Ritual Rubbish

John Clark, PhD, The Healing of Satanically Ritually Abused Multiple Personality Disorder, 1st Books, Bloomington, Indiana. 2003.

One can often learn a lot about a work from its bibliography: this one begins with the 'N.I.V. Study Bible', and enigmatically goes on to list "Pastor Jim Casey", though it is apparent that that is the name of a man rather than a book. It also includes such titles as Bible Answers to Man's Questions on Demons, which it seems is Volume 4 of the Satan. Demons and Demon Possession series. It is further instructive to note that the Acknowledgements end "Lastly, I want to give glory to Jesus Christ for without Him, we can do nothing.

Lest anyone misunderstand the title, and think that this might be a treatise about fishing or home economics, the author begins his introduction with the explanatory sentence: "This book is about the healing of satanically ritually abused multiple personalitv disorder." He writes mainly from his "400 to 500 hours" experience in the field, which included "a case study I did with a client who was being groomed for the World Council of the Satanic Church, the Council of Nine". (I fear that he has been seriously deceived: surely everyone knows that the Council or Nine are aliens from the planet Hoova?) Satanic ritual abuse, he explains, is employed to create multiple personality disorder in the victims (one has to take care to distinguish MPD from demonic possession) which, in turn, will programme them to obey the cult. It also helps "foster astral projcction ... an important ability to develop in the cult.'

Clients are to be cured using "Seventeen principals [sic] of spiritual warfare based on God's word". These include: "We are in a spiritual battle"; "Fasting and prayer are essential to the pulling down of the enemy's strongholds"; "Be sure to inquire of the Lord"; "We must test every spirit"; "The battle must be fought with God's spiritual weapons." Basicallv. this means a combination of modem psychotherapy and counselling with reliance on the Bible and the Holy Spirit at every point.

The minister has to understand that 'Black Widow Intenational Programming' will have been employed, which he illustrates with mysterious diagrams of interlinked pentagrams. and even more obscure commentary: "The Spindle is the core shaft upon which the layers are forged. It is ultimately ruled by the Senior Widow, who is in all cases core or the strongest part of the core". Presumably this information is meant to be of use during the healing process.

Unlike some works of this type there are no gruesome pornographic descriptions of what goes on in Satanic rituals. There are, though, some interesting narratives, such as this of a pastor on his way to exorcise a teenager: "I was made to know by the Holy Spirit that two demonic spirits were afflicting the boy. one tempting him to suicide and the other to despair. I was shocked at this and asked the Lord how a Christian could be possessed by a demon (the strong impression that I received was the young man was possessed). No reply from God was forthcoming by the time I reached the house."

On another occasion, "we were working with a client and we were working with one particular alter [personality]: when we spoke in English to her the alter was hearing us cuss and blaspheme the name of the Lord. So, what we did was begin speaking in tongues and speaking in our prayer language to the client and all of a sudden the client was hearing us praise the name of our God. The Jim Smith [sic], he had a word of knowledge that we were dealing with the Tower of Babel Programming."

It is possible that these strange methods may have therapeutic value, but they obviously create the danger of people being accused of non-existent crimes, and, as has happened a number of times, convicted of them. All that he has to say on the subject is this: "It is good to note if you are planning to expose the cult and call the police on things that you have found, make sure you have your facts straight. For example, one of the cults [sic] ploys, when people turn their back and want to testify against them, is to gct the survivor on the stand and then send in their own psychologist into the court room to throw out some trigger words to trigger their multiplicity on the stand so that the survivor will be seen as being incompetent

Of course, "Societies [sic again, evidently the publishers relied on the Lord instead of a proof reader] denial of ritual abuse must be recognized as an enabling stance that assists in the continued perpetration of these heinous acts." That ought to silence the disbelievers. Part of his rationale for publishing is "a scarcity of books on the market covering this subject" currently, in contrast to the glut of them a decade or so ago. A doctor of psychology who examined the book expressed concern to me that its author is a hospital chaplain. -- Gareth J Medway from Magonia 83, December 2003.