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IamLEAM1983
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To Tom

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

What's your take on the late eighties' and mid-nineties' Satanic Panic?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"Ah, the eighties... I didn't spend much time in that particular body, having already planned for things up until the 2020s, but I still remember the decade quite well. I especially remember that ridiculous Geraldo episide from 1988 - which aired just prior to Samhain, of course - and seeing pseudoscience debase the time-honored concepts of due dilligence and methodology for the sake of spitting on a demographic which the United Nations had vocally supported not ten years earlier!

Imagine the context, if you will: you've seen the Accords be ratified, you've witnessed as underground practitioners stepped forward with ad hoc textbooks waiting only for approval from the Department of Education, you've seen the undead and supernaturals fall in each other's arms, weeping in joy - and then this. To say the community took it as a slap in the face was, and still is, a euphemism. I remember Walpurgis' Elmyra Devlin stepping up to a hearing in the midst of a cavalcade of forced hypnotic suggestions and rampant fetishism on the part of the so-called psychotherapists who interviewed these poor kids and saying that as an Infernalist, she felt a moral duty to speak for everyone else in the greater coven of American magic-users, because most wouldn't dare to lift a finger or make a sound. She was right, too - the wizards and witches of this country sat by and chewed on their nails, hoping beyond hope that their newfound rights wouldn't be snatched away.

And these men, these purported healers of young minds, these quacks with a therapy license and no Ph. D. to speak of, stepped up to bat and blended everyone, from the most kind-hearted of Wiccans to Reiki practitioners to Elemental mages finding gainful employment in fields related to their element of choice - into a single unformed morass where the occasional idiot with a vetted Name, a summoning circle and a vendetta informed the treatment everyone else would receive. If I'd had Quint's body back then, I would've paced and snorted, fallen back to Tommy-boy's old spastic hand gestures or grunted mid-speech out of sheer rage. I wanted to get out of my chair, throw my glass of iced tea at the screen and hex each and every one of these misguided souls who had dared to sear nightmarish visions into the minds of children barely old enough to grasp the proceedings they took part in. I wanted to clean my floor, lay out my circle and contact an associate of mine at the time, in Wrath. I didn't want these poor fools to die - but I wanted them to suffer.

I almost went through with it. I stopped partway and cast my mind back to the generations that had followed the Salem Witch Trials. I remembered that mortal reason ebbs and flows, that every Enlightenment is preceded by a Renaissance and a Dark Age - and now, Media had shortened the cycle, compressed centuries down to years. I remembered all the signs - guidance wards lobbed in with graffiti, the lot of them confused for sigils of power used by long-dead Infernalists - to the point where even an errant scrawl or gang sign the "investigator" couldn't parse took on some deeper, darker meaning. Novels had first paid the price for society's ignorance, and now I was seeing Cordatus and his ilk question their then-brand-new hobby and come this close to tossing their DM screens and game manuals and dice in the bin. It was the same old fear, the same old ebb and flow, with a new face.

Back then, I didn't make much in the way of waves. I was living deep undercover as a supposedly mundane and mortal human artist in the late seventies' counterculture scene. All this made me decide I'd ride that wave, the next time around. I'd find someone powerful, with ideally a touch of the grotesque, clean them up, trim their nails and turn Media's boogeyman into a creature of allure and sophistication - someone deeply, profoundly rooted in the darkest reaches of the Craft, who would've been well-suited for grandiose displays of self-serving evildoing - but who'd be motivated first and foremost by kindness. I'd never put words in anyone's mouth, I'd never tell anyone how to perceive me, but I'd make sure everyone knew I was on their side."

He chuckles darkly. "Oh, and if you wanted Hell that much, if it was painfully obvious you were using ignorant and innocent folk to prop up some sick and twisted fantasy you'd been harboring for the future out of some ham-fisted and half-baked display of religious zealotry - then I'd give it to you."
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