History is stuffed with rumors of strange and secretive Satanic cults. Some of those rumors are nothing more than a load of hot goat's blood, and others are something more. Check out the best cults in history, and see if they ever really existed.

Ah, Salem. In 1692, over a period of only a few months, 200 people had been accused of witchcraft and jailed, and 20 had been killed. (One man had been tortured to death. His interrogators had piled stones on his chest he smothered.) It started out as a few girls - none of them over twelve years old - "having fits." It soon became a storm of accusations that only ended when the governor's wife was accused of witchcraft and he shut the whole thing down. Many people confessed to trafficking with the devil and writing their name in his book. Under torture, they named others who they had seen at black masses. One woman named her own daughter. On paper it looked like a good part of the village was a Satanic cult.

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Was it Real?

What's strange about the Salem Witch Trials is not that no one believes it now - it's that no one even believed it then. The village of Salem was known to be a nasty place. Its members quarreled with each other and with their neighbors. The town couldn't keep a minister because the supposedly devout Christians refused to pay ministers their agreed-upon salary. Once the trials began, letters poured in from the surrounding countryside condemning the very idea, and ridiculing the use of incorporeal evidence, like visions and dreams. Executions seemed to be meted to the less popular and the less protected. The woman who named her own daughter as a witch was hanged. The daughter was not. Nor was Tituba, a slave who was one of the first people accused of witchcraft - and the very first to confess. Possibly she lived because, as she had no property and no ability to cause trouble for others, no one stood to gain from her death. After the trials were shut down, the town reversed its stance on witches quickly. The accused were let go. The use of incorporeal evidence was deemed unlawful. Within fifteen years, the verdicts were declared void and restitution was paid to any accused yet living, even if they had confessed. Everyone seemed to know it was a fraud, but during the trials no one spoke up.

Michelle Remembers has entirely sunk from the public consciousness by now, but in 1980, when it was published, it kickstarted a whole movement. The book was about the recovered memories of Michelle Smith. Aided by her psychiatrist, she remembered horrific abuse at the hands of an ancient and international cult of Satanists. Among Michelle's memories were things like 81-day ceremonies in a public graveyard during which the cult raised the devil, only to see him fought back down to hell by angels and the Virgin Mary. The book started a two-decade search for child-abusing satanic cults that supposedly populated America and several other countries. That search ended in some drawn-out trials and a few convictions. The fear of underground Satanic cults was so widespread that it earned the name "The Satanic Panic." Geraldo Rivera claimed that there were over a million satanic cults in the US. In South Africa, they actually trained a supernatural crimes unit to deal the the cases.

Was it Real?

Almost certainly not. Although the book got a good reception when it was first published, the public soured on Smith and her psychiatrist when they divorced their respective spouses, married each other, and went on speaking tours. Eventually reporters and television stations began looking into the book's claims, and found out that Michelle had never been out of school for 81 days, and the site of the two-month-long ritual to raise the devil occurred in a graveyard surrounded on three sides by suburban houses. As for the claim that there there were a million satanic cults in America, if it were true it would mean that, at the time of the claim, one in two-hundred people would have been a Satanist.

Founded in 1948, Our Lady of Endor is an example of gnostic Satanism. The founder, Herbert Sloane, claimed to have seen a horned god in the woods as a child. Later he realized that this was Satan. With that in mind, he re-read the Bible story and saw the serpent not as a tempter, but as someone who showed Eve the true nature of God. The "fall of man" was a good thing, but its meaning was twisted by Christian theists.

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The 9 Best Satanic Cults in History