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1 " Of course it's kitsch, and of course our love for every cult figure gets called kitsch when we want to separate the suffering it requires to create a symbol that lives in the world from the ravages of one's own life. "
― , Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror
2 " The image of the devil in human history has provided the simplest answer to the problem of evil in all its forms. How is it that human beings, capable of acts of self-sacrifice and moral magnificence, are also able to perpetrate the greatest of horrors? One answer has been the power of an evil, dark force that has helped to corrupt us from the beginning of time—a devil that embodies all of our aggression and rage without any of our capacity for moral imagination ... A Tempter, but also a creative sadist, the monotheistic West’s image of the devil has given us an embodiment of violence. Our dark impulses are us, but they are also not us, according to traditional beliefs about Satan. We act on our most vicious impulses, the logic of the diabolical tells us, because a Tempter pulls us into them, makes us live in our darkness, causes us to forget ourselves or even become a new, wretched self. "
― , Satan in America: The Devil We Know
3 " The connection between the changing role of the police in American society and efforts to control culturally subversive groups is illustrated in the backgrounds of some of the most well-known of the “occult cops.” Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedecker’s examination of these usually low-ranking detectives found that many of them “had spied on groups opposing racism or the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.” Before morphing into “occult experts” they traveled the “small town lecture circuit” warning mainly white, middle-class audiences about the danger of “Moonies” and other alternative religious movements. The role of the police in the satanic panic of the 1980s appears to be symptomatic of a much larger problem. Rather than asking its police to prevent and prosecute crimes against person and property, white America asked it to crusade against evil, to slay monsters and demons. In an urban America prostrated by the growing economic inequality of the 1980s and the consequent deadly mix of entrepreneurialism and despair that constituted the crack epidemic, politicians gravitated to the “tough on crime” rhetoric that became such an important part of the successful campaigns of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Meanwhile, the leadership of the evangelical and Charismatic worlds adopted a very similar rhetoric in which their followers were asked to engage in an unrelenting war on the forces of darkness threatening their homes, children, churches, and communities. "
4 " She always paid a high price for her dignity. "
5 " Robert Boyle, the English scientist largely responsible for the creation of the modern discipline of chemistry, interviewed miners in the 1670s in an attempt to discover whether the men had met with any “subterraneous demons . . . in what shape and manner they appear; what they portend and what they do. "
