Carnal Knowledge: The Epistemology of Sexual Trauma in Witches' Sabbaths, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Alien Abduction Narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT There are strong similarities between the confessions taken from accused witches in early modern Europe, the testimony of Satanic ritual abuse taken by modern therapists, and accounts of alien abduction given under hypnosis. In each of these narratives, a subject describes horrible sexual transgressions performed on them at the hand of a mysterious other: the thorny penis of the Devil, the bizarre anal insertions of Satanists, and the mysterious probing of aliens. The motive behind these sexual acts is never revealed and the existence of the perpetrators is usually in doubt. This article suggests that sexual trauma serves an epistemological function. For such apparent victims, a belief in demons, Satanists, or aliens provides a meaningful worldview, and narratives of sexual transgressions maintain and even compound these beliefs. “Carnal knowledge”—knowledge through sexual encounters—is privileged above visual or auditory encounters, and is therefore more useful for constructing meaningful cosmologies in which human beings may interact with the divine. Carnal knowledge was a privileged form of epistemology in pre-Christian cultures. Since the days of the early Christian Church and the equation of sexuality with sin, carnal knowledge has survived in the form of masochistic and traumatic sexual encounters.