Christian child welfare and social workers most feared, that they believed they were facing a full-frontal assault by Satan and his demonic forces and the Earthly form of this was an insidious organisation that had the following characteristics:
No wonder people were frightened; the end of the world as they knew it loomed. Social historians, such as Norman Cohn, have shown, that the notion of a baby-killing, cannibalistic, incestuous, orgiastic Devil-worshipping conspiracy is a complete fantasy, but one that has, throughout history, been used to sanction the most brutal and inhuman pogroms notably by Rome against the first Christians, then by Christians against Jews, heretics and witches. It is a variant of ethnic-cleansing based on religious fanaticism. To some extent, the hysteria of the 1980s has died down due, in part, to the steady loss of credibility of the conspiracy theory in the face of the publication in June 1994 of the La Fontaine report and increasing numbers of retractions from survivors of Satanic abuse (the Fundamentalists' star witnesses). Professor Jean La Fontaine's three-year study for the Department of Health blamed Christian evangelists, obsessed welfare workers and self-appointed experts for stoking a state of panic in which blighted the lives of hundreds of children by forcibly parting them from innocent parents. Satanic abuse was a myth that distracted attention from the very real predicament of abused children and had,said La Fontaine, "to be distinguished from the acts of evil men who use occult imagery to terrorise their victims."
A promising indication of the Satanic conspiracy could be found in Belgium last year, when links between a series of grisly pædophile killings and an active Satanist society shocked the nation. Throughout the summer, the gradual revelations of the murders of at least four children led to the arrest of Marc Dutroux, an unemployed electrician and convicted paedophile, his wife Michele Martin and other accomplices. They are suspected of other pædophile killings around the city of Charleroi but, so far, no other bodies have been found. Two attempts in November 1996 and January 1997 to drain and search abandoned mine shafts in the suburb of Jumet proved equally fruitless, despite separate suggestions by Dutroux and his wife that police would do well to look there.
The presence of a Satanic conspiracy became a distinct possibility when, in mid-December, while investigating the Dutroux's pædophile network, Belgian police stumbled upon links to a college of Black Magic called the Institut Abrasax, in a village near Charleroi. The building served as the offices of a number of pagan organisations, including the Belgian Church of Satan and the Luciferian Initiation Order. According to Peter Conradi, reporting for the Times,five witnesses described black masses [there] at which children were killed in front of audiences said to have included prominent members of Belgian society.
In early January 1997, a Flemish newspaper disclosed that three policemen (and possibly a fourth) of the Charleroi municipal force had admitted to being members of Abrasax, claiming it was all quite harmless. Mindful of the allegations that some babies were sold to the group by their parents while others were abducted, more than 100 investigators searched the building for eight hours. As well as the expected ritual paraphernalia, police found a bottle of frozen blood in a refrigerator. High priestess Dominique Kindermans who described the search as terrifying managed to prove she bought the blood from a butcher.
To make matters worse, police also uncovered evidence of a separate locus of orgies in a dilapidated chateau. Organised by Michel Nihoul, a known accomplice of Dutroux, a group of judges, senior politicians, lawyers and policemen have been implicated in the orgies there. This too, panned out; just sleaze as usual. To the dispair of the witch-hunters, so far the associations have proved circumstantial, the allegations have remained unproven and there have been no further arrests.