Here's to My Sweet Satan by George Case

Author:George Case
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linden Publishing
Published: 2016-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

6

Devil in the Flesh

Yes, the demons are real. I saw them, I felt their presence, and I heard them.

—David Berkowitz

In recent years there has been a rapidly spreading interest in this country in the occult, mysticism, ‘black magic,’ witchcraft and the worship of ‘the Satanic majesty,’” related a New York Times article of July 6, 1971. “With California taking the lead, the interest, or obsession, has spread to colleges, hippie gathering places and even to suburban housewives.”1 Datelined from a small New Jersey community, the report was titled “‘Satan Cult,’ Death, Drugs Jolt Quiet Vineland, NJ.” It was there that the body of twenty-year-old Michael Newell had been found bound and submerged in a local pond. According to his alleged killers, Newell had belonged to an underground satanic group and wanted to die a violent death, which they had provided for him. His goal, they claimed, was to enter the afterlife and assume command of forty leagues of demons. “Close to three centuries after the hanging of the witches of Salem,” noted the newspaper, “witches seem to be turning up all over—in Brooklyn, in Nassau County, New York, and here in Vineland.”2

The Times story had accurately judged the pervasiveness of the occult in the era. For millions of people, young and old, rural and urban, the occult was entertainment enjoyed through music, books, movies, television, games, and what-if conversations in classrooms, workplaces, and private homes. It was a vicarious thrill. But for millions of others the occult was something to be actively practiced, even if they did not always consider their practices occult at all. In the latter half of the sixties and throughout the seventies a wide swath of the Western populace took up the occult as a way of life, some of it in forms so mild it would eventually be incorporated into conventional medicine and psychology, and elsewhere in extreme manifestations that, together with the entire onslaught of occult pop culture and ephemera, would awake a sleeping giant of political and religious reaction that has not yet been stilled. Sometimes the occult was a means to live. For Michael Newell of New Jersey and many others, it turned out to be a means to die.

Other influential institutions besides the New York Times had taken notice of the occult. On November 15, 1972, an address by Pope Paul VI, “Confronting the Devil’s Power,” examined diabolism from the highest office of the Catholic Church. “What are the Church’s greatest needs at the present time?” asked the Pontiff. “Don’t be surprised at Our answer and don’t write it off as simplistic or even superstitious: one of the Church’s greatest needs is to be defended against the evil we call the Devil . . . . Sin in its turn becomes the occasion and the effect of interference in us and our work by a dark, hostile agent, the Devil . . . . This matter of the Devil and of the influence he can exert on individuals as well as

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