Walpurgisnacht

There's a woman, on my block,
She just sit there, as the night grows still.
She say Who gonna take away his license to kill? - Bob Dylan

April 30 used to mean to me only the deadline for Canadian income tax. Now, since beginning to explore here the topic of mind control, which opened up the field of Satanic Ritual Abuse, I've learned what else it means, and to more people than I could have imagined.

See, for example, comments here on the discussion board:

"My survivor friend got a note posted to the hood of her car two days ago, telling her to go to a certain place that night, where she would be picked up and taken to 'the festival.' ... she indicated that 'the festival' happens at the same time every year, and that she has attended at multiple times in the past. The note suggests that this is 'her time' eg she will be forced to initiate as a 'master,' which will involve killing a child.... It's Walpurgisnacht.... It's the night when they sacrifice somebody. They initiate new members the next day."

"Yes I'm familiar with Walpurgisnacht, and you are correct about what it is. These 'holy days' are always difficult times for me."

"It was about this time of the year when she invited all the kids in the program to have a slumber party at her house, to celebrate the end of the year... She told us not to tell anyone about what was going to happen and if we did, we would be killed, and so would she. I don't remember being told this, but somehow I knew we were going to a grave yard and something bad was going to happen...."

Since survivors are usually told by authorities, the media, and strangers on the Internet that they are delusional, and the crimes they've suffered are fictions encouraged by abusive therapists, I thought it may be good to remember something else that happened on another April 30: in 2000, the respected British paper The Independent published this article:

Satanic abuse no myth, say experts

A specially commissioned government report will this week conclude that satanic abuse does take place in Britain. It will say that its victims have suffered actual abuse and are not suffering from "false memory syndrome".

The report, ordered by the Department of Health, focuses on the experiences of 50 "survivors". Compiled by Dr John Hale, director of the Portman Clinic in London, and psychotherapist Valerie Sinason, it will reopen the debate which started a decade ago with testimonies from children in Nottingham, Rochdale and Orkney.

Its findings contradict the claims of a report ordered by the Conservative government in 1994, which concluded that satanic abuse was a "myth". It follows the growing concern of child protection agencies, and the Government, over organised child abuse.

Last week, it emerged that police were investigating the alleged sexual and physical abuse of up to 4,000 children in care homes and council-run homes in Devon. Ms Sinason, who has treated 126 ritual abuse survivors, said yesterday that in many cases children were tortured by being held under water or made to believe they had witnessed the murder of infants as part of the satanic ritual.

"Some children are born for the purpose of abuse and are not registered on birth certificates," she added. "The abusers use trickery to convince children they have taken part in murder. This increases the power of the abuser."

The report will point to the difficulty of bringing prosecutions because of the problems of putting abused children into the witness box. There are currently at least five cases involving ritual abuse in the hands of lawyers. Lee Moore, a barrister who founded the Association of Child Abuse Lawyers, and was himself a victim of ritual abuse, said it was hard to persuade people to give evidence, particularly after the 1994 report claiming satanic abuse was a myth perpetuated by social workers.

The latest report was welcomed by Dr Joan Coleman, a Surrey psychiatrist who has spent 14 years treating victims. "A lot of children are born into satanic families who indulge in this ritual abuse," she said. "It's only now that child sexual abuse is being exposed that people are beginning to believe ritual abuse exists."

The report will be studied by John Hutton, the health department minister with responsibility for child protection. He is expected to order an investigation into its findings.

The report, it would seem, was shelved by an embarrassed government, which soon disappeared it down the memory hole.

Regardless of the report, regardless of the similarities of survivors' accounts and physical evidence, most people have filed away ritual abuse as "debunked." Jacques Vallee has written how, with respect to another phenomenon, "carefully contrived official 'explanations'...do not really explain anything, but...provide skeptics with an excuse for dismissing the story." There is an understandable psychological need to live in a world where such things don't happen, so it doesn't take much to persuade most that all child victims must be liars and all adult victims pathological. Undoubtedly people have been falsely accused of ritual abuse, but many more people have been falsely accused of non-ritual rape and murder. Have rape and murder been debunked?

In Linda Blood's The New Satanists she writes that above her desk is a sign: THERE IS NO DEFENSE AGAINST AN EVIL WHICH ONLY THE VICTIMS AND THE PERPETRATORS KNOW EXISTS. She adds, "We owe it to the victims of ritual abuse to recognize both their suffering and their courage and to make every effort to put a stop to the cruel and vicious activities of their abusers."

To those of you who find this an oppressive time, I'll pass along this advice from Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense and hope it doesn't sound too glib: "If the victim of an occult attack concentrates on mundane things he is a heartbreaking proposition for any sorcerer. What is the sorcerer to do if, at the time when he is operating the Black art, his victim is at the local cinema roaring at the antics of Charlie Chaplin?"

I know it's banal, but the banal is suggestive of the commonplace, and there may be power to be found in the commonplace when confronting the uncommon place.

That's no strategy to save the world, but first things first.