Blame Canada

One of the fundamental characteristics of youth is ignorance. I say that not as a criticism but simply as a statement of fact. Young people, simply by virtue of being young, lack knowledge and experience – and the wisdom that (hopefully) comes with them (though, to be fair, older people have only a marginally better track record on the wisdom front). 

This was certainly true of me as a kid. My own attempts at making sense of the world of my childhood were frequently thwarted by a combination of naivety and ignorance, not to mention my sheltered suburban upbringing. Consequently, there were a lot of events going on around me that I didn't understand or didn't understand fully.

A supreme example of this is the moral panic known today as the "Satanic Panic." If you search through the more than 4000 posts on this blog, you'll find very few dedicated to the discussion of this topic, despite the fact that, for many roleplayers of my age or slightly younger, the Satanic Panic occurred smack dab in the middle of their introduction to the hobby. The lack of posts here on the topic is because, while I was certainly aware that some people somewhere believed that Dungeons & Dragons was diabolical, it was not a belief I encountered in my own life – quite the opposite, in fact.

With four decades of hindsight, it all seems very silly, but that's the nature of moral panics, whether they be about rock music, comic books, switchblades, or, as in this case, Dungeons & Dragons. To the extent that I had any thoughts about the Satanic Panic, I assumed that it must have originated in the American South among those people, because who else would believe something so patently absurd? As I said, the young are ignorant, their understanding of the world sometimes skewed based on the prejudices of their elders. 

Because the Satanic Panic always seemed so far away from me and my friends, I never really understood its actual origins – that is, until recently. The other day, I was reading something online and came across a startling (to me) fact: the proximate cause of the Panic was a 1980 book, published not in the United States but in Canada. The book, entitled Michelle Remembers, supposedly recounted the therapy of a woman called Michelle Smith under the guidance of psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder in Victoria, British Columbia. During these sessions, Smith "remembered" her abuse as a child at the hands of a Satanic cult that included her own mother among its members.

I say that Smith "remembered," because what Smith claimed to recall were the fruits of recovered-memory therapy, an extremely dubious form of psychotherapy that involves, among other things, hypnosis and the use of barbiturates to "recover" memories of past events supposedly so traumatic that the conscious mind suppresses them. To call recovered-memory therapy a pseudoscience is probably generous, but, at the time the book was published, it was relatively unknown and thus treated seriously by the credulous media outlets that helped spread Smith's absurd accusations.

And spread it they did. Though published in Canada, Michelle Remembers gained a lot of publicity through the popular American periodical People, not to mention that trusted purveyor of truth, the National Enquirer. Smith's story circulated widely and soon inspired others to come forward with their own concocted tales of abuse at the hands of Satanists. As so often happens in circumstances like this, the panic metastasized, its adherents purporting to find evidence of the fingerprints of hidden devil-worshippers on just about anything they didn't like, including Dungeons & Dragons.

I had never heard of Michelle Remembers. By the time I really became aware of the Satanic Panic, the book itself had long since been supplanted by other, even more lurid – but just as fabricated – claims about the demonic infiltration of Middle America. I do remember the 60 Minutes hit piece from 1985, but that had little to do with the book that released this ridiculous thought disease into the English-speaking world (I don't think the Satanic Panic had held much water elsewhere in the world, but I leave it to my readers to correct me). If I thought I'd learn anything useful from it, I might try to find a copy and read it, if only to come to a better understanding of something from my childhood whose origins I never really understood. Sadly, I doubt I'd gain much from the effort.

This is, of course, a joke. Everyone knows I love maple syrup.