I've had the same podcast in my headphones all summer, The Devil You Know by Sarah Marshall. The podcast is about the Satanic Panic, which I was born in the middle of, in the '80s, old enough to absorb the dread and too young to understand anything about it. And it’s funny, because the lurid paperback covers from that era, the upside-down crosses, the warning-label fonts, the cult ephemera, have more or less become the visual DNA of the entire TAP (The Alchemist Papers) project. My underlying artistic goal was to build a brand from the very iconography people were once told to fear. Last week, in the July Magick post, I said I would go deeper into this inspiration, so here it is.

Fun fact: The Satanic Panic wasn’t actually invented in the 80s. This dog-and-pony show has existed for far longer, dating back to medieval times. The same accusation, that a hidden group steals children's blood to use in its rituals, was aimed at Jewish communities in the Middle Ages, and before that at the early Christians in Rome. Geoffrey Chaucer dropped a version of it into the fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, where the locals find a dead boy and execute the local Jews for it. The stories never had backing evidence; they were told in an effort to point at the stranger in the community, or the neighbor who never really fit in, as a scapegoat for what were probably more insidious things going on behind closed doors.

In the '80s, the costume of that same stranger was heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, Ouija boards, and, apparently, being a daycare worker. Books like Michelle Remembers and talk show hosts like Geraldo Rivera fed the fire (to his credit, Rivera did later apologize for it). Three teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, served 18 years on the solid evidence of black clothing and the wrong taste in music. The family that owned the McMartin preschool spent five years and millions of dollars in court to prove they had done nothing at all and that there was never an organized occult behind any of it. The children had actually been coached and rewarded for the lurid stories, and the medical evidence never existed in the first place. Meanwhile, the actual abuse of children was happening, overwhelmingly, inside the very institutions doing the accusing. Go figure.

Pulling the Devil card for this month’s writings was a bit of a surprise. I used to be terrified of this card, seeing it as a representation of the evil I was taught to fear as a child. Now, when I draw it, I see projection instead of danger. In Psychic Witch, Mat Auryn describes the shadow as Carl Jung did: the parts of ourselves we refuse to accept don’t disappear; they grow louder and regularly take the form of how we project onto others. These collective panics are like everyone doing this simultaneously. It’s easier to imagine a satanist you created than to confront the priest, coach, or man in your own home. The danger we were warned about was never really outside, but often inside ourselves. Those who avoid accepting their shadows tend to project their insecurities onto others who have already faced or embraced them.

That original playbook has been reprinted and used countless times. People are still yelling “protect the children” when talking about drag performers and trans kids, and they still have no evidence but preach with the same certainty. One takeaway I want to leave you with out of all this history is: when a panic shows up, ask yourself three questions before you give in to the fear: Who does it target? It’s usually people already existing on the fringes of society. Who is profiting from it? Is it a church or some political campaign that has created a monster to promote their own agenda? And what is the actual evidence that it’s causing the harm everyone says it is? Is it tangible? Have you seen it first hand? These are the lessons that I’d like this card to teach you this month.

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