“Acquired information can alter the memory of a previous event…. Many people think that memory works like a recording device, but it doesn’t…. We don’t just record the event and play it back later. We actually reconstruct memories using bits and pieces of experiences that have happened at different times and places.”
Full article “Memories of Satan” HERE
“In many court cases, people are bringing in memory reports and they need to be scrutinized carefully. They can’t just be accepted as truth simply because they are expressed with a lot of confidence and detail. Distorted memory reports can enter legal cases and destroy the lives of innocent people… vivid memories of entire events that never occurred could be planted into a subject’s mind.”
“‘In 2005 one of the leading experts in the field of memory, Richard McNally, wrote a letter to the California Supreme Court explaining, “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry.’ The scientific community seems to be in agreement that recovered memory therapy has less to do with accessing repressed memories than implanting new ones.”
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From the beginning of the article, instead of choice quotes here and there:
“A series of videos recently uploaded on YouTube show two young children divulging disturbing information about a secret society active in north London.
The siblings reveal that they have been the victims of satanic ritual abuse, inflicted upon them at school and church in the affluent suburb of Hampstead. In hours of video footage that has been viewed millions of times, they describe the sacrificing and eating of babies, grotesque sex parties, and rituals of satanic worship.
“The assertions were that babies had been abused, tortured and then sacrificed,” a judge later put it. “Their throats were slit, blood was drunk and cult members would then dance wearing babies’ skulls—sometimes with blood and hair still attached—on their bodies.”
They name dozens of perpetrators, claiming teachers and the parents of other pupils belong to the pedophilic cult lead by their own father.
Naturally the police took these initial accusations seriously.
But after six officers searched the church, they found no reason to suspect any satanic behaviour. Eventually, after two police interviews, the children admitted it was false—citing physical and psychological abuse from their own mother Ella Draper and her partner Abraham Christie, who pressured them to lie.
“That was all made up,” the 9-year-old girl explains to the police. “He told me to say that, and I said ‘Why, Abraham? That’s not true though’ and he said ‘Yes, that is true, so don’t lie and say that to the police. They dance around with baby skulls in the church, don’t they?’ That’s what Abraham told me, and I said ‘no, they don’t’ and he said ‘yes, they do—stop lying, you little brat.’”
Despite the confession, campaigners are adamant that there is more to this case then we are being lead to believe. “Believe the children!” “Satanists!” were some of the cries that could been heard just a few weeks ago at a demonstration outside the school.
How did huge numbers of people become so frenzied over baseless accusations, and how did the line between fact and fiction become so blurred?
Meanwhile, High Court Justice Pauffley determined in March that there had been no satanic cult. “I am able to state with complete conviction that none of the allegations are true,” she said. “I am entirely certain that everything Ms. Draper, her partner Abraham Christie, and the children said about those matters was fabricated. The claims are baseless. The stories came about as the result of relentless emotional and psychological pressure as well as significant physical abuse.”
“Both [children] P and Q have suffered significantly. Their innocence was invaded. Their grip on reality was imperilled.”
“Their minds were scrambled.”
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As bizarre as this story seems, it’s far from the first time someone has contrived a story about satanic horrors—and repeated it so many times that they themselves almost began to believe it. In fact, it’s been happening since the early 1980s. In a BBC Radio 4 documentary, journalist David Aaronovitch identifies the controversial book Sybil, published in 1973, as the predominant cause of what came to be known as “the satanic panic.”
The book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, tells the supposedly true story of Shirley Ardell Mason (under the pseudonym of Sybil Dorsett) and her therapist Cornelia B. Wilbur. The story goes that “Sybil” began sessions with Wilbur to treat her social anxiety.
Wilbur’s therapeutic technique, Schreiber writes, was based on efforts to help Sybil contact repressed memories of repeated sexual abuse perpetrated by her mother when she was a child. Soon after beginning therapy, Sybil begins to show signs of multiple personality disorder (MPD) and eventually dissociates into 16 distinct personalities.
Sybil lead to an increase in the popularity of neo-Freudian attempts to access deep-rooted repressed memories. There was also an increase in the controversial diagnosis of MPD (now known as dissociative identity disorder), resulting in it being classified as an official condition by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980….
Full article much longer, read more at link above
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