RELIGION : SATANISM : Scholars Find No Evidence of Spreading Occult Cults

Attempting to exorcise a “collective hysteria” haunting American parents, sociologists meeting here contend that there is “not a shred of evidence” that the small number of satanic cults in this country is significant or spreading.

“Evidence disintegrates as close examination occurs,” said David Bromley of Virginia Commonwealth University at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, which ends today.

Bromley and three other panelists blamed growing public anxiety over satanism on news reports of ritual killings and blood-drinking cults--often given greater credence by overzealous police investigators--as well as to rumors, fundamentalist literature and teen-agers’ use of symbols.

Some conservative Christians have condemned Halloween observances in recent years as encouraging youthful interest in the occult. That alarm may have been heightened this year by proliferating church seminars on satanism and books such as one by an evangelist who claimed that “hundreds” of church-like satanic groups exist.

The October issues of magazines published by Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, two influential broadcasters on the Christian right, featured articles alerting parents to the wiles of satanism. Readers were advised to look for pentagram tattoos; “NATAS” (Satan spelled backwards) and other cryptic writing in their childrens’ notebooks; altars and animal bones in their bedrooms, or sudden secretive behavior.

The satanic scare “fits neatly with the fundamentalist belief structure” and comes at a time when people are looking for ways to explain disturbing, antisocial behavior, said panelist James Richardson of the University of Nevada at Reno.

The panel was challenged by a psychologist, Noemi P. Mattis, who said she has 14 patients in her care in Salt Lake City who claim they are “survivors” of family-based satanic cults in which women were expected to be “breeders” of babies to be sacrificed.

Mattis said colleagues in psychology have reported hundreds of similar cases at professional meetings.

“I don’t believe in Satan, but I do believe in people who do things in the name of Satan,” she said.

A report issued last month by a task force of the Los Angeles County Commission for Women links “ritual abuse” to satanist cult activity. Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary has had a class for three years--”Demonology and Mental Illness”--studying reports of satanic involvement.

The sociologists agreed that increased talk of satanic practices will create a problem in itself--and they suggested that it has become faddish for patients in therapy to claim that they were once part of a satanist cult.

“But beyond several informal satanic groups and two or three serial killers such as Richard Ramirez who call themselves satanists, the reality of a satanist movement fades out quickly,” said J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara.

Melton said that the Church of Satan founded in San Francisco by Anton LaVey in 1966 attracted a lot of publicity over the years but that “at its height it never exceeded a few thousand members.”

Author of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, Melton said that a total of eight small satanic churches existed nationwide in 1974 but that only two continued into the 1980s.

Melton contended that cases of fascination with satanic symbols or imagery have re-emerged because some Christian literature “supplies the information.”

But Melton said news reports of killings within allegedly satanic groups often turn out to have drugs, love triangles or other primary reasons for the crimes.

Reporting on a case study he made 15 years ago, University of Montana sociologist Robert Balch said the gruesome murder of a woman in Missoula, Mont., in 1974 was attributed in recurring rumors by residents to unknown satanists. The reported discovery of mutilated animal bodies kept the stories alive for two years. A second murder in 1976 led to the killer, a “loner” who was intrigued by weapons and the movie character Conan the Barbarian, Balch said.

As for clinical therapy cases in which women patients unacquainted with one another tell essentially the same stories of being “breeders” for satanic cults, the panelists compared that phenomenon to the strikingly similar stories among people who claim that they were once abducted by aliens from outer space. “If you believe the UFO stories, you believe the breeder stories,” Melton contended.

Bromley said that researchers like himself are told that corroborated evidence of satanic groups is lacking “because they are so diabolically secret they can’t be found, and that they have such a powerful hold over people that no one can leave and tell about it.”