Sympathy For The Devil:The Satanic Panic and Why it Refused to Go Away!

Is there a secret global network of powerful paedophiles who are kidnapping, raping, and killing children so that they can harvest their adrenochrome (a mythical elixir of life) so that they can remain forever youthful? Is the only person who can stop this horrific crime the former, and potential next, president Donald Trump? Is Trump the saviour of planet Earth?

 

Spoiler alert. No, no, and thrice no. I was back at The Bell in Whitechapel and I was back with the London Fortean Society to hear investigative journalist Dr Rosie Waterhouse talk about the above subject in 'From Satanic Panic to Pizzagate and QAnon' and if Rosie struggled at times (she had a cold and her voice was croaky but there were a few too many irrelevant digressions for my liking) then the talk itself, and the subject matter, was fascinating - and depressingly topical.

If not new. This is something that Dr Waterhouse has been investigating, on and off, for thirty-four years. She's watched something spread from a fringe, though very worrying, story into a global conspiracy theory. Dr Waterhouse came to the story in the early nineties following the 1990 publishing of the now widely discredited book Michelle Remembers in which patient Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder (whom she later married, hmmm) made lurid claims about how she had repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse and now, with the help of her shrink/husband, was able to access those memories.

It was a misery memoir based entirely on lies but it made Pazder and Smith a lot of money and set into a motion a chain of events which is still snowballing today. Christian cranks, 'cult cops', tabloid - and broadsheet - newspapers, and well meaning leftist social workers propagated the lies without question and by 1994 there was a widespread belief in North America and the UK that not only was Satanic ritual abuse happening but that it was widespread.

I remember the stories and the headlines of the time. Certain places (Cleveland, Rochdale, the Orkney islands) were said to have particularly large paedophile rings. The British anthropologist Jean La Fontaine looked into these allegations of cannibalism, children being forced to eat faeces and drink urine, bestiality, forced abortion, and teenage girls being made into 'brood mares' to ensure a steady supply of babies and children to be abused - and in her 1994 report, The Extent and Nature of Organised Ritual Abuse, she came to the conclusion that there was no evidence for any of this whatsoever.

The Daily Mirror had already reported that children had been made to take part in Satanic orgies and been forced to eat human hearts at events where babies were put in microwave opens like jacket potatoes. Further research, however, proved that all the available 'evidence' was anecdotal. Dr Waterhouse, for her part, was initially convinced that these events were happening. Not least because the NSPCC were involved in a campaign against it.

But when she asked the NSPCC how they could be certain that Satanic ritual abuse was taking place, a spokesperson for the NSPCC said their 'evidence' had come from an organisation called the Evangelical Alliance who had, in turn, got all their information from unspecified sources in America. The eight girls who had 'confessed' to taking part in these Satanic orgies had all done so while undergoing a process to become born again Christians.

Pagan and occultist groups were horrified that they were being defamed as child abusers and got in touch with Dr Waterhouse and asked her to look further into this. Much like Jean La Fontaine, Dr Waterhouse found no evidence whatsoever so she wrote about what she saw as, and clearly was, a 'moral panic' in The Independent on Sunday (who, bravely in the climate of time, published it) before following up in several other publications.

Things moved on, the media and Dr Waterhouse herself focused their attentions elsewhere, but in 2016 a Satanic sex fantasist came forward with claims that former Prime Minister Edward Heath (who, by then, had been dead for over a decade) had abused them in a "forest ritual" that was, for unspecified reasons, lit by candlelight. Dr Waterhouse covered this story for Private Eye but this time it was clear that this was the work of a fevered mind or an opportunist rather than a true story.

But it showed that the 'Satanic panic' had not gone away. A few years later, the pandemic and its lockdowns - as well as the rise of social media - became a fertile breeding ground for soon to be turbocharged conspiracy theories. Disinformation and misinformation spread so quickly, and with such malice, that, in one instance, a child was kidnapped in Anglesey, ostensibly to protect them from their own parents who somebody had decided, with zero evidence, were Satanically abusing the child.

Boris Johnson was accused (he's done a lot of very bad things but he's not a paedo), the Queen was accused, the Queen Mother was accused, the rest of the Royal Family were accused (Prince Andrew isn't a Satanist) and all sorts of people were accused. As the American Republican party continues to remould itself into a Trumpian cult, it is now fairly standard procedure for them to accuse anyone they don't like, anyone they disagree with, or anyone who dares to question them of being a paedophile.

In the USA, the Satanic panic morphed first into Pizzagate and then into QAnon. Pizzagate sprang up from the hacking of Hillary Clinton's e-mails where the use of the word 'pizza' was said to be code for child sex abuse. Believers in this conspiracy had it that the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. was where the abuse was being carried out. The Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. does not, and never did, have a basement.

QAnon (which I've written about in some depth before - see here) tied up with Pizzagate with all manner of conspiracy theories to become an all-encompassing, ever evolving, belief system that explained the world to its followers. It played a major role in the January 6th Capitol Building insurrection and has been endorsed by Donald Trump who has reposted QAnon related materials over eight hundred times on his own Truth Social media platform.

At the same time the anti-democratic activist, openly fascist, richest man in the world Elon Musk is now illegally bribing people to vote for Donald Trump as well as having donated $75,000,000 to the Trump campaign. Will Musk get Trump back into the White House? We'll find out soon enough but one thing we know for certain is that Trump and Musk will continue to spread these damaging and dangerous lies and conspiracy theories and that people will get hurt and people will die because of that.

A Q&A session took in witch trials, Dungeons & Dragons, voodoo, The Wicker Man, David Icke, the Spanish Inquisition, The Cook Report, speaking in tongues, aliens, Elizabeth Loftus, Professor Chris French, spiritual warfare, backwards masking within music, The Sorcerer's Apprentice bookshop in Leeds, and ORCRO - Occult Response to the Christian Response to Occultism.

Thanks to Dewi, Sean, Paula, and Tim for joining me, thanks to David V Barrett for hosting, thanks to Pizza Union on City Road for tasty grub (paedo free too, though I didn't venture into the basement) beforehand, and thanks to Dr Rosie Waterhouse, The Bell, and the London Fortean Society for another memorable night. One I won't need access to a spurious therapist to recover my memories from.

 

 

Fleapit revisited:The Room Next Door.

"The snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" - The Dead, James Joyce

When successful author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) reconnects with her old friend and war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton) it's apparent from the off that Martha is ill. She's got cervical cancer and even though the new treatment programme she's undergoing is, for the most part, working, Martha knows it's merely buying her time. She's come not just to accept, but to embrace, the end of her life but she is quite clear that she doesn't want to suffer, or deteriorate, any more than she has to.

So she asks Ingrid for a very big favour. She asks Ingrid to go away with her to upstate New York, somewhere near Woodstock - somewhere very beautiful - but somewhere with no memories for Martha, and be with her while she waits for the right time to take her own life with a euthanasia pill she has illegally bought on the dark web. She doesn't need Ingrid to hold her hand or even to be in the room with her when she does it. She needs Ingrid to be in the property, in the next room. Martha doesn't want to die alone.

The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar's first English language film, based on Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through, sees the Spanish director in more sombre, more reflective, and less camp mood than admirers of his previous work may expect. Could it be that Almodovar, at the age of seventy-five, is beginning to consider his own mortality and that of those around him?

The film is emotional and yet warm at the same time, it's chilling at times but it's also tender while retaining what Graham Greene once called 'that splinter of ice in the heart'. The friendship between Ingrid and Martha is close, loving, and respectful but while Martha is open to Ingrid about her intentions and feelings, Ingrid - the author of fiction and thus, presumably, more prone to confection - keeps some things from Martha.

Not least the fact she is still in touch with Damien Cunningham (John Turturro) - a former partner of both women. Damien is kind and understanding yet rages with absolute, and understandable, nihilism at the climate crisis, at neoliberalism, and at the rise of the far right. All of which he believes will conspire to bring about the end of human life on the planet. 

Damien, like Ingrid and Martha, is a writer and the film is never shy of veering into literary or artistic waters. The friends discuss Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Edward Hopper, Leonora Carrington, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey as they look at either the beautiful Catskill adjacent forests or the incredible New York skyline.

There are good performances from Turtutto, Alessandro Nivola as a local police officer, Alex Hogh Andersen as the father of Martha's daughter Michelle (played by Swinton herself as an older woman), and Esther McGregor (Ewan's daughter) as the young Martha but, of course, The Room Next Door is really a double header and Moore and Swinton are both excellent. Neither of them off the screen for very long at any one time.

The dialogue (it's a dialogue heavy film) is brilliant, it's fascinating even it is perhaps almost too perfectly articulated and delivered to represent real human conversation, and as with the TV programme Mayflies (shown a couple of years back) we're left ponder issues of euthanasia (rather than suicide), assisted dying, death with dignity, and how we come to terms with our own mortality and the mortality of those we are closest too. We'll all have to face these things one day. It's remarkable how little serious forethought and preparation we put into it. The Room Next Door will help prime you for the inevitable and though you may shed a tear, you'll feel better for it afterwards.

Thanks to Sanda for getting me in for free on her Odeon card and, even more so, for joining me in watching this film.

 

I Found That Essence Rare:Boucher & Yukhnovich at The Wallace Collection.

Rococo!? To be honest, I've never really got on with it. Baroque's flighty little sister always seemed to be trying a bit too hard, wearing her mum's old clothes. The art, and the architecture, always seemed a bit too flowery, too twee, too biscuit tin to take seriously. I'd not even given it that much thought. I could probably name a handful of rococo artists (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard) although Wikipedia chucks in Tiepolo, David, and even Gainsborough, Goya, and Chardin into the mix so what do I know?

 

Francois Boucher - Pastroal with a Bagpipe Player (Historic title:La Couronne accordee au berger - The Crown awarded to the Shepherd) (1749)

Flora Yukhnovich is twenty-two years younger than me, however, and she has no problem with the rococo style. In fact she's very inspired by it and we should not hold the fact that Rishi Sunak hung one of her paintings in Downing Street against her. That's not her fault.

The Wallace Collection are currently hosting Flora Yukhnovich and Francois Boucher:The Language of the Rococo, a dialogue (if you like, Boucher's been dead for 254 years so he doesn't have much to add) between the two artists but not, as I may have hoped, much of a trip into the world of the rococo. It's one full room with two Boucher paintings and then you go up a ridiculously ornate flight of stairs where you can see some more Bouchers, hung at angles that make your neck hurt looking at them, and two Yukhnovich works inspired by them.

That's your lot. But it was free so I'm not complaining. It's always nice to have a look around the Wallace Collection even if most of the art and design is a little 'saccharine' for my personal taste. It is, however, one of the view places in London, in Britain even, in which you can really get your teeth into the baroque and the rococo. In fact, in Britain, rococo was originally known as 'French taste' and the closest any major British name got to working in rococo was with the furniture design of Thomas Chippendale.

Instead it thrived in French hotels, Italian chandeliers, Russian vases, and German churches that looked like giant wedding cakes. The most prominent artists were, of course, French and Francois Boucher was one of those. But I can't say his seductive bagpipe players (could there be a less seductive sound than that of a bagpipe?), flirty damsels, sheep, and dogs do much for  me. Even though they've been executed with no little panache.

Francois Boucher - Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain (Historical title:Les Raisins. Pensant-ils au raisin? - The Grapes. Are they thinking of the grape?) (1749)

Grapes, I will agree - especially in their fermented form, have played a historical, and still current, role in multiple seductions and that's not lost on Boucher who shows off his 'French taste' with a subtly erotic (for the time) painting of some young lovers getting juiced up. Of course, there's a dog and a sheep there because why the fuck not?

Boucher began his career in the 1720s, working as a printmaker making etchings of Watteau's drawings but a decade later he became enormously successful when he became Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour's chosen artist. The two paintings above were painted as chateau decorations for a civil engineer called Daniel-Charles Trudaine, a new name on me but apparently one of the primary developers of the present French road system and the instigator of the supposedly infamous Trudaine Atlas. 

Boucher liked to call his works 'pastoral', an idealised depiction of nature inhabited by 'bucolic lovers' and popularised by Renaissance artists like Titian and Giorgione and now, in our modern era, it is Flora Yukhnovich who has been handed the baton but I'm not totally convinced she's done all that much with it. The paintings are okay, they look nice, but they don't really make you feel anything and the supposed references to Walt Disney, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Barbie don't really stand up to any degree of scrutiny.

Her cornucopias of hazy, gauzy, flowers could be quite easily ignored but as they were part of the exhibition I'd come to see I thought I ought to take a look. I did - and I was left cold. Even if the colours, and the thought behind these works, comes from a warm place. The original era of the rococo came to an end when the French Revolution demanded more hard hitting art. We live, again, in a time of immense political turmoil and though, hopefully, heads will not be rolling any time soon this lightweight art just doesn't speak to me anymore. Escapism is good but change is better. Improbable bagpipe seduction aside, I'm handing this one to Francois Boucher.

Flora Yukhnovich - Folies De Bergere (2024)

Flora Yukhnoch - A World Of Pure Imagination (2024)

Beds Are Burning:Tracey Emin at The White Cube, Bermondsey.

Beds are pretty central to our life. Most of us will spend about a third of our life in bed, most of us were conceived in a bed, most of us were born in a bed, and most of us will die in a bed. I've been in my bed twice today already and I'll be in it again later too. Probably with a hot water bottle. That's how I'm rolling right now.

 

Beds are pretty central to art too - as well that might be as art, more often than not, aspires to an imitation of life and when you think of beds in art which artists come to mind? A Guardian feature from back in 2014 listed the ten 'best' beds in art and they include the beds in paintings by Van Gogh, Titian, Rauschenberg, Delacroix, Munch, and Piero della Francesca. The newest, and perhaps untidiest, bed in that list was Tracey Emin's unmaded My Bed from 1998.

A representation of Emin's bed from a time when she was suffering from depression, not getting out of said bed, and not eating. Though she was drinking and we're not talking Diet 7-Up. The bed caused a stir at the time and was eventually sold by Christie's for £2,546,500. I'd sell my bed for that.

Take Me to Heaven (2024)

Emin's current show, I Followed You To The End - at Bermondsey's rather lovely White Cube gallery, dispenses with actual beds but it's got a lot of representations of beds and, in many of them, it seems that there are even worse, more unpleasant, things going on in them than people getting drunk and sinking into depression. And getting drunk and sinking into depression isn't that pleasant, I can tell you from bitter personal experience.

Sometimes Emin's figure, herself one tends to presume with this artist, is alone and sometimes she has company. Sometimes that company does not look particularly welcome. The blood red tones, the hints of menstruation, the violent scrawls, and the almost wholly abstract expressionism in some works suggests not just a disturbed mind, but a disturbed body.

None of the works (except a video - Tears of Blood, yes it lives up to the name - at the end) have been given a title and that's a pity because Tracey Emin is good at titles (the titles I have included here were found on the White Cube's website several hours after attending the show). Her titles tend towards the emo but they do give pointers as to the meaning of her work. Without the titles, we're mostly in the dark but that's not necessarily a problem. It means you engage with the work more directly.

Which is not always comfortable and, one imagines, is not meant to be either. Even if the titles regularly reference love and, in one case, heaven. The online bumf suggests Emin is taking a journey through loss, love, mortality, and rebirth and that she's exploring life's "most profound and intimate moments, with renewed intensity".

Which, to be fair, she is. As ever with Emin the work is often so personal you'd need to have lived her life, or at least shared a significant part of it, to truly understand what she's getting at but it'd be a disingenuous observer who would say she's anything but brave in putting these brutally personal images and thoughts front and centre of her art.

Visceral, flirting with body horror in places, the paintings feature a lot of boobs, the odd growler, and, Emin's trademark, some fairly frank text. Not least in work which features the bold and stark graffiti style message, rendered in red of course, I DON'T WANT TO HAVE SEX BECAUSE MY BODY FEELS DEAD.

Another Place to Live (2024)

I Followed You to the End (2024)

I Followed you to the end (2024)

There are a few more comforting images amongst all the chaos. There's a cat by the side of one of the beds, the odd bedside cabinet or chest of drawers, and, in one image, there seems to be some pylons in the background. I love a pylon but, more so, it suggests Emin has actually got out of her not so lazy bed and ventured outside.

It's good for you, you know. There's a couple of bronze sculptures too. Ascension is an armless, headless torso that does have legs and the more startling, and much larger, I Followed You to the End, is similar but appears to show a woman, presumably Emin herself or part of her - there are bits missing, bent over in a position that Morrissey may once have called 'wide to receive'.

Lots of the works in the this show, as in Emin's wider work, show women at their most vulnerable but also, paradoxically, at their strongest. They show images of women that will make some men uncomfortable (I'll 'fess up, the sixty minute Tears of Blood video made me pretty uncomfortable).

Emin is on record with her admiration for Edvard Munch (there was even an exhibition that combined the two artists at the Royal Academy back in 2021) but I also saw, in this show, parallels with the late great Philip Guston. Guston famously, and controversially, turned his back on abstract expressionism to make figurative, politically satirical works and if Emin's paintings are only political with a lower case 'p' then they do seem to come from somewhere between Guston's abstract phase and his figurative era.

I Waited So Long - Too Long (2024)

The End of Love (2024)

There IS a lot of repetition in the show (I suppose getting into, and out of, bed is a fairly repetitive part of life but it says something that I was excited to see a painting that was set in a bath tub, rather than a bed) and the colour red becomes almost so dominant at points that you suspect you've accidentally wandered on to the set of a Dario Argento film (the blue of More Love Than I can Remember acted almost as a palate cleanser), and Emin's habit of randomly capitalising, or not, her titles remains frustrating, yet endearingly singular, for this orthographical stickler.

But none of those things are really a problem. When you enter Tracey Emin's world (and you don't have to pay for the privilege - I suspect both Emin and the White Cube are doing okay for money) you enter it on her terms and that's the best way to do it. If somebody is opening their soul, and - in a way - their body, to you you don't complain about how they do it. You accept it as it is. Tracey Emin's art may not always be the art we want but, just maybe, it's the art we need. I followed this show right to the end.

I Kept Crying (2024)

More Love Than I can Remember (2024)

 

Ascension (2024)

Imitation of Christ:Hockney and Piero at the National Gallery.

Each time I visit The National Gallery, usually for a temporary exhibition, I make a point of visiting some of the permanent collection and trying to broaden my art knowledge and this afternoon was no exception. In fact, I was so inspired by David Hockney's love and admiration for the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca that I ended up taking a deep dive into the works of fellow Renaissance artists.

 

 David Hockney - My Parents (1977)

Raphael, Titian, Mantegna, Palma Vecchio, Masaccio, El Greco. I could hardly get enough (though I did - Renaissance complacence is a very real thing as I discovered on a Tuscan holiday twenty years ago) but it's not those 'old masters' I'm hear to talk about now. It's David Hockney, Piero della Francesca and the National Gallery itself. Which is currently hosting the free Hockney and Piero:A Longer Look exhibition. There were pretty long queues to get in to the gallery but this room was not too crowded so I did, indeed, enjoy 'a longer look'.

The National is celebrating its 200th birthday this year and since it opened it has always worked with living artists, many of whom have sketched, taught, or exhibited within the collection. Living painters were consulted regarding new gallery acquisitions and access has been granted to artists to inspire their own creativity. In fact, until the 1940s the gallery was shut for two days week (except for paying customers - there's always the bottom line to consider) so that artists could enjoy a private view.

Since then, contemporary artists of their time have been involved in curating exhibitions and making works for special displays although this little show is something quite different. The newest works in it are, of course, the pair of Hockney paintings and they are already forty-seven years old. It's also a rare case of the more modern painter, Hockney, being a bigger draw at the moment than Piero. At least in London. The story, of course, may be quite different in Florence.

Hockney is on record as saying he's had a life long admiration of Piero della Francesca and to look at his paintings here that would be hard to deny. Piero's Baptism of Christ features in reflection in Hockney's painting of his parents, Laura and Kenneth, along with a book about the 18c French painter Chardin and a drape by fellow Tuscan Renaissance bigwig Fra Angelico. The Baptism of Christ appears again in Looking at Pictures on a Screen. This time along with works by Van Gogh, Vermeer, and Degas.

David Hockney - Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977)

 

That's the art critic, curator, and one of Hockney's close personal friends Henry Geldzaher admiring, intensely, various artworks and reproductions of artworks and, as with Hockney's parents, he's been captured in a very Hockneyesque way. Colourful, elegant, realistic looking yet not looking real - certainly not anywhere near as 'real' as the work of hyperreal artists like Chuck Close or Ron Mueck, and dignified.

 

Hockney, it seems to me, always give his subjects dignity. Him and The National Gallery go back a bit too. From visiting the gallery and sketching works as a younger man, to guest curating 1981's Looking at Pictures on a Screen exhibition (named for the work above) and being one of twenty-four artists (others included Paula Rego, Cy Twombly, Patrick Caulfield, Frank Auerbach, Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud, Anselm Kiefer, Jasper Johns, and Bill Viola) to contribute to the millennium celebrating Encounters show. He chose to paint images of some of the gallery's then stewards.

A nice touch. The three paintings are all hung neatly on one wall and the rest of this one room show is fleshed out with letters between Hockney and the gallery's former director Michael Levey (in which Hockney enquires as to the possibility of copying a Van Gogh painting) and a catalogue of a Hockney curated show (which features Piero, Degas, Vermeer, and Van Gogh - the big names again - on its cover) but the centrepiece is, of course, a painting made nearly six hundred years ago.

Which is just how you'd imagine David Hockney would want it. He'd probably insist on it. Purchased by the National in 1861, The Baptism of Christ has remained on display ever since. Even though Piero was not popular with Victorian audiences who preferred the supposedly 'sweeter' style of Raphael. That's changed now and Piero della Francesca is widely considered one of the most important painters of his era. A fact that was not lost on my old Eggheads frenemy Kevin Ashman who I bumped into in Winchester back in 2018 during a TADS walk.

He was sat on a bench near the side of the Itchen reading a hefty looking tome about Piero (of course)! Abstract and modernist artists saw something in Piero's work and though I can't quite work out what that is or was, it's indisputable that it's a work of rare talent. In it we see Christ being baptised by John the Baptist (who knows the score) near the banks of the river Jordan. Above Christ's head, a dove represents the Holy Spirit and to JC's side there stands a somewhat anaemic looking walnut tree.

 

Cleverer people than me claim that the whiteness of that tree as well as the whiteness of Christ's skin (surprisingly pale for a man who was born in modern day Palestine) and probably his loin cloth too divide the painting up according to the much sought after golden ratio. There's some angels in it too. Angels are always good.

While I'm not a believer in supernatural and all seeing deities. I do enjoy a lot of nominally spiritual and religious things. I love church architecture (mosques too), I love gospel music, and I love these old religious paintings. Unlike the people who created these things, or most of them, I don't ascribe their creation to a god or a team of gods but to humanity. Although religion in a way is the worst thing that humans ever invented it has to be said it shows how remarkable and complex we are as a species that we have been able to construct these incredible stories and narratives and then build buildings, write books, write songs, and create paintings to celebrate them. With that I went for my gallery walkabout. I had a longer look.

Piero della Francesca - The Baptism of Christ (about 1437-1445)

The artist's eye catalogue (1981)

Raymond Foye - David Hockney (1981)