There's been something of a fixation lately on QAnon's conspiracy theories about pedophilic cannibals, especially since a lapsed member of the cult declared to CNN's Anderson Cooper that he no longer believes that Cooper eats babies. I'm glad that guy no longer believes Anderson Cooper eats babies, but I was struck by the "shocked! shocked!" energy liberals were putting out: How could people believe that their fellow Americans are cannibals? My magpie memory began bringing up other cases of similar beliefs, until I realized that they're normal. That doesn't mean that they're true, of course, only that normal, reasonably sane people keep reinventing such beliefs, and it's very hard to pry them loose from those beliefs.
First I remembered that the early Christians were accused by outsiders of having nocturnal orgies, which climaxed in the ritual killing and eating of babies. I don't know how widespread the accusation was, and I find it somewhat suspicious, because the sources for it seem to be Christian apologists, answering heathens' lies, and I don't consider the apologists to be reliable sources on anything. I also recall reading somewhere that when Tertullian, a notable Church Father of the same period, switched from the Catholic Party to Montanism, he accused the Catholics of ritual cannibalism, but insisted on the innocence of his own sect. In any case, the fantasy that the hated Other rapes or eats children is clearly ancient, whether pagan or Christian writers harbored it. Probably both did.
Later, Christians accused Jews of ritually murdering Christian children and using their blood to make Passover Matzohs. But the Satanic Ritual Abuse witchhunt of the 1980s and 1990s seems closer to the QAnon scare, and it was recent enough that it ought to be surprising that people have forgotten it. I dug out my copy of Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker's book Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt (Basic Books, 1995; quoted here from the Kindle edition).
Children caught up in this maelstrom often reported that they had been molested by people dressed as clowns, in Halloween masks, or in uniforms. In many cases, they talked of being taken to cemeteries or funeral homes, of having to touch or eat feces and urine, and of excrement covered in chocolate. Incongruous people, like movie actor Chuck Norris, prosecutors, social workers, and television anchormen, were named as perpetrators. Abuse was said to have occurred underground or in airplanes, and animals were usually involved, occasionally as sex objects but most often as victims of sacrifices. Nude picture-taking sessions, rituals, and sex acts were almost always reported, as was blasphemous behavior and language, as well as murder, either for religious reasons or to make snuff films. All these themes—pornography, masks, rituals, uniforms, excrement, blasphemy, and murder—appeared in the checklists, guides, and questionnaires that investigators used when they questioned children.
All this was the work, not of a bunch of extremist weirdos, but of mainstream figures. As Nathan and Snedeker point out, feminists played a significant role in the craze, but so did fundamentalist Christians, police departments, and psychologists. A professor of sociology at the Big Ten university where I worked was a vocal proponent and defender of the witchhunt. I also knew people who didn't believe every detail of the stories, but still insisted that an international network of Satanists was plausible. During that period of more than a decade, Nathan and Snedeker recall,
It was also possible to turn on the radio and hear Joan Baez performing “Play Me Backwards,” her song about a youngster who witnesses a diabolic ceremony in which adults dressed as Mexicans slaughter a baby, remove its organs, and make other children play with them. One could stand in a supermarket checkout line and read the women’s magazine Redbook, with its survey indicating that 70 percent of Americans believed in the existence of sexually abusive satanic cults, and almost a third thought the groups were being deliberately ignored by the FBI and police. If one sought out a psychotherapist, the chances were good that he or she believed these cults were organized into a vast conspiracy whose crimes were responsible for many patients’ emotional problems. And if one were to examine the files of district attorneys’ offices throughout the country, there was a considerable likelihood that some would contain allegations of ritual sex abuse.
Baez was still performing "Play Me Backwards" as late as 2000, when the witchhunt had largely subsided and been debunked, sometimes by the same media that had promoted it a decade earlier. Many of the people who'd been convicted and jailed for non-existent crimes had been exonerated and released; I don't know how many weren't. Judging by the comments under various YouTube videos of Baez' song, not to mention hostile reviews on Amazon of Satan's Silence, there are still numerous people who believe in the original stories.
I don't know why many people are so eager to believe that their neighbors eat babies in secret nocturnal orgies, but I'm not at all surprised by QAnon's fantasies. I suspect that many of the people who believe QAnon are diehards from the Satanic abuse witch hunt, which as you can see was much more ecumenical and inclusive than QAnon: millions of Americans were willing to believe that their neighbors were Satan-worshiping cannibals.
Another curious thing: though many people will jump to embrace fantasies of imaginary horrors perpetrated on innocent little children, they will resist doing anything about actual child abuse, and will protect abusers, even when the abuse happens before their eyes. The Penn State scandal was a striking example of this, but belief in "seductive" children leading sex-starved adult men to their doom seems to be as common as belief in lizard-people Illuminati predators.
