My Association with the Alternative Religions Forum & the South African Occult Community

Good morning, friends and fans!

*Speaking in hushed, reassuring tones* Don't be afraid now, kiddies, but today we will diverge from talking about my fiction writing and take a closer look at some of my academic writing and advocacy work.

This article will provide a brief description of my advocacy in the field of religious freedom, and will also take a closer look at my background in order to create a more balanced picture of me as an individual.

Background

I’m a born and bred Port Elizabethan, as of 1 February 1973! I’m an Aquarian and also a transgender woman. I have been an activist for most of my adult life, specifically my field of interests has been LGBT rights and later freedom of (and also from) religion! Over the years I became interested in the communities that grow up around various religions, and became an amateur student of several of these.

To provide religious context to my background in relation to the topic of this article - that is, my association with the Alternative Religions Forum, the paper I wrote, called "Satanism: The Acid Test" and the South African Occult Community - I was raised a Christian (Congregational and then Methodist), then left the church in 2008 when I considered myself an agnostic. In 2010 I entered the Pagan community and participated in the local meets of Wiccan groups in my area. Over time, I since gravitated away from religion or belief-centered identities and embraced my atheism. Mainly, I have campaigned not only for the equality and freedom of religion, but also for the rights of people to be free of religion as well. This is, I feel, an often overlooked concept - and a sadly neglected group of people!

I’m what I call a second generation writer, as both my parents were writers as well. My father, Theo, wrote dramas and my mother, Yvonne, wrote poetry in English and Afrikaans. I write mainly science-fiction, generally with a horror and fantasy bent, and have also written my share of poetry and non-fiction. I currently have around 30 titles in print, eBook and some in audiobook format available. Writing is not as lucrative as some people believe, but it is a way of life! Aside from “Satanism: The Acid Test” I have written a further three academic papers on the topic of Satanism, the occult and moral panics. They're listed at the bottom of this article.

I’m happily married to a wonderful woman named Wendy, who like her cartoon namesake, is a witch (and artist and poet) who specializes in herbs and medicines. We live in a lovely old Victorian home with three cats …and an uncertain number of ghosts, whom I occasionally write about on our paranormal blog.

A brief Look at my activities before the ARF

Between 2008 and 2011 I had been working almost exclusively as an activist for LGBT rights, and in particular transgender rights since I am transgender. I did so via two South African organizations, namely the South African Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (SA GLAAD) and the Eastern Cape Gay & Lesbian Association (ECGLA). I was a founding member of SA GLAAD, which was established in response to Jon Qwelane’s hate speech column in the Sunday Sun in 2008. I joined ECGLA in February of 2009 as a member, and rose to lead the organization later the same year.

After the successful conclusion of the NMB Pride event organized by ECGLA, I stepped down as head of ECGLA and shortly afterwards, of SA GLAAD as well. In the meantime, in about 2010, I had also become more involved in the local Pagan community. At around the same time, I became aware of the 16 Days of Activism Against Witch Hunts campaign being held annually by the South African Pagan Rights Alliance, an activist organization based within the South African Pagan community, and offered to assist with collection of statistics which SAPRA used to build a database of incidents of witch hunts, or persecution of perceived witches in South Africa. In about 2012, I became a member of the executive committee of SAPRA.

At that particular time, there had been frequently a lot of negative news press coverage of a series of so-called “occult related crimes” in which news media platforms provided unfair, distorted and biased interpretations of these crimes in a religious sense. One of the heads of the SA Police’s “occult related crimes” unit (ORC) had gone on record in the media to equate Witchcraft and Satanism as religions with being “a belief system which leads to crime”. Being associated with Satanism could therefore – according to the SAPS – be seen as a justifiable reason to be suspected of criminal activity, even after these religions had been legally recognized in South Africa in the 1990s.

The SAPS added a lot of fuel to the fires of hysteria by the maintenance of a special police unit (the aforementioned ORC) staffed exclusively by evangelicalist Christian members, and run like a tax-payer funded Christian “spiritual warfare” or “deliverance ministry”, which also spread misinformation as though it were official opinion and fact.

Throughout this period, media – especially Afrikaans language and religious media, eagerly provided spotlights for self-proclaimed “occult experts” who spread misinformation with impunity.

Perhaps what I found most disturbing about this period in particular, was that individuals with absolutely no personal experience or training in Satanism or knowledge of Pagan religions or other occult beliefs or practices, were being presented as, and accepted as, experts in these fields – with their main and only qualification as authority figures being that they were some form of lay Christian clergy. In the case of members of the ORC, it was Christian clergy members wearing police uniforms and bearing the authority and assent of the State.

In addition to murder, kidnapping and other text-book crimes, belief under the ORC became a closely scrutinized motive for the commission of crimes. It is from this moral panic that the popular urban legends originated which claimed that specific brands or genres of rock music (i.e. Slipknot), violent video games, music, black clothing and candles found at a crime scene or in possession of a suspect were to blame for “opening” teens up to evil spirits or that they were connected to Satanism.

In the SAPS's periodical magazine "Servamus", such untruths and inaccuracies were published and sold to the public under the guise of officialdom and state authority as though they were fact. Further, any attempt by various activist or advocacy organizations to set the record straight fell on deaf ears - the SAPS refused to entertain approaches from the SAPRA for example, but in the meantime, went so far as to lie about meeting with representatives of SAPRA in order to lend credibility to their own misinformation.

Aside from the SAPS element, there was another sort of “occult expert” who craved the media spotlight, being the numerous evangelicalist pastors who set up “deliverance ministries” and “refuges” often while claiming to have been Satanists themselves. The evidence and testimony given by these individuals, which became the topic of a flood of interviews and articles in tabloid press such as Huisgenoot and YOU magazines, simply did not add up – not that the media appeared to care about verifying any of these claims. The media seemed eager to give this sort of “expert” attention – after all, their public seemed interested to know all about Satanism and what drove these people to commit such horrific and tragic crimes! Kobus Jonker for example, who founded the ORC unit and is still widely consulted as an “expert” on Satanism, is the man credited with starting the conspiracy theory in the 1980s that there were over 300,000 “Satanists” in South Africa who were all involved in human sacrifice and other crimes, and who were in league with crematoria that disposed of the evidence – all the while somehow keeping everything a massive secret! The scary part is, that a lot of people actually believed this sort of tripe, and some still do.

To those in the occult community, nobody seemed to care about the accuracy – or inaccuracy – in the claims made by these people, except for the people finding themselves on the receiving end of the rising intolerance, fear and loathing which resulted from all this misinformation! However, for those who saw past the hysteria and the frequent media-facilitated witch hunts of the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, it was very clear that the SAPS and all those “experts” were not talking about the same occultism or Satanism as practiced by occultists or Satanists. There is such a thing as “mythical satanism” or “legend tripping”, also called “pseudo-satanism”, which is in effect a Christian-created idea or construct of what Satanism is supposed to be. One of the terms used to describe the mythical satanist is a “reverse-Christian” – that is, individuals who believe in the Christian mythos of Satan and essentially form and practice their beliefs around the Christian perception of Satan as an actual deity, and from the opposite direction.

Consequently at around 2013, it became clear to those of us at SAPRA – a group which focused on the protection and advancement of Pagan rights in South Africa – that the hatred and intolerance being expressed against adherents of Pagan paths was the result of an overwhelming external ignorance of what Pagans believed or did – or even how Pagans looked in relation to everybody else – and that a lot of this hostility was brought about firstly by the average Christian’s ignorance of Paganism, and the massive amount of propaganda stemming from the same ignorance, combined with a perception that Pagans and Witches were somehow just “less committed Satanists”.

Evidence of this confusion is still seen in false material such as the so-called “Occult Calendar” also called the “Satanic Calendar” or the “Witches Calendar”, spread around by some fanatical Christian groups since the 1980s, and which purports to be a list of dates on which Satanists supposedly commit human sacrifice, orgies, ritual murder, animal sacrifice, or other atrocities. This calendar was also taken as fact, virtually verbatim, by a few law enforcement agencies around the world during the moral panic of the 1980s and 90s, in the USA and the UK in particular, with predictable results - the men and women in blue ended up chasing ghosts and conspiracies of supposed "satanists" hiding in the shrubbery and, instead of doing their actual work, ended up chasing their tails! Unsurprisingly, our own SAPS also shared a version of this work of fiction in their Servamus magazine, and also on their website for several years.

The trouble with these calendars is that they all combine a cherry-picked list of dates which have only a small significance to Paganism, and even less so to Satanism, apparently without being able to distinguish the two religious paths, and while also failing to notice that 90% of the “satanic festivals” listed are in fact Christian ones dating from the Middle Ages! I would add that its propagators themselves appear to rely on the ignorance of their audiences about their own religion – were it not for the fact that its originator, David Balsiger himself appeared to be equally as ignorant when he compiled it. It’s obvious then that its purpose from its very motive for creation, was as a tool or weapon to be used to spread misinformation and to incite fear and hatred of anyone perceived to be a witch or Satanist, or having involvement with the occult. It’s surprising to me that some churches in South Africa actually take this tripe seriously and still circulate them to this day. (I discuss these calendars at length in another paper I wrote in 2021, called "A Date With The Devil - Occult & Satanic Calendars Debunked".)

A great deal of the “satanic panic” hysteria in the media, even today, especially in letters and comments, appear to be fueled by Christian outrage and intolerance for "satanism". A lot of alleged evidence and many claims put forth by the accused in several court cases which centered around claims of "satanism" at the time (e.g. the Kirsty Theologo murder trial) appeared to be quite believable to a portion of SA society – but for those who were on the receiving end of such harsh social judgements and media-propagated slander, these claims, beliefs and allegations of what occultism, satanism etc. was – made no sense at all.

In another example of the effects of this slander in the media, the rash of frivolous claims that “satanic” gangs of children at rural schools were killing each other to drink blood because they were vampires, made the local Vampyre Community very nervous indeed! The fact that the MEC for education, Barbara Creecy, threw her support behind those inciting the hysteria only made things worse for South Africa’s occult community as a whole.

To give an example of the effects of such ongoing slander and misinformation, when South Africa finally did get a formally established Satanist organization (the South African Satanic Church) in 2020, one of their reverends – and his family – received public threats of rape, assault, violence and death, at the hands of people who publicly proclaimed that they were Christians. Reverend Tristan Kapp’s crime? Apparently just being publicly known as a Satanist was enough. How dare he not burst into flames?

For many in the occult community, what made the least sense was that the individuals who had taken the spot-light as “experts in Satanism” and were perpetrating slander on the stage, radio and TV and even in court against Satanists, Pagans and occultists, had never been active participants in any of these fields, and had blatantly lied in claiming they had. It was obvious to occultists, Pagans and Satanists that nobody who had been active in a real Pagan or Satanic or occult religious organization would demonstrate such a complete lack of any working knowledge of the systems they slandered.

The Founding of the Alternative Religions Forum

In 2012, at SAPRA, members of the Executive Committee agreed that something had to be done, and some members accepted the responsibility of reaching out to other paths and social groupings within the broader occult community to begin a dialog. The purpose of this was to establish a larger voice than would result from just Pagans speaking out. Coupled with that, we as Pagans then felt that we did not wish to presume to speak out on behalf of other communities (which several times we were accused of doing, oddly enough, by fellow Pagans) and as such, while Satanists were occupying the central place in the tirade of hatred and misinformation rather than Pagans, it is true that Pagans were being misidentified with Satanism and experiencing the same stigma.

The local vampire (vampyre) subculture, having burned their fingers with one or two ill-fated attempts at educating the public about their activities and beliefs through several poorly written and sensationalist tabloid style articles in newspapers which had essentially portrayed them as 'satanists' as well, at worst - and a bunch of kooks at best, had kept their coffin lids tightly closed for some time to avoid any media contact or exposure. Pagans also did not wish to speak out for or on behalf of this community, but once approached, they seemed eager to participate in such a promising educational venture.

It has also to be said that as much as outsiders were ignorant of the nature and affairs of Paganism at the time, many if not most Pagans in the local community forums and real-world groups were equally as ignorant about the nature of religious Satanism. As a matter of fact, many were as biased and hostile towards Satanists and Satanism as Christians were towards both.

That aside, when it became known within the Pagan community forums that SAPRA intended to undertake such a project, fears that Pagans were going to have to share space with Satanists, or that Satanism was going to be included into Paganism or under the Pagan umbrella as a distinct path, abounded. I recall it led to quite a lot of arguments, and several influential Pagan leaders abruptly ended their relations with SAPRA and the SA Pagan Council too. In the end, once these fears were allayed, the project went ahead.

I'm not sure now who proposed the formation of the Alternative Religions Forum, but I do remember that it came into existence as a closed group on Facebook where representatives of several different paths of belief and/or practice were invited to participate. The SAPRA sought to represent neo-pagan paths in South Africa, and the local vampire (vampyre) subculture was represented by the SA Vampyre Alliance (SAVA). Due to the fact that there were no official Satanist religious organizations in South Africa in 2012-2013, much input was made by several local individual Satanists of different persuasions.

The goals of the project were hammered out, and it was decided that the monumental project of creating an ultimate information resource which not only explains what the participating social or religious group really was about in laymen's terms, but also to expose the lies and misinformation which had been disseminated against them for many years. It fell to me to assume the role of researcher and compiler of what became known as “the STAT document” or “Satanism: The Acid Test”, which examines the phenomena of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) propaganda and the hysteria that accompanies it, exposes the underlying foundation of “pseudo Satanism” being put forth as actual religious Satanism and as an allegory for occult religions and a myriad of subcultures by self-appointed “occult experts” - and then goes on to explain what those identities really ARE from an inside perspective.

The Alternative Religions Forum was never intended to be a long-term enterprise; in fact, it very much existed only to act as a sounding board for the material being included in the document, the way it was organized, the way it presented its argument etc. After it was completed, its members also helped to disseminate the document.

The STAT Document

The document’s goal was to provide a combined resource of educational material which would continue to debunk, expose and disarm Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) claims, and to make it a freely available resource to the entire world.

In the course of conducting this research, I interacted directly with a number of authority figures within these different communities via email and sometimes via messenger apps. I was given unparalleled communications access to some very secretive and secluded communities, and found the experience immensely interesting and enlightening!

Furthermore, the sections covering Paganism and Satanism as religions, and a section examining the Vampire subculture were each contributed to by knowledgeable authority figures and organizations from WITHIN those communities, not by outsiders. These sections were also sent to numerous international authorities within those communities to obtain their assent or approval of how their specific religion or social group was explained. This demonstrated its accuracy in as far as how it represents each of these social groupings and debunks the propaganda myths propagated against them.

Another section which focused on the nature of Satanic Ritual Abuse Hysteria was also included, which explained factors such as mythical satanism among others. I also created a website for the ARF to provide an online and public context and findable reference for the ARF – and most especially for the STAT Document. Links to various media items stored online were also provided to allow readers to find and view videos or radio shows that were referred to etc. Thus I was able to provide clear disambiguation, clarifications, explanations and examples.

Because of this approach, and because so much of the content has received the approval of various religious groups being discussed, this document is completely unique. It is not a monologue in which one religion discusses several others and paints them according to its own perceptions, understandings or dogmata.

The original document (Version 01.00 to 01.03) was distributed widely in 2013 and 2014 and made available as a free download from the ARF website, as well as on Academia.edu.

I was also honored to hand over a printed and digital copy of this document to the CLRC Commission at a seminar in Port Elizabeth in 2013 on a fact-finding tour brought about by the recent outcry about “satanism in schools”, although what has been done with it by that commission is uncertain and unclear. A PowerPoint summary of the STAT document was presented by myself, and it might be of interest to note that it was met with outright hostility by several municipal delegates who were very staunch Christians whose moustaches bristled at the prospect of hearing a “witch” speak!

Because we felt it was so important to the cause of disambiguation and clarification, the STAT document was subsequently disseminated far and wide in digital format, via email – internationally, to the UN, the FBI among others, and locally to SA government departments, newspapers and media reporters, and also to universities – local and overseas.

What was noticeable to me was that over the same period, shortly after the dissemination of the STAT document, the manner and tone in which criminal cases involving mention of "satanism" or "the occult" were reported on by media drastically changed and became far less hysterical and more objective. It was like the change between night and day. This is exactly what the ARF's objective was, and as such I feel the ARF – and SAPRA and SAVA and all of us – largely succeeded.

The Aftermath – As I Saw It

Although the Alternative Religions Forum remained active for a short time after the release of the STAT document, it never again held any more meetings, and over time, dissolved.

The SAPRA still operates as a SA Pagan community-based organization, although I ceased to be a member of it in early 2018.

For me the sad part of reviewing the public comments on such news articles (most recently the attack on reverend Kapp and lately the Daniel Smit/Klawer Killer case for example) is realizing that while we appear to have made great strides in getting the media to report more factually and more objectively on such cases, the ordinary public still lingers under the false information spread by churches and their pop-cult "warfare ministry" influences - still freely peddling that nonsense with impunity, and has a long way to go in catching up.

Christian zealots posing as “experts on Satanism” or even as “ex-Satanists” (e.g. Adele Neveling, 2 who demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge of Satanism) mislead their audiences into believing a version of fantasy that never happened, and lead them into a fantasy world of lies, fear, hysteria and superstition. A book recently published, supposedly by an investigative journalist, and which covered the recent "Krugersdorp Killers" aka "Electus Per Deus” case, presents the actions of individuals who were literally members of a Christian cult which had nothing at all to do with Satanism, as an alleged “satanic murder spree” complete with imagery related to Satanism on the cover for sensational effect. The ordinary public it seems, is still very susceptible to propaganda and lies as long as they come wrapped in religion.

The typical self-proclaimed "experts on Satanism" who gain the media spotlight whenever such contentious cases make the headlines, know nothing about the religious groups they slander. Rather they only "know" what their own religious upbringing or indoctrination has taught them to believe about these groups, their beliefs and their practices. In finding an outlet for their misinformation, they continue to render irreparable harm to the lives and reputations of people they generally incite intolerance against.

An aspect of the present-day South Africa - a country whose Constitution defines the state as essentially secular - is the overwhelming prevalence of Christianity being proselytized and pandered to by the state and in its own organs and mechanisms throughout. For example, military and SAPS parades are still conducted under the auspices of a Christian chaplain and the Christian religion; public schools are rife with Christian-centered indoctrination and misinformation about other religions, occult religions in particular - and while individuals supposedly cannot be forced to attend Christian religious ceremonies in the workplace, it seems that a lot of the checks and balances intended to prevent such blatant circumvention of the mandate of the state to remain separate from religion are simply being ignored and have been increasingly so since 2009, when then president Jacob Zuma first aligned himself and the ANC and government, with the Rhema cult.

Manic street preachers continue to accost strangers on the public street with Christian proselytizing, openly preaching stochastic terrorism against occult religions. Even though it is illegal to do so in a public space, policemen will not caution these individuals, nor fine, move them along, nor arrest them. Complainants are told to "show respect" to the Christian religion - while their rights and they themselves are being disrespected. That's quite a slap in the face.

Even now in 2022, the SAPS still maintains a watered-down and low-key version of Kobus Jonker's original "Occult Related Crimes Unit" of 1992 - the "Harmful Religious Practices Unit" staffed by evangelical Christians - but the fact that it still exists at all - and on the tax payer's dime - to focus on policing belief rather than focusing on criminal activity, is a violation of the bill of rights.

Government is not supposed to allow it to happen - and whether they know this or not, they blatantly keep on doing it anyway.

Under the Constitution, the democratic right to religious freedom - including freedom from religion - does not rest on the weight of numbers.

It's clear that there is still a lot of work to be done from an advocacy standpoint.

In Conclusion

The STAT document was not the last document I compiled on the subject or in service of this cause, but it is the longest and most well-known.

In January 2021 I wrote three more papers with the aim of disambiguation, and dispelling myths and misinformation around aspects of Satanism and the occult.

Together with “Satanism: The Acid Test”, these three papers are listed as information resources on the website of the SA Satanic Church. They are also freely available alongside the STAT document on Academia. I also updated the STAT document in February 2021.

Thank you for your interest and attention!

Cheers!