FIRST READ: THE START OF THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

A. V. Sellwood and Peter Haining. Devil Worship in Britain.  Corgi, 1964.

When I was a teenager we didn’t have video nasties and computerised war games to allow you to venture into the dark realm, you read books like the Pan Book of Horror Stories , the Pan Book of Ghost Stories, or things like this. Long term Magonia readers will recall our various articles on the great Satanism and Satanic abuse panics of the 1980s and early 1990s.
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It was assumed at the time that this was an American import. Not so; if there is an origin point of the modern Satanic panic it is this book; advertised as “a startling expose which reveals the shocking truth about Satanism today”.

Written in the style of the gutter tabloids which provided most of its 'facts' this book typified the moral panics of the post Profumo period; lumping together a range of social phenomena such as sex parties, neo-witchcraft, teenage vandalism, and fears of immigration into a single package. Any interest in the occult was seen as an opening through which you could fall into Satanism. As a metaphor for social and sexual change 'Satanism” had a powerful symbolic ring. Actual evidence as to its existence was hard to come by, not least because the thing didn’t actually exist, at least not outside some rather kinky play-acting based on the novels of Dennis Wheatley.

Some of the fears in this book look very peculiar; it will, I think, come as surprise to Messrs. Rimmer and Harney to learn that the Liverpool of the 1960s was rife with the devotees of a secret Polynesian cult, dedicated to the god Tiki. Racism was very much an undertone of this book; dark skinned immigrants were bringing in “dark rites” and so on.

Very little of what was to become the kernel of the great Satanic abuse legend - the sexual abuse and murder of children - features here, just the odd rumour (or rumour of a rumour). Dancing in the nude and smoking were wicked enough for Satanists in those days, or so it seems.

These beliefs continued for a number of years; I recall being warned as a nineteen-year-old reading the now-classic partwork Man, Myth and Magic, that this was a road to Satanism, presumably via visiting tarot card readers and attending séances.  

• Peter Rogerson