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My grandfather belonged to a secret cult. He and other prominent members of our community met in secret to worship Satan at our high school. I still get flashbacks of their ceremonies: the cross hung upside down, the dead animals, and the room with pregnant women who were giving birth to infants. The newborns were sacrificed to Satan, and everyone drank their blood. Mom forced me to go to these meetings, even though she knew that Grandpa and the others had sex with me and the other kids.

This grim tale isn't borrowed from a paperback horror or an episode of The X-Files. Things like this really happen. Or, at least, they happen in the minds of self-described victims of ritual abuse. These people whisper their painful stories into the ears of spiritual warfare counselors and therapists. When Christianity Today spoke with several victims, they told of dehumanizing sexual molestation, brainwashing, and other torture by their closest relatives who allegedly belonged to a secretive but widespread satanic cult.

Spiritual warfare counselors realize that many people who tell these stories have dissociative identity disorder (see "Alter Possession," p. 51). In many cases, the disorder is said to have resulted from a severe childhood trauma, often ritual sadism. That's why spiritual warfare counselors attend workshops on ritual abuse.

Most of them, including C. Fred Dickason, and some Christian psychologists, such as Jerry Mungadze and Larry Crabb Jr., believe that some satanic ritual abuse (SRA) tales may be true. But many therapists—including John E. Kelley, director of the Biola Counseling Center—dispute the accuracy of most so-called recovered memories.

The boom in SRA reports began with the release of a book. Thousands of people began "remembering" abuse just after the 1980 release of Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder. The book, in which Smith and her therapist warned against an underground satanic conspiracy in whose clutches she claimed to have fallen as a child, was disputed by those who knew her. Other disclosures from the same genre were received with similar skepticism by family and friends.

Many psychiatrists question the ritual abuse narratives. Kelley says "recovered memories" are often not memories but images or fantasies generated in therapy. Recovered-memory therapy directs patients inside themselves for "proof" of abuse through methods such as stream-of-consciousness writing, dreams, art therapy, and age-regression hypnosis in which patients are temporarily taken into childhood.

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, founded in 1991, hears from thousands of distraught parents whose children accuse them of being cult members. Accused family members, and sometimes patients whose therapy included "recovered" memories of abuse, have won a number of malpractice lawsuits against therapists whom they charged with fabricating memories.

But this is not to say that no SRA reports are true. While the fbi and police say there is no evidence of a widespread satanic cult, some cases of sadism and sexual molestation in a cult setting have been proven in courts. Even the most ardent critics admit that, in rare cases, ritual abuse reports are based on reality.

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September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11