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

"Journalists" like Geraldo Rivera exploited this panic quite thoroughly in the 1980s: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5829171/when-geraldo-rivera-took-on-s...

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I didn't realize it was such a wide-spread 1980s thing. I always just remembered the Procter & Gamble rumors since one of my parents worked for them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procter_%26_Gamble?section=17#...

I remember my parents showing us a video about "satanic" music. Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Rush, Styx, the Eagles...you name a late 70's band, they were in there. Some of the bands actively courted that image, of course, but the whole thing was pretty patently ridiculous.

Their lyrics, their iconography, their album illustrations were all trotted out as 'proof' that the bands had sold their souls to the devil and were trying to recruit us to the dark side.

Abba?

As i start to read this, "Dancing Queen" comes on. Clearly they control the airwaves.

On the other hand, I strongly suspect TSR was pandering to the ironic satanic heavy metal crowd when they put evil-looking demon things on all of the AD&D core rulebook covers.

http://imgur.com/a/bfE4C

Well, admittedly, nowadays I know at least one metal band whose logo is Moorcock's eight-pointed Star of Chaos. I just also know that they don't mean any occult bullcrap by it.

> The D&D controversy intersected a much wider (now discredited) moral panic about Satanism.

It didn't intersect it so much as it was a component of the broader Satanic panic.

What baffled me most as an child during the "Satanism Panic" was what the grownups thought the danger was. Regardless of whether there were really people worshipping the devil, and regardless of whether such people believed what they were doing, did the panicked adults believe it?

Did they worry that someone was going to perform dark rituals so well that they actually summoned the devil?

There were two concerns, as I understand it: there were (and are) Christian groups that believe that "dark rituals" can have real and serious consequences for not only the participants but the society that allows them to occur, whether that's literally summoning the devil or, more commonly, just provoking divine disfavor (the kind of people that blame various disasters on divine disfavor due to tolerance for abortion, gay rights, etc.) But there were also concerns that satanic cults, whatever activity they started with, progressed to ritual violence including sex crimes, assaults and murders, and suicides. Overtly, the government and law enforcement involvement in the satanic panic was driven by the latter type of concern, though a lot of the propaganda that fed that concern was spread by people who were also involved with the more.religious concern -- they weren't independent phenomena.

The Satanic Panic most prominently involved railroading childcare workers on the theory that they were sexually/satanically molesting the children. The threat model there is fairly easy to understand.

People say we've come to our senses, but the unreasoning panic about anything that might be related to pedophilia is actually still very much with us.

It still baffles me as an adult that actual adults can believe that stuff.

Edit: I'll add I don't go around telling people how silly I think they are for believing these things, but it makes as much sense to me as telling me aliens live in our shoes and if we don't tap then three times before taking then off they will harm us.

The satanism panic is not "now discredited"... rather the factual basis is, i.e., unreliable interrogations and statements, etc.

In the same way the Iraq War itself is not discredited, while the evidence presented at the time is.

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