Interest in new religious movements or cults has greatly expanded since the 1970s, often because cults were regarded as a social problem or as a form of counter‐culture (often to Christianity or an established religion), and usually because of wider awareness of cross‐cultural belief and practice. The very term cult takes on controversial overtones when it is compared with the term religion, for are we talking about Scientology or Transcendental Meditation or Children of God or Satanism? Some, like the Solar Temple and Heaven's Gate, were in the news in the 1990s for notorious reasons like mass hysteria and suicide. The view that cults were scary drove much of the so‐called research early on, though more recently, in work by people like Dawson (1998), it has become more reliably sociological. One of the two editors of this new encyclopedia on Satanism, James R. Lewis, has edited a useful Oxford handbook (Lewis, 2004) to new religious movements (NRMs as they are called in the trade).
We are, then, in a field where experts and others come from many walks of life, where there are often very strong views about right and wrong and good and bad, where rumor and media and celebrity both provide evidence and distort it with wild anecdote, and where a spurious kind of respectability provides a patina to a lot of discussion that, when you look at it hard, it just plain prurient. That said, interest in Satanism goes back a long way, to the medieval period and its Dantean representations of hell, to biblical exegesis and claims of a dualistic after‐life one option of which was Satanic. The extent to which such things are the very creations of institutionalized religion is worth noting – one theme in the encyclopedia is that Satanic cults represent a counter‐cultural response to established religion, and are vigorously attacked and demonized and marginalized by established religion (especially, as it is alleged today, in an America more credulous towards conservative fundamentalism that before).
Another twist to all this is that moral panics and urban legends arise, not just about cults Satanic and otherwise, but about all and any form of sub‐cultural or counter‐cultural phenomenon. To this sociological (the pathology of society) angle we should add the psychiatric (those many neuroses and personality and false‐memory factors of interest to practitioners in the field), the social work (above all people who deal with allegations of sexual and ritualistic abuse, especially of children) and the police (crimes that incorporate a ritualistic or Satanic element, and other aspects of social deviance and criminality) sides of the picture. Mention of cults and Satanism draws, then, on all these strands of research and commentary; it also evokes a great deal from popular culture – films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, the novels of Dennis Wheatley and Stephen King, computer gaming, evangelical writing like the Left Behind series and any or all fantasy for young people, media portrayals of child abuse and sex rings and celebrity excesses. Included in this encyclopedia is some content analysis of newspaper coverage of Satanic cults (from Norway and Denmark, for instance) and an interesting description of how talk shows cover them too.
The topics in such an encyclopedia open up a Pandora's Box of issues – the price of free expression in a democratic society, what if anything to censor, the paradox of an interest in the mystical and esoteric in an ostensibly secular society (though the USA is arguably not), the need for reliable evidence to solve crime, the authentic interest by theologians in new religions, the need to protect the vulnerable and the gullible against charlatans and against mass panics. The real strength and interest of this encyclopedia is that all these are there. Prometheus Books has a distinctive list and it's recent The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (Flynn, 2007) (RR 2008/203), is excellent. By that token, some of the entries in The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of Satanism derive from sources like the Skeptical Inquirer even though no systematic stance of rationalism is developed.
Yet The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of Satanism is so uneven that it trips you up on its unevenness constantly, goes round and round in circles, mixes the jejune with the brilliant, clutters up the text with weird and unnecessary illustrations, resuscitates pretty old (and old‐hat) stuff (many pieces were published before, rather too many from long ago), falls short of taking a real grip on the central issues (which a really strong introduction and sharp editing could have provided), and wanders about historiographically without giving the reader anything like a coherent and cumulative bibliography. So, for all the fact that important themes emerge – the price of a free society, the paradox amid secularity, how global urban legends and cross‐cultural study is, the growth of extremism, the propaganda of established religion, the ways rationalism can and should approach Satanic cults, the social responsibilities and obligations posed by having child and other forms of abuse arising from Satanic impulses – the actual presentation and evidence here is erratic, irritating, piecemeal, self‐indulgent, and often passé.
Really promising, given that we live in the internet age, is Petersen's (one of the two editors) piece on Satanism in a digital world, with comments on the dark side of the web and an interesting though bog‐standard interrogation of sources there. Far more could and should have been made of that, at the expense of the seemingly‐endless repetition of anecdotal evidence about child abuse and the fascination with Anton LaVey and his Church of Satan (influential, yes, but it is not enough merely to describe it and reproduce gloomy photographs). One of the final chapters, by Kenneth Lanning offers an investigator's guide to allegations of ritual child abuse, and, although Lanning's original work (from the 1980s) on child molesters and sex rings is still of interest, such an approach, like crime and real‐crime novels of an explicit kind, mediated through the eyes of what authors often hope are interesting forensic investigators, is prurient. Or if it is not, this opens up the problematic (which the encyclopedia should have covered) about how to deal with subjects as disturbing as Satanic cults in ways that do not themselves fall into the trap of being seemingly pharisaically interested in them.
The issues raised by this encyclopedia come in two categories – it genuinely raises important issues about Satanism in the modern world, and as a result resonates with that wider debate, extending from folklore and the sociology of religion to popular culture, about alternative forms of belief. At the same time, it raises issues about itself, it becomes its own story and, as all PR consultants will tell you, that gets bad: it is an uneven work, a lost opportunity, a disappointment, and at the price an expensive risk if you plan to buy it. If you do, for the academic and specialist collection rather than the public or school library.
