Satanic baby-eating and other holiday notes

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To celebrate the holiday season and the impending triumph of Theocratic Fundamentalism, I thought I would discuss the ever-popular topic of Satanists who feast on the flesh of infants.

Dare ye scoff, heathen? Check out this report on Christianity.com (one of the more respectable web sites of our new fundamentalist rulers), which offers first-hand testimony by a former Satanist called "Sharon":

"I saw babies be killed all the time," Sharon continues. "When I was 17, I was impregnated by the high priest and made to carry his child. And then they took this child from me and I saw this baby be sacrificed before my eyes and was made to eat a part of her heart. They took my baby out of me, and I heard the infant cry, and even though I was only 17, my maternal instincts reached out for that little crying baby. And the next thing I know, they had placed that baby on like an altar -- really it was a pulpit -- and then my father took his fist and crushed her skull and at the same time was removing her heart. And then they took off body parts. They took her little arms and lifted up my baby. They chopped off her head and had this infant dangling without a chest cavity in front of my face to terrorize me and say, `This is what's going to happen to you. This is what's going to happen to your sister.' So this stuff is real."

Those debunkers who refuse to face this ghastly truth may be interested to learn the origin of the baby-eating accusation. The very first people in history to be on the receiving end of such rumors were...

...the early Christians.

So, at least, states Norman Cohn in his excellent text on the origins of the witch persecutions, Europe's Inner Demons.

Back in the old, old days, before Constantine decriminalized the Christian religion, most of the faithful did not meet openly in churches. Instead, they gathered together for what were, in essence, pot-luck dinners. These meals were called "Agape" feasts. During these secret gatherings, the officiating priest would celebrate the eucharist -- drink the wine, chew the wafer, you know the drill.

Word on the Roman street had it that the Christians used these covert meetings to "eat the flesh of the Son of Man." In Greek, this phrase sounded indistinguishable from "eat the flesh of the son of A man."

The Christians tried to explain the technical meaning of the phrase, but their explanations sounded like ex post facto rationalizations. All the best people in the empire, including the "good" emperor Marcus Aurelius, became convinced that Christians were baby-eaters.

In desperation, the Christians countered that they were innocent of all such practices -- but that those pesky Gnostic heretics probably were not. You want to meet some baby-eaters? Check out those nasty old Carpocratians. Those people also have ritual sex. Sex! Without even being married! They're capable of anything!

Then as now, Christians had a rather loose interpretation of the commandment forbidding false accusation. From that day to this, the charge of infanticide has perfumed all reports of "heretical" practice circulating within the Christian community.

In the early 19th century, a German scholar dug up the old anti-Christian cannibalism charges which had circulated in the days of Marcus Aurelius. This scholar published a book which took the accusations at face value. The work excited various advanced thinkers of that era (Marx was taken in by its argument for a brief time), until subsequent scholarship established the truth about early Christian dietary practices.

But in the eldritch realms of modern fundamentalism, neither scholarship nor evidence counts for much. So our evangelical friends will continue to circulate reports similar to the lovely anecdote relayed to us by "Sharon."

Some of you may now be wondering about my own religious beliefs, and perhaps my own dining habits. I usually do not speak openly of my own ideas, which are vague, contradictory, and continually in flux. Suffice it to say, the above reference to early "heretics" reminded me of this rather Gnostic passage from Moby Dick, in which Ahab disses his Demiurgic Creator:

Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten: Certainly knowest not they beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, of, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical.

Happy holidays, everyone.