Satanism’s Handmaidens—Drugs and Heavy-Metal Music
CARL A. RASCHKE, director of the University of Denver Institute of Humanities, wrote: “It is no accident that drugs, heavy metal [music], brutality, and wanton violence have all become the grisly ensigns that wave above the human desolation as we move toward the third decade of the Age of Satan.” He also said: “You might say heavy metal rock is to self-styled Satanism what gospel music is to Christianity. Very few people get converted to Christianity just by listening to gospel music on the radio. But heavy metal is a very powerful reinforcement. It legitimizes the nasty stuff the kids are already into.”
This is a strong indictment against what so many of today’s youths consider normal diversions from the anxieties of life—heavy-metal music and drugs. Are these charges justified? Can it be that drugs and heavy-metal music are possible symptoms of Satanism? Consider the comments of those who have come face-to-face with the violence of satanic worshipers and those who have investigated them.
“The inflammatory message of heavy metal music is, as might not be surprising, ‘religious’—in the sense that it proclaims a higher power overseeing the universe. The power, however, is not God,” wrote Raschke, in his book Painted Black. “It is . . . engineered by the Archfiend himself.” Additionally, he said: “The power and violence of the satanic is something toward which youngsters bereft of hope, and with a stunted conscience, can easily gravitate. . . . Troubled and abused youngsters, through a sort of insidious imprinting of experience, believe the Higher Power must be evil. Heavy metal affirms this ‘theology’ and institutionalizes it in the music.”
According to Dr. Paul King of the University of Tennessee, who testified before the United States Senate about heavy-metal music, the music preference of a large number of disturbed youngsters is that of “unconventional themes of violence, hate, rebellion, primitive sex, abuse of women, and glorification of Satan. When an adolescent’s life-style includes drugs, this preference is even more likely.” Heavy-metal music glorifies and extols the power of evil, King said. In heavy-metal music, “evil acts are glorified to new heights in concerts,” he said.
Consider the fruits of heavy metal’s subliminal message in the items that follow.
Last year in New Jersey, U.S.A., two 15-year-old boys brutally killed a family’s pet Labrador dog named Princess. “It was a sacrifice for Satan,” they claimed. They held the dog up by her chain, kicked her to death, ripped her tongue out and used it in a satanic ritual. They impaled the mutilated body of the dog on a large metal hook and hung it in a neighbor’s yard. Satanic markings were found on the dog’s head, and a pentagram (a five-pointed star in a circle—a Satanic symbol) was etched on the ground beneath the dog’s body. On the night of the killing, they were listening to Deicide (which means murder of God), a death-metal band, whose lead singer boasts of torturing and killing animals.
In California, two teenage lovers, who, according to friends, were obsessed with Satan worship, savagely killed the girl’s mother by stabbing her and by beating her with a wrench. In the same area, another youth offered a prayer to Satan and then shot his father to death. Police investigating the crime were convinced that heavy-metal music was to blame. “Basically, the music teaches that you don’t have to listen to your parents, and that you should live life the way you want,” said one police authority.
In England victims of serial gang rapes reported to police that one of the rapists bore tattoos of the insignia of a heavy-metal band whose lyrics contain messages of rape and violence.
In Arkansas, U.S.A., a rural teenager attempted to kill his parents by beating them with a club and then slicing them with a butcher knife. Police found in his audiocassette player a tape cued to a heavy-metal band’s song, “Altar of Sacrifice,” in which the lyrics scream out: “High priest awaiting, dagger in hand, spilling the pure virgin blood. Satan’s slaughter, ceremonial death, answer his every command. Enter to the realm of Satan . . . Learn the sacred words of praise, ‘Hail Satan.’”
As for the lyrics of other songs sung by screaming members of heavy-metal bands—often lip-synched by their fans at concerts in wild frenzy, or listened to on audiocassette tapes for hours on end—what influence do such messages have on impressionable youths? Consider, for example, these lyrics: “Satan our master in evil mayhem guides us with every first step,” and “Spill your blood, let it run on to me. Take my hand and let go of your life . . . You’ve spilt the blood. I have your soul.”
“If we already grant the premise that pornography might motivate a child molester,” wrote Carl Raschke, “why not entertain the thought that lyrics that scream kill, mutilate, maim, torture, obliterate might actually spur someone with a deranged brain to perform precisely those acts?”
It is the opinion of researchers everywhere that drug abuse and Satanism go hand in hand. Former vice detective David Toma laments that he has “never met a Satan worshiper who didn’t do drugs.” Drug use, reported ’Teen magazine, complicates matters for teenagers “who turn to devil worship, making it harder and harder to distinguish what’s actually real and what only appears to be real when viewed through the fog of drugs and alcohol.”
“Heavy metal is to heavy drug use as lotteries are to compulsive gamblers,” said Raschke. “The chemically dependent adolescent adopts a life-style of swagger, brutality, theft and sexual excess—all of which is reinforced by the yowling and bellowing of the metal groups.”
Without doubt, a youngster becomes easy prey to Satan’s influence when sanity is flushed from his brain and thoughts of perversion and violence take its place.
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One is easy prey to Satan’s influence when sanity is flushed from the brain and perversion and violence flood in
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What are you filling your mind with?