THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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In 1486, two Inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, published the Malleus
Malejicarum (Hammer of Witches), a comprehensive set of guidelines for identifying,
prosecuting, and punishing witches. This soon became the standard European witchhunters
reference (Guiley, 1989). The subsequent trials and the legal documentation
arising from these established the demonological witch as a distinct entity, and provided
elaborate accounts of demonological practices. While sorcerers and diviners were
believed to invoke Satan's aid, witches were alleged to have devoted themselves to
Satan's service (Cavendish, 1977; Kingston, 1976). The main characteristics of
witchcraft were established as demonic pacts, orgiastic 'sabbats', infanticide,
cannibalism, renunciation of Christianity, and desecration of the cross and Eucharist
(Guiley, 1989). Theoretical disquisitions on witchcraft and its treatment, aided by the
invention ofprinting, widely disseminated this emerging demonological discourse.
When the additional power ofnocturnal flight was attributed to witches, the conception of
large assemblies of witches, and hence the belief in a demonic witch sect, emerged. The
Church, having explicitly assumed the machinations of the Devil behind all beliefs and
practices ofwhich it disapproved, combined two 'antisocial' figures into one:
The Satanist perversions attributed to the heretic were combined with
night-flying, infanticide, cannibalism, demonic connections and harmful
magic ofthe black witch. The effect was to make the black witch, who
had long been blamed for poor harvests, mysterious diseases, cot-deaths
and every kind of undeserved misfortune, into a member of an
organized conspiracy, directed by the Devil against the whole structure
of Christian society (Cavendish, 1977, p. 77).
2.2 The witchcraft trials of medieval Europe
In the early days of the Church, Satan and his demons were perceived as being weak
relative to the power of God. Their relative weakness is further evident in the fact that
demons were alleged to obey the commands ofthe humans who conjured them up. In the
15th-Century witch trials, the relationship between conjuror and demon undergoes a
dramatic revision. The demons are no longer servants, but the masters to whom the