An Overview of the LDS Church of Satan, Two Years In...

What I've learned about organized ritual abuse groups

Over the past two years, as I delved into what I initially viewed as absurd allegations within the Hamblin Victims Statements, I’ve learned more than I ever thought I’d learn about ritual abuse. Like many people, I viewed the allegations of the Eighties and Nineties with skepticism, incredulous at the stories of abuse that interwove Satanism with MK-ULTRA and subterranean tunnels, with hints of Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Organized satanism was a reality that I was familiar with, having studied the occult and occult groups as part of my deeply religious upbringing.

My father had a library of books, including The Four Major Cults by Anthony Hokema. Hokeman classified Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventism, and Christian Science as the four major cults. Merrill F. Unger’s Biblical Demonology was another book that was heavily highlighted and noted in the margins. My father believed in demons, in Satan, and in the world as a spiritual battleground. I knew what evil was, because I lived in proximity to it for much of my life.

My father opened the door for evil into our lives, because while he was working outside of our home proselytizing and fighting the powers and principalities, his wife was slowly losing her mind. My mother had two daughters eleven months apart, an experience that wrecked her body and her psyche, and she was never the same. She had been molested as a child by at least two perpetrators, and her mother did nothing to stop or correct the abuse. In my family lore, my great great grandparents ran a brothel.

One of my maternal uncles believed that he had encountered literal demons in corporeal form. He had gone to Vietnam as an already troubled man, and he had come back completely dysfunctional. He would go on to be arrested for various felonies, and he would molest multiple children in my family. He was one of my mother’s abusers.

My father’s obsession with the occult, with a world of demons and devils, led him to battle those powers outside of our home, but while he was away from the homefront, his family was falling to pieces. He and my mother never divorced because they simply didn’t believe in divorce. He romanticized their marriage as a covenant marriage, but the reality was that the covenant was one of mutual desperation. My father grew up with a father who was a chronic philanderer, and a mother who dropped him and his siblings off with relatives while she took up with a younger man after splitting up with my father’s stepfather.

Generational dysfunction was real and present. My parents never went to therapists, never sought counseling, never availed themselves of any resources to address their own trauma. They bought into the idea that salvation alone was the balm for their issues. Once they professed Christ, they were made whole. Salvation is immediate through justification; our sins are paid for past, present, and future by the Atonement. Sanctification is a gradual process whereby we grow in our faith and learn to let the past, especially the past of the flesh, recede and fall away as we learn reliance on the power of God. There is no temptation He allows us to suffer that we are unable to overcome through His strength. Learning that takes time, and the willingness to accept that we have to learn how to depend on Him in every situation.

In my younger years, I was very much like my father. I loved to fight, and I was defined by righteous anger. I would go to war for what I believed was right, and I like the taste of wolf meat. I was an atheist by eleven, and by twenty two I had found God, only to lose Him again and again throughout my twenties and thirties as I conflated the hypocrisy of His professed followers with Him. I used that hypocrisy as an excuse for my own hypocrisies and moral frailties. I enjoyed wine, women, and song as much as any man. I sought answers through psychedelics, and I had profound experiences that I later realized were mirages.

The reality was that none of my epiphanies worked. I had two failed marriages, rooted in the fact that I chose one night stands for wives. I wanted to be good, but no one can be good apart from God. Goodness apart from God is transient and fleeting, an illusory experience that cannot be sustained because it has no foundation apart from our conceits. I was good at work, and that was about it.

I enjoyed hunting, whether it was people or answers. Hunting was all I cared to do in my life. I worked a day job while I was married, something to placate my wife and to externalize the costs of health insurance and retirement to an employer. Steady income gives a wife a sense of security, something she can depend on for tomorrow. Your time is the other source of security, because while you’re with her she knows you’re not out hunting. My first wife told me I ran towards everything dark and wrong, and she wasn’t incorrect in her assessment.

I was looking for why and how. How did the men who abused my mother arrive at being those men? How did my mother turn in her psyche to becoming abusive towards her own children, when she had previously been an excellent mother? How could things change horribly in the span of a mere eleven months? Why would this happen?

The only benefit of my upbringing was physical and mental toughness and intellectual curiosity. I knew one thing above all else when I graduated high school and struck out on my own: I could survive. I was unafraid of anything or anyone, because my father was the scariest man I had ever known. His temper, his coldness, his lurid fascination with the occult as a Baptist minister, and his indifference were defining traits. The one thing I admired about him was that no one ever tried him. People feared him, and fear was effective as a deterrent.

I thought he was the greatest man I had ever met, even with his flaws.

When I was four, I almost drowned in my grandfather’s pool, and my father was the one who dove in to save me. Later, as I clung to the side of a shrimp boat with a shark circling below, he was the one who grabbed my arms and pulled me up. When a deckhand hurled a shovel into the boat hold, hitting me in the head and knocking me out, my father was the one who told me I would be okay. I was only okay because I believed him. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t walk, and the words were stuck in my throat, but I believed him.

After those experiences, I did not believe I could be permanently hurt. In fights, I was berserk, unable to be stopped. I would live or I would die, and if I died, it was simply my destiny. In fourth grade, my best friend pushed me out of the way of a knife someone had thrown at me during a street fight. I suffered concussions and various severe injuries over the years, but I always managed to stand up. I was never carried out. I would die on my feet before I ever lived on my knees.

Past eighteen years of age, I had no concept or care for mortality. I believed that I would simply go off of the merry go round into the void, no longer existing. In fact, I rather enjoyed the notion. It made my life all the more vital.

I grew into hardness.

I accepted myself, and I thought logically about who I was and how to navigate the world as someone who was abnormal. I developed rules through observation. I watched other people and their circumstances, and began to understand how their responses to situations implicated me. I learned how to pass as normal, as much as I could. Gradually, I became competent, logical, rational, and I understood the Game.

I knew evil existed. I knew the Devil was real, because He was immediate. I had my doubts about God. I had known evil incarnate, and I encountered it time and time again as I refining investigative research techniques. I was good at locating people, and I was getting paid to do it. I was good at understanding how people worked, the patterns and habits that they almost universally used and employed in their lives.

I started to understand the significance of their deviations from their normal paths.

I had a deep suspicion of the government, but I completely rejected the notion that the government was competent. What I had seen of the government in firsthand experience was an entity with all of the resources and power, but none of the competence necessary to wield it effectively. I didn’t think government agents were stupid. I knew they were arrogant, because their unchecked power gave them that luxury.

They built haystacks to find needles, vast piles of information that they accrued on all of us. When I spoke to government employees, I was struck by how self-impressed they were with their ability to accumulate information, the power that enabled them to know everything about us. I was also struck by how much of that information was irrelevant to any task or objective. You can know everything and nothing about someone simultaneously. I always started with an objective, a question. The information I sought was designed to enable me to accomplish that objective or answer that question.

I didn’t have cosmic ambitions. I believed that much of the context and the why didn’t matter. They either did or did not do a thing. I tried to think algorithmically; sorting, searching, optimizing, and graphing information to get me to a solution for the problem. Ambiguity is the enemy of algorithms, and why is the most ambiguous factor because it is subjective rather than universal for every individual. What a subject did was more important than why they did it, and I only need to establish if they had or had not done what they were accused of, and why was the enemy of the final step in any algorithm: STOP. START and STOP were the alpha and omega of my process.

Anything else was a path to inefficiency. Once your shoes are tied, there is no reason to keep tying them, no reason to keep thinking about tying your shoes.

For most sexual abuse cases, and most organized pedophile, hebephile, or ephebophile rings, there is a definite START and STOP. You establish the truth or falsity of the allegations with regards to the subject, and you develop the evidence to prove or disprove the allegations. Conventional sexual abuse is simple enough to understand as long as you confine yourself to a basic grasp of why pederasts and sex traffickers do what they like to do: they like to fuck children, or people who are legally under the age of consent. They benefit from monetizing their criminal activity. I wasn’t interested in why they became pederasts or sex traffickers; my only interest was whether or not they were pederasts or sex traffickers and whether or not I could develop the information necessary to prove it and deliver that information to law enforcement with anonymity.

Ritual abuse was different. The ritual abuser was ideologically motivated, placing his or her acts within a larger context of archetypes and divinity. They weren’t strictly concerned with temporal factors like wealth or increased power. We were operating in the same paradigm, to different ends, because the ritual abusers were outwardly Christian or Latter Day Saints. We were both intimately familiar with the doctrine and theology, but moved to diametrically opposite ends of activity. My own experience with the Atonement, beginning in home lessons and culminating in baptism, generated something irreversible within me.

Scales fell from my eyes. I saw the world as it was, still, but also as it ought to be, as it could be. I suffered a second divorce almost immediately after baptism, and watched as the vision I’d had for my life dissipated. I was no longer a husband and father, the two noblest things a man could be. I was a man who had reproduced with a woman, the father of a child who would be increasingly remote and distant. I became sick during my divorce, and while I initially dismissed the illness as my annual sinus infection due to the cedar pollen that annually migrated up from the southwest of Texas to the rest of the state, I soon realized that I was not battling allergies. I was pissing blood, and I was dying.

This went on for years, years and years of hospitals and false starts of recovery and recuperation. I had left the investigative research at the behest of my second wife, taking conventional jobs in sales and education to placate a person who would never be satisfied. Her problem wasn’t with me. It was with her own life’s trajectory. She had married me because she had graduated law school, gotten a job, and we were living together. Marriage was the next step.

I was a free spirit, uninvested in anything but the work that would come to be my defining pursuit. Work felt like work outside of investigative work. Investigative work never felt like work until I realized that hours and days had passed since I had eaten or drank or slept. I could sit and hunt forever, in a desk chair or a deer stand or a blind. I could wait, perusing the information across my computer screens or the movement in the brush, and I would never get tired or disengaged.

The why was inevitable in ritual abuse. It was a brute force algorithm, one that required you to examine all probabilities, place them in context, and employ all of your cleverness and experience to devise a means of eliminating some of those probabilities. It was a shovel to the head. I had been hit in the head with a shovel during a fight once, only to turn around and knock out the person with the shovel with a punch before I fell to the ground and shook until my legs pushed me up again. Why was equally as discombobulating.

The Why

I never thought of myself as anything. I knew I was smart, objectively speaking. I had the test scores to validate that, the grades, but most of all I had the ability to figure things out without instructions. There are problems you encounter in life that don’t permit you to consult a book or a manual, and I was good at understanding systems of behavior and action. I retained information, but lots of people retained information. I had the ability to think analytically, combined with a stubborn persistence at rejecting and circumnavigating the rules of the games. I had zero interest in conventional thinking or conventional living.

I knew I was from a poor family defined by dysfunction and a belief system that had never compelled either of my parents to success. At most, their Christianity kept them from becoming even worse. It could have always been worse. I was not special. I was simply very different. I was entitled to nothing. If I wanted something, I had to either earn it or take it through means that were acceptable.

In my early life, I didn’t follow the law because I believed it to be right, I did so because I didn’t want to be hassled. I looked at much of what is classified as illegal or immoral as subjective and even ridiculous, but I understood that that world was structured around value systems and power structures that would hassle you if you were to run afoul of those value systems. As a general rule, those value systems and power structures kept us from ourselves.

Understanding the rules of those systems and structures was necessary to avoid being hassled. It was necessary to blend in with everyone. I didn’t go to kindergarten. I went to first grade the year afterwards, and I had no concept of the social structures or rules or conventions of school. When everyone else lined up to go the bathroom, I stayed at my table working on my drawing because I didn’t have to go to the bathroom. At home, I went to the bathroom when I had to the need. At school, one goes because that is what everyone else is doing. Micturation and defecation are scheduled group activities that require conformity for the group to work.

The early years of education were hard. I was not naturally inclined towards conformity. Other children were content to imagine; I needed to built what I imagined in physical form. I built an island in my yard as a child, digging out the dirt and running the garden hose into the lake, laying lumber planks from edge to edge as bridges. My father only saw the water bill and the risk to his son. He chased me into the neighbor’s backyard, his slacks and dress shoes soaked with the muddy water after the plank collapsed under him.

He said that if he told me not to do something, I never did it. His imagination could not keep pace with mine, and he could never envision what I think of as an activity and anticipate it in advance. Instead, he had to tell me that I could not use his tools or his lumber without his supervision. That eliminated my ability to realize my visions in physical form, because I didn’t have my own tools or lumber. I understood the difference between what was his and what was mine, and permission was no longer implied; it was explicitly revoked.

Why was frustrating. I didn’t understand other children, until second grade when I met a giant child who became my friend for a brief time. He was an enormous ham-fisted boy who dealt with problems I could not deal with myself, such as the girls who liked to tackle me on the playground. The rules were the rules: I could not hit a girl, because my father was absolute in his prohibitions about me hitting a girl. Joey could, and did, and I was temporarily freed of the harassment of the gaggle of girls. I was solving my problems with rules and exceptions.

Joey just liked being friends with someone who didn’t make fun of him for being huge, someone who didn’t mock him for not being good at school. He helped me with the girls, and I helped him academically. I wasn’t an A student initially, because I did enough to get teachers off of my back so I could do what I really wanted to do: read about other things. I had bags of books from the library every week on every topic imaginable. I had my dad’s books on woodworking and carpentry and electrical wiring. These books were the path to realizing my ideas. I read just fine, and phonics were stupid.

School is about going along with the middle.

My why was figuring out a way to avoid the middle’s pace, and get away with my rebellious allocation of time to other things. It wasn’t a happy time. My mother sat at the table with a switch to make me finish homework, which I regarded as irrelevant repetition of concepts I’d already mastered. Homework was for kids who didn’t learn it in school.

Once my parents realized I was smart, I was screwed. They expected me to work up to my potential and make the best grades, which meant I had to play the game. School wasn’t simply about getting answers correct on tests. That was easy. School was about being able to stand up and smile while your teacher gave you a good citizenship award without saying anything about your knowledge that you weren’t a good citizen. School was about going along to get along.

I knew that I was not special, but I also knew that I was not normal, and I had no real desire to be normal. I simply had a need to be normal enough to get through school and to adulthood.

Across the country, a girl two years younger than I was had to deal with parents who were part of a group that believed itself to be of satanic royal bloodlines. Shortly after she arrived home from the hospital, she would be baptized in blood, sodomized, and consecrated to their god, Lucifer. Her maternal grandmother and great grandfather were from a family that believed itself to be descended from the residents of Troy who fled after the city was sacked in 440 B.C. Others within the family claimed the de Jongs had descend from Lothaire, the heir of Charlemagne.

That conceit was couple with the belief of Latter Day Saints that the souls of premortals who had been waiting for 6,000 years to be born were birthed into those families righteous enough to obtain to consent for plural marriage. These premortals were the elites, and greater in nobility, intelligence, and adherence to Heavenly Father’s commands. Carma de Jong’s granddaughters alleged that the family’s belief was that Lucifer had been deprived of his rightful inheritance as the firstborn of Heavenly Father through the subterfuge of Jehovah. Premortal souls covertly concealed their loyalty to Lucifer after his ejection from the Celestial Kingdom in order to obtain bodies, and they were born into those Latter Day Saint families designated as qualifying for goodly parentage with respect to plural marriage and high station within the Church.

These premortals would fulfill the final dispensation of the Latter Days. For orthodox Latter Day Saints, those premortals born into godly families will help to defeat the armies of Lucifer and ensure the plan of Heavenly Father. Those who persevere through the Atonement, who fulfill the commandment of Heavenly Father, will themselves become gods through exaltation, repeating the template over and over again in worlds yet to be created. The endless cycle would be perpetuated infinitely as celestial kings and queens, priests and priestesses, produce even more premortal beings.

For the generations of these Saints, they had been conditioned to believe that they were special, that they were entitled, and that they had a higher purpose and calling. Some believed it was to fulfill the plan and purpose of Heavenly Father; others believed that they would fight in the armies of Lucifer to defeat Heavenly Father. All were taught that they had tremendous significance and purpose. They could expect to benefit from rank and station, and they did.

As a single mother, Roselle Stevenson received one alimony and child support payment from her ex-husband David Lee Hamblin. Hamblin was over $270,000 in arrears to Stevenson, and when she tried to file criminal nonsupport charges against him, the Utah County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute. Roselle Stevenson was never impoverished. Somehow, she had managed to provide for her two minor daughters, Katie and Miriam, as a single mother without any discernible employment. Her daughters allege that during the Provo Church of Satan Council hearing that excommunicated David Lee Hamblin from the CS, the council ruled that their needs would provided for if they faithfully fulfilled their duties to the CS.

It would appear that the council delivered. Roselle Stevenson became a homeowner, raised her daughters, and managed to stay afloat until she married her current husband Ford Stevenson.

The Hamblin sisters appear in newspaper articles for their academic and artistic accomplishments throughout their school-aged years, which might appear to rebut the notion that they were routinely up to the early hours of the morning conduct the rituals and ordinances of the CS. The reality is that religion is a way of existing for the true believers. My own parents kept us up at their fellow believers’ home until the early morning hours as they talked and drank coffee and ate pastries, hauling us out to the car and then waking us for school a few hours later.

Time ceases to exist when you are living your values and purposes.

The hunt always superseded everything in my life. I didn’t notice the time. I didn’t notice hunger or dehydration or anything but my work until I got a dog, or until I got a wife. Dogs and wives require your attention, and break your concentration. They need to be let out, fed, watered, and shown affection.

The why, if there can be such a thing with respect to the CS, is a belief system that becomes who you are through the demand of repetitive acts. Comparatively speaking, being a Latter Day Saint is easy, while being a member of the CS is an all-encompassing pursuit. Latter Day Saints verbally consecrate their lives and all they have to the Church; CS members literally consecrate themselves and their every effort to their belief system. This is done through acts that conform to the baser nature of man. We’re born into sin and fallen natures. It’s easy and natural to succumb to temptation; it’s harder to resist and overcome what your flesh wants.

CS members have a belief system that simply requires them to be, and to be with enthusiasm. We’re all reprobates and depraved apart from the Atonement. The Atonement calls us to a higher existence and higher pursuits. The Adversary calls us to be nothing more than what we are: sinners, but to be a member of a group such as the CS, we must be sinners who make an effort to sin and sin hard. We must do every sin without hesitation or reservation until it becomes second nature to rape, to torture, to kill.

I do not believe that loving God is enough; in my own life, I must hate the Adversary and sin. Only then can I be vigilant enough to eliminate those temptations that would draw me away from God, from the communion with Him that is the source of my peace. Members of the CS believe that they must not only love Lucifer, they must also hate God and His commandments.

There are variations among the ritual abuse groups in terms of their epistemology and core ideologies. Some of the groups believe that exaltation requires equal fluency in both good and evil, assigning that fluency to Heavenly Father in order to mandate the requisite acts necessary to their own fluency.

Ritual abuse groups are almost always familial, only reaching to children outside of their groups for sacrifices. The groups sometimes extend to the criminal acts for both profit and information: the former enables them to earn money through child prostitution, child pornography, and trafficking to support themselves and their group; the latter enables them to accrue compromising information on the patrons of their child sex abuse enterprises. The goal of these groups is power in the temporal realm through wealth and status, so that they may indulge whatever whim with impunity, and this power will extend to the eternal realm as well, as they earn their station in the kingdom of Lucifer with their acts.

They have an innate sense of how the world actually works, whereas their opponents find themselves arguing over how the world ought to be instead of accepting the brutal reality. Luciferians accept things as they are. Christians naively insist on belief in a pretend concept that has zero basis in reality or empiricism. This is why so many Christians look away from the evidence of ritual abuse in their communities: it undermines their fantasy.

As I drove through Utah on my trips, I was struck by the perfectly manicured lawns and beautifully built red brick meetinghouses, the layout of the cities and towns with its impeccable organization. We think of the Devil as an agent of chaos, of his followers as disorganized and dysfunctional, and we are wrong. His followers are highly organized, and the communities he builds are disguised as impeccable neighborhoods and towns with convenient layouts and ample wealth. The Devil has no interest in looking like a devil, or in building earthly kingdoms that overtly advertise their depravity. His kingdoms are artifices, built to pass as the Kingdom of Christ. The lawns are green in Hell, and the homeowners associations are up to the task of maintaining perfection.

Utah is above the national average in only one category of violent crime: rape.

It is a place and a culture much like my first grade class in school. It’s built to smooth one out to go along with the middle. It isn’t acceptable to disturb the middle. Everyone looks alike in parts of Utah, and they act alike as well. It’s a lovely state, with the most pleasant people. It isn’t real, but the residents feel an obligation to pretend that it is, and to ignore or overlook any indication that something is amiss. In our meetinghouses, our wards, and our stakes, we are conditioned to believe that it is impolite to acknowledge what is right in front of us: an avalanche of allegations of ritual and non-ritual sexual abuse among Latter Day Saint families.

The middle is a strong current and and overwhelming tide. It’s not easy to paddle into it.

I’ve learned over two years that the middle is the very thing that the CS and its related groups exploit. We Saints love our harmony, our belief that in our cocoon things are right and good and perfect, and we will do anything to maintain the illusion. We will often viciously attack anyone who raises the possibility that the illusion is an illusion. That is why Latter Day Saint have shown up to sentencing hearings in support of convicted pederasts and child rapists, while lambasting the victim and their families for going to the police. The Devil made him do it, for the Devil loves to take down the Lord’s anointed.

The Adversary has no power over us that we do not cede to him. We choose temptation. With every temptation is the means of escape, 1 Corinthians 10:13 tells us, and we will never be tempted beyond our ability to resist. God cannot be tempted with evil, and He does not tempt any man, but we are drawn away of our own lust and enticed as fallen men and women, and when we give into what lust conceives, we sin, and sin brings death.¹

It is not hard to discern who among us is of the CS: “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him. Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God.”

“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

We see Saints and professing Christians denying that sin is actually sin, rather than acknowledging the biblically identified sin in their own lives which is obvious to anyone who understands the Bible. These individuals say that their sin is no sin, and the truth is not in them. They feel that they have nothing to confess, for they are their sin and therefore their sin cannot be sin: simply existing is not a sin when sin is your entire identity.

These individuals may not overtly declare their allegiance to the Devil, but their acts and professions are an oath of loyalty to the Adversary. They are known by this, but only if you don’t refuse to acknowledge what is right in front of your eyes. What I have learned in two years of studying the CS is that Christians have a problem accepting what is right in front of them. That is why ritual abusers are so successful, and it is why they evade culpability or consequence.

1. James 1:13-15.