A documentary about Technology, Faith and the 20th Century

Just as the spider’s web becomes an extension of its mind, so mass media entangles itself with the nature of human consciousness by altering what we are conscious of. As Marshall McLuhan put it, media “extends our collective nervous system” and in doing so, profoundly reshapes our perception of the world in new and often unpredictable ways. The widespread adoption of new mediums accelerates the speed and volume of information flow and often accompanies social upheaval and turmoil. This documentary is the story of one of those convulsions; the dramatic convergence of folk-demonology, religious mania, and the threat of nuclear apocalyptic wars that accompanied the exponential adoption of broadcast television and videotapes in the 70s and 80s. It is the story of a madness that overcame our new multimedia sensorium, as we grasped to make sense of a strange and terrifying new world.

During the period — commonly called the “Satanic Panic” — the airwaves bloated with magical realism and stories circulated about cabals of devil worshippers that existed just beneath the surface of the everyday. Crimes of breathtaking cruelty permeated the media, all of which seemed to follow the same disturbing pattern. Middle-aged women would appear on talk shows casually confessing to murdering infants and eating their still-beating hearts. Ultra-violent serial killer Richard Ramirez — the “Night Stalker” — praised Lucifer in court and implored his “Legion of the Night” to rise up and avenge his capture. Baby-faced teenager Sean Sellers told audiences of millions that he’d been groomed by Satanists into murdering his own parents as they slept. Skeptics were hushed in 1989 when the remains of missing student Mark Kilroy were discovered on the US-Mexico border, revealing his brain had been cooked in a cauldron as part of a magic ritual.

Everywhere one looked; in newspapers and magazines, books and movies, in TV shows and even at work seminars and conferences, the same stories of sadism, devilry and gore were repeated and reinforced. Talk shows and TV specials were packed with testimonies about escaping the clutches of an elusive criminal underworld who commanded the powers of mind control both to conceal themselves from society and recruit new generations of thugs, assassins and sexual prey. That they were funding daycare centres across the country not just to brainwash children but to make pornographic movies and snuff films to share on the black market; beliefs that persist in today’s QAnon conspiracy theories. But astonishingly at the time, these claims were seemingly corroborated by an alliance of psychiatrists, police officers, journalists, child protection workers, FBI agents, and feminist activists, and there was a growing belief even in the secular world that this enterprise had embedded itself in the highest levels of business and government. 

I began work on the project in 2014, with the intention of making a short, three minute YouTube video on the subject, but it became clear that just having a cheap chuckle at the expense of evangelicals didn’t quite get to the heart of the complex intersection of historical forces that lay beneath it; a long crisis of belief, rapid technological change and a radically new media ecology that let to converging waves of social contagions and manias. And while the three-part series covers half a century — 1950–2000 —  the cultural crisis underlying it was in fact centuries in the making. 

Mass media and the evolution of Western cosmologies

The printing press and the era of mass literacy led to a series of religious wars, and over a longer timeframe had put established religious cosmologies under enormous strain. What’s been called the “early-modern information explosion” led to long periods of strife but in the fullness of time, a new era of structured and organised knowledge and the gleaming age of Enlightenment. We collectively created expansive new information structures and tools such as world maps, musical notation, encyclopedias, and scientific theories. Wholly new taxonomies with the intent of organizing all of the human knowledge, which also afforded humanity vast instrumental power to shape the environment. Yet this new scientific worldview had unveiled a cosmology of deep space and deep time which diminished the role of “man” to ephemera; it revealed a Cthulian cosmos of primordial monsters and infinite alien worlds, far beyond the heretical visions of Copernicus and Galileo.

With Darwin came the revelations that humans themselves were little more than warring bands of primates hurling ever more sophisticated spears at one another. Already weakened thanks to the Reformation, the discovery of evolution led to a shattering of Christian belief into a thousand fanatical fragments, with some believers retreating to biblical literalism, creationism and eccentric denominations, others into secret society social clubs or syncretic movements such as Theosophy. In different ways, Catholics, Protestants, atheists, and a multitude of fracturing sects were attempting to realign knowledge and the numinous. And in doing so demonstrating that ideas, too, were subject to the selective forces of evolution, particularly when introduced to the cultural accelerant of electronic media.

The mass media of the late 20th century was the culmination of over a hundred years of evolution of electrical communication, which began the moment Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message in 1844. A portrait artist who was considered something of a crackpot, nobody believed he could really send a message from the Supreme Court chamber in Washington DC, through an electrical wire, to a train station in Baltimore faster than a locomotive. But to the astonishment of all, he did. As one stunned observer wrote of the story, it represented “the annihilation of space and time”. The message sent by Morse read, with some portent; “What hath God wrought?” 

The explosion of electronic media that followed would go on to influence a new generation of intellectuals to would muse on the implications. In the early 20th century, Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky’s developed a new set of concepts and theories to describe the mechanisms of material evolution. He helped found the field of geochemistry — the study of how chemicals can shape large-scale geological forces — and his 1926 book, The Biosphere outlined how even the smallest living organisms can have an enormous impact on how the planet evolves. He defined it as;

“A definite geological envelope markedly distinguished from all other geological envelopes of our planet. This is only because it is inhabited by living matter, which reveals itself as a geological force of immense proportions, completely remaking the biosphere and changing its physical, chemical, and mechanical properties, but also because the biosphere is the only envelope of the planet into which energy permeates in a notable way, changing it even more than does living matter.”

Following the logic, and recognising the growing impact humanity was having on the environment, he postulated third strata shaping the planet atop the geosphere and the biosphere; the noösphere, literally “the envelope of mind”. The realm of concepts, consciousness, and the entire human information ecosystem, which was through human action shaping the contours and trajectory of the entire planet.

“The noösphere is a new geological phenomenon on our planet. For the first time a person becomes a major geological force. Before the advent of humans, evolution was a natural process. With the advent of the mind, a new organising factor in the biosphere appeared.”

Though a Soviet, Vernadsky was first and foremost a child of the Enlightenment and also believed that the noösphere represented the ideals of freedom, justice, and democracy. He wrote that;

“Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a mighty geological force. There arises the problem of the reconstruction of the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking humanity as a single totality. This new state of the biosphere, which we approach without our noticing it, is the noösphere.”

The evolution of the noösphere was to represent the “reign of reason” which would lead to “a just distribution of wealth” and “the unity and equality of all peoples”. The ancient religious vision of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, recently secularised by the Communist movement. 

Although an atheist, Vernadsky’s ideas crackled with mystical implications. It should be no surprise that the most enthusiastic evangelist of the noösphere concept should be deeply religious; a Jesuit priest and intellectual called Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was also a teacher of geology and an active paleontologist, giving him an intimate understanding of the immensity of deep time. Unlike the growing creationist movement, for Teilhard evolution was undeniable, and changed the calculus of all future religious thought. He wrote that “Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines will follow.” He saw that the embryonic industry of global communication would enable the formation of a “planetary mind”, an ecology of new cultural entities that “are for the noösphere the mere equivalent and the true successors of zoological species in the biosphere.” He wrote that;

“Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth”

Teilhard believed that as human interaction intensified through the mass media, consciousness itself would begin to condense. That over time, the noösphere would coalesce, and crystalise into something more coherent. In his cosmology information was the same thing as spiritual energy, and its integration he associated with the Christian concept of Logos — the Word — and Christ himself; the Alpha and the Omega. This ultimate integration of information and consciousness Teilhard described as “The Omega Point” — a singularity on the edge of time towards which all reality is being pulled. An evolving jewel of matter and consciousness in eternal formation.

Teilhard was suspected of heresy by the Church and banished to China and the publication of his books were forbidden while he was alive. Other Christians denounced him as an atheist and used now-debunked creationist arguments to centre their attacks. However, when it was eventually published, Teilhard’s book The Phenomenon of Man was to leave a profound influence on a new generation, among them the young Richard Dawkins, who was absorbed by the expansive evolutionary cosmology. While he would later denounce the Jesuit as a pseud and charlatan, the fundamental idea of an ecology of human culture clearly influenced his theory of the meme.

Marshall McLuhan acknowledged Teilhard in his 1967 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, referring to his “lyrical testimony” about the potential of electronic media, but otherwise downplays his influence. This may have been because he was a converted Protestant that worked at a Catholic college and did not want to be closely associated with such an ostracised and heterodox thinker for fear of likewise being canceled by the Church. McLuhan had always talked of the cultural transformation wrought by the mass media in ambivalent terms. He could see its destructive influence on society, but described it not as a good or a bad thing, but simply an unavoidable reality; shrugging that “understanding is not a point of view.” He could see that it was beginning to erode the literate knowledge structures that had developed during the era of print, to enormous destabilising effect. The relentless flow of information began to erode the knowledge structures of the age of literacy to reveal the cosmic horrors beyond.

“Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon us instantly and continuously concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. . . . Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a simultaneous happening”

McLuhan secularised and rebranded Teilhard’s concept of the concentration and integration of information and consciousness as the Global Village, a more relatable and everyday idea where people from the other side of the planet are transformed into nosey neighbours. The mass media — in Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase — “extends our collective nervous system”. It entangles itself with the nature of consciousness by altering what we are conscious of. And by the latter half of the twentieth century, thanks to the mass media but particularly television, this increasingly became everything at once, with McLuhan arguing as far back as the 60s that we’d revert back to mythic storytelling to make sense of “such complex data”. Likewise vision of the Global Theatre was also influenced by the concept of the noösphere, where the communications satellite was a “proscenium arch” whose presence made people want to behave like performers and actors. His student B.W. Powe also continued that the stories told in this theatre were not necessarily reaching towards a neat integrated The Omega Point, but had the potential to thrash and fracture.

“While McLuhan was drawn to dramas of hope, it is essential to see the Janus-faced complementarity in the visions of cosmic consciousness: this age is one of apogee (great heights and hopes) and abyss (violence and breakdown). These conditions of abyss and apogee act like figure-ground interactions: hope and horror are simultaneous. This is the lesson of instantaneous global communions: baptism into the soul of the world, and thus into its pain and panic, into ecstasies and discoveries.”

Martin Luther once believed that making the bible accessible to all through the printing press would usher in a harmonious “priesthood of all believers”, only to be later horrified at the chaos that unfolded. So too, perhaps, was Teilhard mistaken about the emergence of the Omega Point, as by the 1980s, panic and breakdown were indeed about to be unleashed, as a new chapter of the Reformation unfolded.

The Omega Point Schism

With so many distinguished Catholic thinkers sensitive to the awesome power of mass media and the dramatic changes impacting the human experience, it is no surprise then that American Protestants too became entranced with its impact. While this fascination took on a more democratic nature — as opposed to relying on a few influential intellectuals — it also took on a characteristically cruder form. It emerged as a decentralized folk-demonology driven by neophobic fears about changes in culture and society that, via the paperback and VHS, became a collaborative narrative-building project that involved culture-jamming ancient visions of the apocalypse with imagery and content drawn from the media.

They sensed agency within this maelstrom of the image and sound, the outlines of something immense and terrifying. Although they never used the term, what they feared was Teilhard’s prophecy; the emergence of an ideological and spiritual “Omega-Point” at the end of time. Only instead of representing the spirit of Christ, it was the AntiChrist, and it would physically manifest in a totalitarian leviathan, a high-tech dystopian “New World Order”. This perhaps rational fear of global centralisation and homogenisation was combined with ancient mythic cosmologies and the augmentation of consciousness with the cutting edge of audio-visual media, which would prove to be a recipe for religious mania at an enormous scale.

Perversely, to Evangelicals this belief in the coming dystopia represented the Tribulation that foreshadows the inevitable return of Jesus and the foundation of his thousand-year theocracy, which meant that on some level they wanted to will it into being. After Israel had been established in 1948, Christian prophets went into overdrive looking for clues of the imminent end-times and the handiwork of the AntiChrist all around them. In seeking out evidence of this cosmic menace, the sects, cults, and new-age religious movements that erupted from the 1960s onwards gave them plenty of material to work with, particularly those that relished scandal and blasphemy such as the trollish Church of Satan and the flamboyant Process Church of the Final Judgement. Scientology, the Jonestown cult and the Manson Family were other strange new schismatics that had emerged in the 60s and 70s that so horrified religious conservatives.

Christian Ministers were evangelical about the dangers of the media, drawing on the imagery of pagan idols and the Apocalypse of Daniel to illustrate its perils, even as they became early adopters of broadcast media themselves. For as the decades unfolded, Televangelists came to resemble augers looking at ripples and fluctuations in the cultural airwaves to try and read the will of these malevolent entities. They found this in abundance in the technological and cultural changes around them, from the popularity of the Beatles and in obscure psychiatric conditions that they conflated with demon possession. While Televangelists led the way in this preoccupation, the low-brow hobby of identifying satanic symbols, memes, and patterns in advertising and TV commercials was open to all.

The hidden satanic cult cultural trope first went mainstream after the huge impact of Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, a stylistic masterpiece that had a similar impact on popular culture in the 70s that The Matrix did in the 2000s. Following its release, a decade of horror movies and trashy paperbacks about satanic sects and devil-worshipping perverts fused on some mythic level with the earthly reality of the weird new religious movements that surrounded them. Vocal and animated sects who were borrowing symbolism and concepts from Hinduism, Paganism, Theosophy, Science Fiction and Psychiatry. Meanwhile, the infernal artistic style of skulls and demons would go on to influence rock music, games and action figures. By the 1980s and the advance of new-age beliefs and irreverent demonic tropes into the mainstream had culminated in a culture war of apocalyptic proportions, amid a backdrop of global unrest and impending nuclear armageddon. Almost unconscious fears circulated that beneath this gleaming world of stadium-rock bacchanalias, crass materialism and new-age mysticism lurked something inhuman and sinister. 

These new myths, first propounded by the religious right, gradually seeped into the secular imagination over the decades. Outbursts of persecution against heretics and religious minorities have a deep and sordid history in the West, particularly in times of social or cultural turmoil. In the past, such spasms of unreason have cost the lives of thousands, and it is remarkable in fact that the cost to human life during this era of extinction-level anxiety was not greater. Nevertheless, the impact on human lives was substantial and perverse.

Now accompanying the primordial accusations of witchcraft were cutting-edge advances in psychiatry and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, which became in practice a modern-day inquisition that cracked open minds and brainwashed vulnerable people into believing they had partaken in child sacrifice, bestiality, and cannibalism before disseminating their confessions across the global mass media. Instead of setting fire to people as with similar episodes in history, they now set fire to reputations and wielded medical and legal bureaucracies and the media itself as instruments of persecution.

Constructing myths to make sense of what is going on in the world is one of humanity’s superpowers, but it can sometimes be catastrophically maladaptive. This was far from the “reign of reason” envisioned by Verdansky, but these myths were emotionally satisfying and conceptually accessible for a great many people. As they gradually became secularized as conventional conspiracy theories they became arguably more influential on Western culture than any of the ideas of Verdansky, Teilhard or McLuhan. 

Part 1: False Prophets

An exploration of the modern origins of the satanic cult folklore amidst the backdrop of the atomic bomb and the ruins of WW2. The Cold War had cultivated an atmosphere of paranoia about secret networks of godless Soviet infiltrators which would slowly fuse with an assortment of pop-culture tropes, from as the next-door-neighbor satan worshippers of Rosemary’s Baby and the shitposting Church of Satan, to real-life atrocities committed by the cults of Charles Manson and Jim Jones.

By the end of the 70s, the satanic cult had become a titillating cliche, permeating shlock horror and pulp fiction, influencing a generation of artists and rock stars. And as the 80s loomed, so began a frosty dance between the religious right and psychotherapy as the latter profession slowly usurped the former's cultural role as chief clerics, inquisitors, and exorcists of society's demons. 

Part 2: Explosive Amplification 

Explosive Amplification explores the strange cultural no man's land that was the consequence of Christianity retreat and the cambrian explosion of New Age beliefs that began in the of 1960s. Demonstrating that the religious right had no monopoly on gullibility, charlatanism, and quackery, New Age beliefs continually remixed myths about angels, UFOs, evolution, far-east mysticism and more which could be mistaken for a coherent cosmology. They made a lot of money in the process.

Evangelicals confused the advance of these new religious movements with broader changes in popular culture that also regurgitated diabolical cliches, everything from Heavy Metal to He-Man. Amidst this cauldron of hysteria, scare stories of widespread networks of sadistic cults were afforded the legitimacy of the educated elites and were spread through their communication networks. It was only former members of the fractious and then moribund Church of Satan that offered anything approaching skepticism about the bizarre accusations made about them.

Part 3: Family of Origin

As traditional religion began to decline, psychotherapy combined the intellectual trappings of science with the soul-doctor role of the priest. But evangelicals were still keen to draw parallels to new conditions such as Multiple Personality Disorder with demon possession or the sadism of satanic cults.

During the course of the 1980s, two divergent intellectual traditions fused in the belief in the existence of devil worshippers who could deliberately brainwash people to create malevolent “alter” personalities; a secular demon. This in turn would combine with the private healthcare industry and child protection services to enable enormous human suffering. This is what happens when beliefs in folk-demonology fuses with the cultural authority of the new secular clerisy. Viewer discretion is advised.