Coping with Satanism

Allen J. Ottens

I originally picked this up assuming I was going to get the extremist-Christian view on supposed Satanic cult activity, but such is not the case. Rosen seems to be a publishing house focusing on the grade 5-12 set, and if there are any extremist Christians the bunch, they held their tongues long enough that the company managed to publish a J. K. Rowling biography recently. This pretty much fits with what I found in the book itself.

Ottens take a surprisingly balanced approach to the idea of Satanism, at least while he's describing the signs that your child may, in fact, be worshipping some guy with a big red tail and a cloven hoof. He almost completely discounts the "Satanic panic" that was on the wane by 1994, addressing most of the key players and giving the reader more than enough solid reasons for doing the same. He's also pretty much got his facts right (though one wonders why, during a brief discussion of splinter groups from the Church of Satan, he neglected to say anything about the Temple of Set, who are the only real CoS splinter group worth mentioning, and by far the best known; have at it, conspiracy theorists). Things break down towards the end when he attempts to make a case for "Satanism as mental health problem; one thinks that a truly good argument for this tactic could easily be turned on older established religions, and Ottens was likely aware of that fact, and thus didn't want to give the budding grave desecrators any ammo they might be able to use in heated discussions with parents about the religion said parents follow. Pity, as that might have led to some really interesting exchanges over the dinner table.

As with any book of this type, it's a double-edged sword. It has equal use to both the teen involved in a "Satanic cult"who wants to get out and the teen interested in finding out more about the religion. (Such would, of course, however be advised to go straight to the source and read Dr. LaVey's cheesy, but fun, *The Satanic Bible*.) Take the mental-health-issues bits with grains of salt, or apply them equally to the more established religions, and what emerges is what some of us have known was there all along: a quick, sketchy overview of an actual religion.

One wonders, idly, why Focus on the Family or some other similar band of numbskulls hasn't raised a stink about this book yet. Only a matter of time, I guess.