Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

176 Mind Control, Satanic
are spirits and sons of God; that they see God
dimly and are around his throne praising him;
that seven particularly are before the throne; that
the good angels are in a kind of order, which
persists among the fallen; that the fallen can do
nothing without God’s permission, and that the
elect are impassible, although they do not look
into the secrets of God, so that in Paradise Lost
God must instruct even Michael before he can
know the future.
In Book 1 of Christian Doctrine, Milton finds
that good angels are ministering agents around the
throne of God, and that their principal office is
praising God, and presiding over particular areas.
Sometimes they are divine messengers, and,
although they have remarkable intelligence, they
are not omniscient. In both works Milton asserts,
against the majority of Protestant opinion, that by
the name Michael the Bible signifies not Christ
but the first of angels, and against a majority of all
denominations that the angels were created long
before the world. In contrast to almost all of his
contemporaries, Milton thought that hell was a
local place outside the universe, and that elect
angels stand by their own strength, not by a
compulsive grace.
In Paradise Lost, however, Milton presented
some items that the poem did not share with the
Christian Doctrine, such as some views that he
could not derive directly from the Bible, although
they had wide acceptance among pious angelologists:
devils can suffer physical pain and are in a
sense always in hell; they were the deities of
heathendom; God created men to repopulate
heaven after the fall of angels; Satan tempted Eve
from the mouth of the possessed snake; angels,
good or evil, know the world by intuition rather
than by discourse, and can control the humors in
men’s bodies to produce dreams and visions.
In Paradise Lost, Milton rejects the ancient
view that good angels were corrupted by the
beauty of women. He argued that the sons of God
were never involved with women, because the love
they knew was not libidinous. Also, in Paradise
Lost, Milton did not commit himself on the three
principal angelological controversies between
Protestants and Catholics, that is to say those on
the worship of angels, the personal guardian, and
the Dionysian orders, although his personal views
were probably Protestant.
Milton’s angels and demons are not merely epic
machinery, but rather characters and agents in the
justification of God’s ways to men, and in the exploration
of the causes and effects of the Fall. Milton
follows an ancient tradition common to the great
Alexandrian school of Christian philosophy, according
to which the universe is full of incarnate spirits
who are corporeal although not densely corporeal.
They are seen only by clairvoyant eyes. In accordance
with that ancient tradition, Milton’s angels
and demons really do eat and excrete, although not
in our crass way. They are not disembodied spirits,
although their embodiment is so much finer than
ours that they might seem to us to be so.
See also Dante Alighieri; Demons
For Further Reading:
Hastings, James, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion and
Ethics. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1930.
MacGregor, Geddes. Angels. Ministers of Grace. New
York: Paragon House Publishers, 1988.
Swain, Kathleen M. Before and After the Fall.
Contrasting Modes in Paradise Lost. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
West, Robert H. Milton and the Angels. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1955.
Mind Control, Satanic
During the heyday of the Satanic ritual abuse
scare, therapists and others supporting the notion
of widespread ritual abuse by secret Satanic cults
relied heavily on recovered memory therapy
(RMT) for providing them with their best
evidence for the existence of a Satanic conspiracy.
To explain why the supposed victims had forgotten
their abuse, such therapists proposed a diagnosis
of multiple personality disorder (also known
as dissociative identity disorder). The disorder
had, according to this school of thought, been artificially
induced by cult “programming” so that
victims could be forced to participate in dark
rituals without later informing the authorities. In
other words, like the schizoid state that was the
goal of CIA mind-control programs like MK-
Ultra, one or more dissociated subpersonalities
could theoretically be induced in subjects. Ideally,
subjects were normally unaware of these subper-