This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 41, Summer 2000.
Survivors of ritual abuse are often met with disbelief, especially when they reveal their everyday familiarity with death, which seems strange and disturbing to most of us. In this extract from her forthcoming book, The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief, Sara Scott explores the meaning of death in the accounts of women survivors.
Survivors’ memories of witnessing and participating in violent deaths have probably aroused more incredulity than any other feature of their life stories. I will suggest that this automatic disbelief originates in contemporary attitudes to both death and religion such that ‘ritual sacrifice’ is always already consigned to a distant time or place. Killings which appear to have resulted from a search for sexual gratification or pecuniary gain, on the other hand, make sense within contemporary understandings of human motivation. At the same time late modern societies shelter their citizens from death in ways that make the death-saturated life-stories of ritual abuse survivors extremely alien to most people’s experience. Taken together, the attitudes towards and experience of death and religion amongst the audience for survivors’ accounts is crucial in understanding their reception.
Belief and experience
When I first began caring for Sinead [1], I remember how contagious her terror could be. On numerous occasions on a bus, in the street, or talking at the kitchen table, fear would clutch at my innards and fill my mouth with a salty saliva which my throat refused to swallow. What I absorbed was perhaps a homeopathic dose of the terror I regularly saw in Sinead’s rigid jaw and dilated pupils. Through this second hand experience, I felt her dread to be of a world-shattering kind which rendered our life together no more than a fragile fantasy — one that might be ripped away at any moment to reveal the inescapable reality of ritual abuse. Her terror was of death: Sinead feared her abusers might kill her or anyone connected with her. Early in our acquaintance, when she herself was ‘on the run’ and sleeping rough, she had her much loved dog put down in order both to protect her from the parents who had abused them both and to ensure that threats to harm Gemma could not compromise her own determination to make a new life. If it had not been for the intensity of her determination and evident anguish over this decision I might have found this a melodramatic gesture on Sinead’s part. Only later were some of the experiences on which her fears were founded shared with me. In other words, my acceptance of the ‘truth’ of Sinead’s memories was grounded in my acceptance of the emotional truth of her terror. Her flashbacks were vivid, visceral and exhausting and the events she described made sense of the nightmares, self-hatred, despair and rage which was the stuff of our daily lives.
This kind of knowledge about ritual abuse is embedded in relationship. It is the foundation for the claims of therapists and foster parents certain that what their particular client or child has told them happened really happened. Hearing accounts of witnessing death from other survivors whom I interviewed for the research was a very different experience. For the most part we met as strangers careful to maintain some emotional distance from the ‘material’ and from each other. From this position the scepticism which haunts most public responses to stories of undiscovered ritual murder seemed a natural attitude. There were after all some bizarre and confusing memories which interviewees could not explain and could not disentangle from the effects of drugs, pain and terror. From the standpoint of most interlocutors it might not be surprising that such memories — severed from the contexts of whole lives — could be dismissed as the nightmares and delusions of the severely disturbed, and considered to require no further explanation. However, I recognized the need to expose to critical scrutiny the assumptions behind the ‘common sense attitude’ which awakened incredulity to some stories rather than others. First amongst these seemed to be contemporary ideas and experience of both death and religion.
Death in late modernity
Birth and death are both in decline in late modern societies. My mother tells a story from her childhood in the 1920s. There was a woman her mother knew who sometimes stopped to speak. It seemed to the child that each time she did so she had the same tale to tell, and it always began: “Eh, Lizzie, I’ve buried another ‘un.” The image my mother conjured up of this woman digging another in a row of infant graves (coupled with her tendency to comment meaningfully on my mother’s ‘mawky paleness’) gave her nightmares. The story is one of my mother’s markers that differentiate between ‘then’ and ‘now’; the past is a foreign country populated by dead babies, we do things differently these days. Infant mortality rates have declined dramatically over the eight decades dividing then from now. But the dead babies of my grandmother’s friend no longer exist in another sense. For the death of a baby in twenty-first century Britain is a tragedy encased within well-developed medical and therapeutic discourses. There are specialist organizations dealing with the aftermath of cot death, still birth, children with cancer, support for parents of murdered children, miscarriage, meningitis. The thing itself has become rare; para-professional advice for those affected by it is plentiful.
Modernity has increasingly removed death from everyday life and placed it in the hands of specialists, so that even our best loved departed are no longer welcome in our homes as corpses. Violent and horrific deaths may be the constant stuff of media fantasy and ‘news’ but we no longer attend public hangings. Actual deaths are only rarely encountered by most of us in late modern societies, a fact which encourages our reception of the stories of ritual abuse survivors as fiction rather than actuality.
It has often been claimed that the key function of all religion is to make death meaningful. In general, this seeking of meaning in religion in order to avoid the dread of death is regarded as benign and functional; while the secularization sometimes supposed to be inherent in modernity is seen as a challenge to human abilities to cope with mortality. The ready everyday rationality which renders so much about ritual abuse counter-intuitive dismisses as ‘impossible’ stories of contemporary human sacrifice. This may result in large part from the hegemony of an evolutionary account of sacrifice in both anthropology and religious studies. ‘Other’ world religions may still condone the stoning of women taken in adultery, the infibulation of pre-pubescent girls or the ritual decapitation of cocks and hens but religiously motivated brutalities seem unthinkable in late modern societies. When such apparently do occur (the Manson murders, the Jonestown massacre or the recent Heaven’s Gate suicides) we seek where possible an ‘explanation’ in terms of a charismatic (and psychopathic) leader and beyond that dismiss them as weird and incomprehensible.
The idea of the psychopath killing for pleasure or the gangster doing similarly for profit provides a residual category of mad, bad and dangerously damaged individuals, but it does not fit with survivors insistence on the collective practice and identity of their abusers. According to survivors, animal and human life is ritually destroyed to enhance the ‘power’ of those involved. It is supposed to bind together the ‘faith community’ in a shared experience of transcendence. Such an idea of absorbing the ‘energy’ or spirit substance of an animal or human sacrificial victim is attested to in many pre-modern cultures, and in some it has also been a ‘mystery’ rite binding initiates together through the solidarity of illegality and the ownership of a ‘secret’ which places them outside the ordinary social world.
Ritual abuse survivors’ experiences of death are difficult then in a number of ways: the kinds of deaths they claim to have witnessed are to the rest of us ‘media experiences’, confined to horror films; immediate contact with the dead and dying is unfamiliar to most of us, and any experience we do have tends to be confined to ‘good, clean deaths’. In addition, our ability to believe or make sense of the deaths in accounts of ritual abuse is curtailed by the hegemony of the grand narrative of modernity. The apparently inevitable progress of secularization renders religious motivation largely irrelevant.
Death, meaning and doubt
Death potentially disrupts individuals’ unquestioning acceptance of the inevitability of social arrangements: nature rips the social fabric showing it to be a man-made backdrop. So when I began examining the various reports of deaths in my interviews, I had an idea that they might represent ‘fateful moments’ during which the stability and inevitability of the social worlds inhabited by survivors might be undermined. If this were so, I imagined that the recognition: ‘It doesn’t have to be like this’ would be likely to be bound up with moral judgements: ‘This is wrong’. One factor which more easily permits the judgement of extreme ‘wrong’ in this context, is the availability of an alternative set of meanings in the wider social world surrounding the ritual abuse cult. What solidifies this understanding of some deaths as ‘wrong’ is an active, if not always wholesale, rejection of the belief system of ritual abuse within which they took place. In other words, this ‘threat’ to taken for granted meanings was one which some of the ritual abuse survivors I interviewed appeared to have transformed into an ‘opportunity’ to escape the discourse of their abusers.
The occult beliefs attached to the ritual abuses reported by survivors apparently operated to make some deaths more ‘meaning-full’ than others. The reports of survivors suggest that multiple meanings can be generated in relation to different deaths and that certain types of death — those most marginal to the ritual system and those most emotionally and physically personal — may serve most readily to allow oppositional meanings to be generated.
Ritual abuse occurs in opposition to, but also inside and continuous with, the societies of late modernity. Understanding this is crucial to making sense of survivors’ lives. The illegal international markets in pornography, drugs and child abuse with which ritual abusers are involved are twentieth-century creations. In addition, it can be argued that the very machinery of modernity: the increased mobility, anonymity and privacy of the individual, the separation of work, family and leisure (at least for a large number of middle class men), the hiding away of death and violence from everyday life may all enable abusive and secretive groups to thrive. At the same time, those practising ritual abuse form rigid, hierarchical, patriarchal secret societies which are violently opposed to many aspects of late modernity — most particularly of course to any advances towards the emancipation of women and children.
Types of death
The survivors I interviewed described lives saturated with the fear of death. There were three main types of death which survivors reported actually witnessing or being involved in. I have categorized these deaths as: incidental, personal and ritual, and will explore the significance accorded to each in survivors’ accounts. It is interesting that, with the exception of occasions when an interviewee related the sacrifice of her own baby, the least emphasized of the three were deaths which had taken place in a ritual context. This is not to say that other ceremonial killings were not spoken of, but these tended to be generalized as ‘what sometimes happened at ceremonies’. The deaths discussed in most detail were those which were ‘personally meaningful’, all of which had in various ways resulted from abuse but either had no ritual element or were related in ways which downplayed the ritual context.
Certain experiences of death appeared to provide the survivors I interviewed with ‘moral opportunities’, and some used memories of particular deaths as personal ‘fables’ through which to explore the moral meanings of the world of their childhood.
Incidental deaths
It would not be appropriate to call the deaths I want to discuss first ‘accidental’, for it suggests a mistake, something to be regretted. Rather these deaths were consequences (not always intended) of abuse, and appeared to have been inconsequential to those who caused them. They are examples of marginal deaths, the deaths of people that ‘did not count’, except to the women who remembered and chose to ‘re-count’ them as part of their own life stories. None of these were ritual killings, they were not punishments, they were not rendered to survivors as meaningful in any way. The intention of the actions of the perpetrators was their own ‘pleasure’; that they cost a person their life was incidental.
These ‘chaotic’, undisciplined and inadvertent deaths best illustrate the constant presence of the fear of death in survivors’ lives. These were often deaths which no amount of obedience or self-control could ensure protection against; deaths in which interviewees expressed their identification with the victim whose place they could so easily have occupied. Elizabeth reflecting on the murder of a young man she witnessed as a teenager expresses this as follows:
Seeing people killed, particularly this young man, and thinking: ‘well what did he do that we’re not doing all the time. What’s different about what happened that time than when I’m getting raped’. And when I saw Schindler’s List it was something that was said to the housekeeper: ‘You will always be afraid of death — it was the chap that was her boss — that he might kill you because you don’t know why he kills people. He kills people at random’. And that’s what it was like in the cult. People were killed at random, it seemed to a child and even a teenager, no rhyme or reason why someone would suddenly be killed. It was their turn. So you never knew, what was it you might do that meant next year you’ll be dead. And I grew up with that. I lived my whole life with that fear … Like what is it you have to do that makes people kill you? And so I always had to be really, really good. Really well behaved, never put a foot out of line, never say what you want, never say: ‘I don’t like that, I don’t like you doing that’, because they could kill you.
Despite the equally evident randomness of a child’s death remembered by Kate, her account still emphasizes the importance of self-control in guaranteeing her own safety. Kate insists the little girl’s death was an aberration, if only she had obeyed the rules and not cried out it would never have happened. Kate knew not to cry, she believed her own survival depended on it, this was therefore the sort of death she thought she could avoid for herself.
She was at a ceremony with her father and I was with mine. Afterwards…I don’t know where her father went…but there was me and my dad and a couple of other men and the girl. I know that one man was having sex with me, one man in the kitchen, and my dad was having sex with this little girl and she was crying. And if that’s one rule that you learn very early on is you do not cry. Come hell or high water don’t cry. You weren’t allowed to, if we did we were punished. And my father got very angry with her and I remember him throwing her against the wall, and picking her up and really shouting at her telling her not to cry. He took one of the knives off the wall, cos there were racks, and he stabbed her and took her off down to one of the back rooms and I had to go and look after her. I was told to stop the bleeding and I couldn’t. She was still crying and I remember saying to her: ‘Don’t cry, you mustn’t cry’, because I was so frightened they’d come back in the room and do something more. And in the end she stopped crying. At the time I thought ‘O, good, she listened to me, wonderful’. Looking back on it I realize she just went unconscious and she basically bled to death. I remember covering her in a green towel, and this man just coming in and picking her up. Literally carrying her out under one arm. And I never saw her again. I was left with this massive pool of blood. That was it.
The story emphasizes the lack of significance that Kate’s father, and those with him, attached to a child’s death. Kate’s indignation falls on the way the girl was carried away under some man’s arm as if she was just something to be disposed of. By contrast, Kate herself had covered the body with a green towel and a moral universe yawns between the two actions. This death mattered to someone, and allowed Kate to identify a clear distinction between her abusers and herself. It seems it was the very meaninglessness of the death that allowed space for the creation of meaning.
It seems to me that these incidental deaths were available for the inscription of meaning by survivors because they were so meaningless. Ritual sacrifices seem to have been far harder to re-write, being as it were already full to the brim with the significance of an occult cosmology and a set of ritual practices. Survivors comment on the attention to detail in the rituals they participated in, the rehearsals, detailed organization and participants’ dismay at the smallest variation or mistake. Such meaning-full deaths leave little room for ontological insecurities, which, it seems, were far more likely to creep in by the back door of incidental deaths.
These incidental deaths were those of strangers, but some survivors also suffered the deaths of significant others. Emotional attachments within ritual abuse groups were described as extremely rare. Children often didn’t know each other’s names, and self-isolation was a survival strategy commonly embraced in the face of suffering over which they had no control. Personal deaths were therefore most often the deaths of women’s own babies.
The death of one’s own baby
Although pregnancies of various duration had been numerous in the lives of most of the survivors I interviewed, five women highlighted one birth-and-death as particularly significant. Invariably this pregnancy ran to term or was only induced only a little prematurely.
The focus of much child death discourse is the grieving mother. News, soap operas and self help guides all emphasize the naturalness of a mother’s grief and the necessity of expressing it. But at the same time the ‘grief’ expresses the ‘mother’, confirms her goodness, her proper affections, her sisterhood with other women and her place within humanity.
This is the discursive context into which survivors of ritual abuse must speak their stories of repeated births followed swiftly by sacrificial deaths. Such stories do not readily fit the available discourses of birth and death, contradicting what we ‘know’ they are met with widespread disbelief. However, accounts must still be constructed of extreme as of mundane aspects of our experience and survivors have little choice but to borrow what they can from available accounts of infant death, in order to make sense of their experiences to themselves as well as to communicate them to others. Ambiguity is not ironed out in this process: those shaping their experiences to fit what can be said, may also indicate an incomplete ‘fit’. Clues about different versions are present in those told.
The accounts considered here suggest that it is through the experience of pregnancy and childbirth that ritually abused girls may come to think about themselves as women, and therefore as members of a category of persons continuous with others outside the cult. At the same time, it is within these experiences that a ‘mother’ is born — a person subject to the discourses of maternity.
The women who attached particular importance in their life to the loss of a single late-term baby, described these experiences as having helped them get away from their abusers, enabling them to define themselves as different to those who had abused them, and providing a focus for their anger and pain. These babies were invariably named by their mothers, an action that may have been informed by two different strands of thought. First, within the world of ritual abuse survivors describe names and naming as significant and powerful, to give a dead baby a ‘secret’ name is therefore a subversive act. Second, in contemporary discourses of bereavement, naming even a stillborn baby is considered a ‘healthy’ thing to do. According individual identity to the baby is meant to facilitate the expression of grief, rendering the loss more real.
Lynn described the birth and death of her baby daughter as the pivotal event in her escape from her abusers. Her account, which I will quote at length, also makes clear her abusers deliberate encouragement of her attachment to the child:
I had three other children, at various stages I should add. […] The third one was a full term pregnancy. Funny enough, it was about the time I ran away each time, so I think there was a deep inner knowing of what was going on. Even if I didn’t want to really announce it to myself, I believe I knew.[…]
And what happened to this was that she was induced and she was born within a few hours. And she was a normal healthy little baby girl.[…] And when they brought her back and I was holding her, there was a lot of “Would you like to keep her?” and “Was I worthy of keeping her?” I had to prove that I was worthy of keeping her and look after her. And if I promised to be good, and really, really try, they would give me a chance, and these were things I would have to do. And that was OK, and I agreed to all those things and I believed them. You know, we have a deep-rooted need to be loved, but we also have a deep-rooted need to give it back too, and I believe that this is what was happening here. I really wanted, more than anything, not just love this baby but look after her.[…] Throughout that whole week, a lot of abusive things happened. […]And there were other things going on, preparations, things if I had wanted to I could have seen, the things I was making myself not see. Because I believed I was protected then. And I….between, as I would go back and in this bedroom, there she was, and what they’d done is they’d converted the bottom drawer for a sideboard into her bed and I would take her out and love her and nurse her and I would bath and clean her and feed her. And for the first time in my life, I really believed it was going to be OK.
[…] I was encouraged by other people. “Yes, you really love her, don’t you?” and “Oh, look at the way she looks at you”. And so there was a lot of…and there was a relationship growing there. And I suppose some people would say that’s a natural bonding going on there, but it was there nevertheless.[…] And this continued the whole week till Friday. Then on the Friday they came and removed her and I think I knew then[…] And I was drugged, there was a lot of abuse around that. On the Saturday, I was picked up and […] I was taken to a church, an old church, and because its my baby, I was supposed to have the honour, only I think I was getting really rebellious […]… there was my mother and father at the altar, they were high priest and priestess, and my little girl. […] At the end of it, what was left of my little girl was put in my arms and I was taken out and made to lay her in a grave, and it was shortly after that I decided this…and that was how I got out. Her name is Melanie and I can share that. I find it really hard to… […]
And anyway that night she died, and I think a huge piece of me died with her, and yet she gave me the right to be free. That seems kind of hard, that my child died, but if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t be here…
Tell me why.
After that night; I’m pretty certain that they didn’t care whether I died or not that night. That in many ways they knew I’d become a danger to them. And I think they thought: ‘well if she dies during this we’ll find a way of explaining it, and if not…’. I was very badly beaten that night, and tortured. And although I did survive it, I survived it in a place that told me I had to run.[…] But also my dad had started saying things, and my mum mentioned like. One of the girls in our group had committed suicide about a year and a half before this by jumping in front of a moving train. She kept saying that if I did that it would be all over, all over in minutes, never know a thing about it. My mum put loads of pills by the side of my bed and said: ‘well you can take them if you want, you’ll never wake up again, it’ll never happen again’. […]
There was so much going on at home. Lots of morbid, sick stuff about where Melanie was. And they would talk about her dying moments of agony. Real sick, sick stuff. So I actually just ran. I knew that I’d reached my limits with them, that if I didn’t run they would eventually get me to kill myself.
Lynn refers to ‘a deep inner knowing’ in relation to her pregnancies and the impending horror they signified. This idea of knowledge, or of an alternative moral order, being located in the body, a secret opposition that ‘grew inside me’, appears in more than one interview. Her baby, once born, represents this knowledge of otherness in external form. Melanie is described as a ‘normal, healthy little baby girl’. She is the ‘normal’, ‘natural’ outsider to the world of ritual abuse.
Lynn was ‘tricked’ into allowing herself to love her baby. On the other hand she acknowledges that she allowed herself to believe in the possibility of ‘this time being different’. She refers to the fact that some people would interpret her attachment to the baby as a natural bonding. In this way she connects her story to a dominant model of motherhood, without actually claiming this as true for herself. The details she selects emphasize both the connection and difference between her experience and that of ‘ordinary’ mothers. The baby’s cot is a bureau drawer, and it is the remains of the little girl which are put into the mother’s arms.
It is Melanie’s death which Lynn describes as the springboard for her bid for freedom. However, her actual description of her parent’s nudging her towards suicide in the weeks after the birth suggests a more complex picture. It is not so much moral outrage at the murder of her baby that inspires Lynn’s escape, but her consciousness of the nearness of her own death. This in no way undermines the symbolic importance attached to Melanie, or her role in Lynn’s sense of herself as a mother. It is more that clues about different versions are visible in the account. There are two meaning systems present in Lynn’s report. The meaning of Melanie’s birth and death are partially understood through contemporary discourses of motherhood and bereavement, but they are also acknowledged to have been highly meaningful ritual events within the cult. Lynn weaves her personally significant account between these, even though the ‘normal’ discourse clearly dominates. The survivors I interviewed did not much emphasize that the deaths of their infants had occurred within a meaning system they had rejected. Lynn did say a little about this, but the distancing devices she uses, and the lack of detail, contrast sharply with the vivid accounts of her own experience. In the context of describing an earlier infant’s death, she reports:
The ceremony was actually…it was about the 3 stages of giving your body…you know, giving your body, somebody else’s body and then your soul. So it’s like the 3 stages, so giving Melanie apparently was giving my soul. Have to say it probably felt like my soul at that age.
But this was much more about giving your body, somebody else’s body, feeling much more incriminated, like you’d deliberately done this. You’d had this child that wasn’t… you’d only carried it for whoever the deity was, and they were claiming it back. So bizarre some of the things that they say.
From sentence to sentence the shifts between meaning systems are apparent. In written form, the ironic tone is lost but the distancing comments: ‘Have to say it probably felt like my soul at that age’, and ‘So bizarre some of the things that they say’, are evident. In this account, the apparently meaningless cruelty of encouraging Lynn to love her baby is connected to the significance of the ritual as ‘giving one’s soul’. These other partially hidden (occult) meanings are present nonetheless.
If Lynn saw Melanie’s death as a ‘last straw’ experience, Sinead describes the death of her baby as an epiphany:
When I decided I didn’t want to do this any more it was I suppose for selfish reasons… which was when they killed Bethany. I decided I didn’t want anything to do with this any more…You know….I didn’t want this child, and then when I had this child, I couldn’t have this child. I didn’t want it, I was made to have it. Then when I had it, I wanted it and it was taken away. That was it. I’d had enough and I was going to wait my opportunity and I was going to get away from them. From that point on I could hear the cries of other kids. I could hear the fear and I knew what I was doing was wrong.[…]
I suppose in a way I was lucky that they didn’t let her live. […] But I think what hurt most was that they didn’t just kill her outright, they gutted her first while she was alive. It took ten minutes for her to die. And I had to hold her while they done it, and I was still bleeding and confused and hurting from the birth. Just watching her. She had masses and masses of jet-black hair, she was just perfect, not a mark on her. […] I remember her being born on this slab floor and picking her up. She was huddled up really tightly. My Mum just got the cord and halved it, cut it with a knife and tied it in a knot and that was it. I held her…And my Mum looking and saying: ‘She’s beautiful, perfect. My first grandchild’. And that was it. Next thing she just grabbed it by the neck and hauled her off me and held her up and everybody’s looking. Then she started howling, wailing and shivering. And she was dropped onto the slab and they started.
I just thought: ‘No’. […]
I was an awkward bitch though, from that day. I would not co-operate, I would not do my training, I would not listen. And that was what decided me to get out, I’d had enough. I ran away a number of times then, after her birth. Every opportunity I run….got found and brought back.[…]
There […] were times even up to a couple of months ago when I’d quite often think about it and get upset, but I resolved that by thinking that she was better off where she is. I mean I wouldn’t be out if she’d be alive anyway, I’m sure I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have left and they wouldn’t have let her go.
Sinead makes a direct connection between her experience of giving birth and seeing her baby killed, and her moral development. Again the connection is made through the body: her ears are opened to the cries of other kids with whom she has no direct connection. Again the baby’s natural, undamaged state is emphasized: ‘not a mark on her’.
Sinead believes herself ‘saved’ by her baby’s death in a different way to Lynn. A living child would have been a tie that she might not have been able to break. There is also an awareness in other ways of how ambiguous was her relation to motherhood: ‘I didn’t want it, they made me have it, then when I had it and wanted it, they took it off me’. Sinead was 19, at the time of her interview, Lynn was 43 and the mother of two grown up children, their relations to dominant discourses of maternity were therefore different in terms of both generation and their stage in the life course.
Not everyone I interviewed felt able to talk about experiences surrounding the death of a baby. For example Gene, at 18, began her interview by telling me: ‘I had a baby and it died…you know…and I don’t want to talk about what happened’. Kathleen, who found talking about the ritual aspects of her experience almost impossible — she ‘drifted off’, or dissociated, whenever she got close to discussing such things — was still able to tell me how she had made the death of her baby the basis of a highly symbolic action:
Well I know how they killed her. But when I go to talk about it all I can see is her. It’s because I was standing in front of her and I couldn’t do anything about it, and she was alive one minute and then she was dead. I saw her alive and I couldn’t stop her becoming dead. There just wasn’t anything I could do. […]
You know, my sister got married a couple of years ago and my parents put a family notice in the newspaper […] And I knew everyone in the family would get a copy of it, so I put an ‘In Memoriam’ in the same day for my daughter. And I thought they won’t know it, but everyone who keeps that is going to have the truth.
Kathleen, who couldn’t stop her baby ‘becoming dead’, attaches great significance to her memory and the truth of her abuse which it embodies. Another survivor I interviewed had arranged a memorial service for her baby. Such borrowings from the ‘normal’ world of death serve as both bridges to, and claims of, a different morality.
Ritual deaths
The three categories of incidental, personal and ritual deaths are not exclusive. As is evident in the above discussion of the deaths of infants, these most frequently occurred in a ritual context. However, the ritual element was faded out in these accounts, at the same time as the personal meaning was foregrounded. The ritual deaths I now turn to were discussed less frequently in interviews. In each, the interviewee was directly involved in the killing and the victim was an older child or adult. It is clear in each that the ritual context is important to survivors struggling with issues of personal responsibility. These are the deaths which it seems were most difficult to translate ‘between worlds’ being already over-interpreted, their meanings given by the rituals within which they had occurred. It is interesting that although religious and ritual aspects of their abuse were generally minimized in survivors’ life histories references to symbols, deities and ‘theological’ explanations were spoken of in this context. Each of these deaths was a human sacrifice, by definition something that can make no sense in profane terms. In addition, they represented individual ‘rites of passage’, a stage in the initiation of the speaker themselves. Inside such a framework individual moral responsibility is irrelevant, outside that framework it is everything. The fact that these are such ‘strange deaths’, without parallels in the surrounding society, also renders them less porous to alternative meanings. These facts need to be placed alongside two others: the ‘full personhood’ of the victim, represented by their age, and contrasted with the ‘potential personhood’ of babies and foetuses; and the survivors direct participation in the ritual death. It is these factors taken together which seemed to make these deaths the most difficult for survivors to discuss, and thereby incorporate within their life stories.
As an interviewee, Lynn was the most able and willing to talk about the ritual aspects of her experience. However, I think the following description illustrates the particular difficulties in relation to meaning and responsibility around a ritual death in which she was forced to participate.
This one’s really difficult […] I still to this day find it really hard to think that I held the knife. And I mean I’ve always found that extremely… I have to say the reason is that I’m talking about an 11-year-old person, an 11-year-old boy. There were two kids there and I was told I had to choose which one I was going to marry. I didn’t want to choose, and of course I was made to, and of course he dies. I was made to feel I had done that. I was one of them. I’d killed for Lucifer, which I’d done before but not an older person. But the thing is when it actually came to the ceremony, we’d had the marriage ceremony and all that: I was married to the boy who became Lucifer because he’d died. That was the whole point. Lucifer consumed his body cos he died. He was taking the role of Lucifer, they never told me he was going to die, and as Lucifer could take on any shape or form, or that’s what we were told anyway. So we were married and all the rest and he was placed on an upside down cross. Lots of other things happened (voice trails away.) And he was directly in front of me and er, my mother put the knife in my hand and said: “you know what to do”. I stood there and there was a lot of noise, I raised my arm and then just as I was about to pull away her arm came down on mine and pushed it in. I then, although I had my hand on it as it entered, I then pulled back and let go. I think it was because he in some way reacted, and she finished it. I’ve always found that extremely difficult…very…Like I didn’t know this boy, he’d never done me any harm…I’d seen him, but he was from another group in the same town, he’d been at our meetings sometimes. Very beautiful child too…And I was made to take parts of his remains (mumble) and they were brought back at another ceremony a week or 10 days later absolutely riddled with maggots and then we were made to eat them. Part of that is when the heart and the brain, parts like that, are riddled with maggots, that means that Lucifer is consuming them, then we eat it to show (voice trails away). Stupid, stupid stuff. It’s sort of like horoscopes in the newspaper, you can make them fit anything. Like Freud this stuff, you can make it fit anything, they’ve always got an answer, it’s so all consuming…. Like God, there’s always a reason even if we don’t understand it.
Through these ritual meanings, which Lynn can only describe now as this ‘stupid, stupid stuff’, (and which for the uninitiated she compares to Freud, God and horoscopes), the process of becoming ‘one of them’ is intended to take place. As ‘one of them’ such events are meaningful, as ‘not one of them’ they are appallingly senseless. It is interesting that in Lynn’s account the locus of resistance is the body. Her incomplete absorption into the world of ritual meaning is demonstrated by the parental hand which forced the knife.
Sinead’s description of her father’s death as a ‘voluntary sacrifice’ is distinctive because of the relationship between them. The contrast between her father’s ‘faith’ and her own disbelief is probably the clearest statement, in any interview, of the serious commitment to a different universe of meaning which ritual abuse may sometimes involve:
Then my Dad took ill in the September — just after my birthday. He had a bad heart and he’d had it from birth and he’d had several operations on this. And in the October he took quite ill and had a heart attack and went into hospital. He gradually picked up a bit but they said he would have to have a heart transplant. He would probably die anyway, he had a short life span owing to it.
The thing is…I think it’s every 17 years within a cult group they can have a voluntary sacrifice which gives them a lot of power, a lot more power than enforced or chosen sacrifices.
It was set for this date in November […] He was dressed in a white robe — which was often what was used for a sacrifice. But he wasn’t like…..Normally when somebody is being sacrificed they are drugged and spaced out, he wasn’t. He was himself, he’d refused drugs….which was going to mean he was going to scream….y’know […] He got to the altar and was lifted on it. And the robe was removed. And he had the marks on — they’re painted on — it’s the mark where… where you put the knife…where it’s been decided it will go.
[…]The athame and that was brought in, and it was his. But…and I thought: ‘There it goes, that’s it’. But it was taken away and mine was brought. And I knew then that he’d actually decided he wanted mine… he wanted my knife to be the one to have his blood on, and not his.
[…] I could see that he didn’t want to die. Once it had been done. And there was bugger all I could do about that. And at that point I didn’t want him to die.[…] Whatever the sod had done, once it had happened I didn’t want him to die — I didn’t want him to have died that way anyway.
Within the universe of ritual meanings such a voluntary sacrifice makes sense (even though I don’t expect there would have been a superfluity of applicants for this seventeenth year privilege). I think Sinead’s account clearly displays the tension between the ‘ritual meanings’ with which survivors are brought up, and the ‘abuse meanings’ through which they reinterpret their experiences. I do not mean to suggest that this is an entirely post-hoc re-interpretation, for the two meaning systems at least begin alongside each other in survivors lives.
Ritual deaths seem to me to be the half-hidden heart of ritual abuse, but within the discourses available to survivors to describe, categorize and make sense of their lives, these deaths are hard to place. If a culture of sexual and financial greed, incorporating a criminal lack of respect for the value of certain human lives, can ‘explain’ what I have termed incidental deaths; then enforced pregnancy and abortion can be seen as continuous with physical and sexual abuse — as something done to the body of the survivor — while the death of a baby can be felt as a personal maternal loss and a key to future freedom. However, the available discourses around the abuse of women and children based on an analysis of power and the pleasures of power (frequently through its sexualization), cannot fully incorporate these accounts of ritual death which stubbornly refuse to translate into late modern terms.
In discussing a series of ritual killings in Peru and Bolivia in the 1980s, Patrick Tierney has described the mix of deities and beliefs drawn from ancient Andean civilizations with the Satan of Christian derivation. In explaining the involvement of drug traffickers and mine-owners commissioning such killings and the shamans performing the rites, he argues that:
Although the perpetrators of these sacrifices are sincere in their faith that human sacrifice is the ultimate magic, the resulting violence is conducive to their illegal and immoral purposes. It continues because it works. (p.324)
It may be that in relation to the ritual killings described here this remains the most ‘modern’ explanation we can find: they bring power to those who control them — they continue because they work.
Conclusion
Survivors of ritual abuse have the kind of intimate knowledge of death that is normally reserved for medics and funeral directors. Like occupants of those professions, they must select from many such contacts with death those which are of personal significance.
I am reminded again of my mother, who was a fever nurse in an isolation hospital in the 1930s. She nursed dozens of children who died of diphtheria, scarlet and rheumatic fevers, whooping cough and smallpox, but the story she returns to regularly is that of a little boy who died on Christmas Eve, having refused to have his presents early because he didn’t want Santa to have to make a special trip. This death was the occasion of one of my mother’s, not infrequent, fallings out with God, but it also stands for all the other deaths she witnessed as a young woman. Through this story she expresses her own helplessness and rage at the pre-antibiotics world, a world of dirt, disease and poverty I have never known. The survivors who shared their life stories with me were also trying to find stories that might enable me to glimpse the alien world they had inhabited.
Note
[1] Sinead’ is Sara Scott’s now adult foster daughter, who was included among the women interviewed at her own request.↩
Sara Scott’s book, The Politics and Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief, will be published later this year by Open University Press.