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Mind Control, Satanic 177
sonalities so that, should agents be caught and
interrogated, they could not reveal their true
missions. The idea was that an alternate subpersonality,
which was programmed to follow the
dictates of the programmer, could be triggered by
certain key words or other cues implanted in the
agent by posthypnotic suggestion.
For believers in Satanic ritual abuse, the MK-
Ultra scenario explained, for instance, why the
women who claimed to have been “breeders” for
babies sacrificed by Satanic cults could have
performed this function while apparently leading
ordinary, even innocuous lifestyles. This exotic
theory was invoked, at least implicitly, by Satanic
ritual abuse advocates, despite the fact that the CIA
was apparently never successful in inducing such
states in its experimental subjects. The mindcontrol
hypothesis explained how the victims could
have forgotten the abuse that RMT supposedly
recovered. While on the one hand ritual abuse
advocates relied upon MK-Ultra-type notions, on
the other hand they drew from popular stereotypes
about “cult” brainwashing/mind control. For
example, the Los Angeles County Task Force on
Ritual Abuse described Satanic cult brainwashing as
follows: “Mind control is the cornerstone of ritual
abuse, the key element in the subjugation and
silencing of its victims. Victims of ritual abuse are
subjected to a rigorously applied system of mind
control designed to rob them of their sense of free
will and to impose upon them the will of the cult
and its leaders.” This characterization makes
Satanic programming appear less a form of CIA
mind control and more a subcategory of the kind of
brainwashing that the popular press has attributed
to Moonies, Hare Krishnas, and others. This makes
social-scientific analyses of “cult”mind control relevant
to the issue of Satanic programming.
Since the mid-1970s, mainstream scholars—
particularly sociologists of religion—have been
steadily churning out studies directly relevant to
the cult controversy. With respect to the brainwashing
or mind control accusation that is at the
core of the cult stereotype, the operative question
that social scientists asked was: How does one
distinguish “cult” brainwashing from other forms
of social influence—like advertising, military
training, or even the normal socialization routines
of the public schools Some anticultists theorized
that “cult” members were trapped in a kind of
ongoing, quasi-hypnotic state, while others
asserted that the ability of “cult” members to
process certain kinds of information had
“snapped.” The problem with these and similar
theories is that if cultic influences actually overrode
the brain’s ability to logically process information,
then individuals suffering from cultic
influences should perform poorly on I.Q. tests, or,
at the very least, should manifest pathological
symptoms when they take standardized tests of
mental health—and when tested, they do not.
In the face of many scholarly studies debunking
cult mind control, social scientists asked the
further questions of: Given the lack of empirical
support, where did the brainwashing notion originate
And, What was the real nature of the conflict
that the “cult” stereotype obfuscated The generally
accepted conclusion of sociologists (as analyzed,
for example, in David Bromley and Anson Shupe’s
book-length study, Strange Gods: The Great
American Cult Scare) was that the principal source
of the controversy was a parent-child conflict in
which parents failed to understand the religious
choices of their adult children, and attempted to
reassert parental control by marshaling the forces
of public opinion against the religious bodies to
which their offspring had converted.
This core conflict was then exacerbated by an
irresponsible mass media less interested in accuracy
than in printing exciting stories about weird
cults that trapped their members and kept them in
psychological bondage with exotic techniques of
“mind control.” Also, once an industry was established
that generated enormous profits through
the “rescue” of entrapped “cult” members
(“deprogramming”), special interest groups were
created that had a vested interest in promoting the
most negative stereotypes of alternative religions.
In the case of Satanic ritual abuse, however, the
issue was not that parents were upset because their
children had run off to worship the Devil. Rather,
accusations about Satanic cults sacrificing and ritually
abusing individuals took hold in the conservative
Christian subculture—a subsection of the larger
population that believed in the real existence of a
supernatural being corresponding to the traditional