In researching the history of child molestation, and ritual abuse I came across this site [www.psychohistory.com] (The site also does an interesting
diagnoses of George Bush Sr., Reagan, JFK, Saddam)
I've read many of the reports and although I have some reason to be skeptical of some of the observations (I believe there were subcultures who did
not practice this), the information is very enlightening to the situation of societies mixed with pedophilia and how a system as such can survive.
I hold the belief that history repeats itself until we collectively change it, these rituals and cruelties are very old and cross many cultures. They
have not went away but have just gone underground,
...
www.psychohistory.com...
During the past three decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life examining primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor's reports,
ethnographic reports and other documents that document what it must have felt like to have been a child--yesterday and today, in the East and the
West, in literate and preliterate cultures.
In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history
of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from
the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten,
terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.
Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of
children. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional
problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis. Most
historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest. Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of
adults. Even today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children through our social, military and
economic activities. I would like to summarize here some of the evidence I have found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and
most successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social violence, and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the most important
social task we face today.
...
Children were particularly useful as poison containers when adults felt anxious about recent or impending success. Success stirs up superego
retaliation, and the sacrifice of children to appease the gods--that is, the punitive parents--was an extremely widespread guilt-reducing device. Most
early states practiced child sacrifice. Typical was Carthage, where a large cemetery has been discovered called The Tophet filled with over 20,000
urns deposited there between 400 and 200 B.C. The urns contained bones of children sacrificed by their parents, who often would make a vow to kill
their next child if the gods would grant them a favor--for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port. Some urns
contain the bones of stillborn babies along with the bones of two-year-olds, indicating that if the promised child was not born alive, an older child
had also to be killed to satisfy the promise. The sacrifice was accompanied by a music, wild dancing and riotous orgy, and was probably accompanied by
the ritual rape of virgin girls, as it was with the Incans. Plutarch told how the priests would "cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or
young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan [while] the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and
drums..." Sacrifice, rape and genital mutilation of young girls continues to take place today in the Andean mountains, particularly to ward off the
guilt coming after successful coc aine deliveries. These ceremonies, from antiquity to today, resemble closely the satanic rituals made familiar
recently in the newspapers, using the infliction of rape, sexual mutilation and other horrors in order to visit upon child victims elements of the
traumas of the satanists' own childhood.
That child sacrifice was carried out mainly by the rich in each of these early societies confirms my theory that it is a guilt-reducing technique.
Whenever new ventures were begun, children would be sacrificed. Whenever a new building or bridge was built, a child would be buried within it as a
"foundation sacrifice." Children still play at capturing a child and making it part of the bridge in "London Bridge's Falling Down." Children's
bodies were particularly useful in curing disease. Whatever one's physical ills, a child could be used to "absorb" the poison that was responsible.
When, for instance, one wanted to be cured of leprosy, one was supposed to kill a child and wash one's body in its blood. When one wanted to find out
if a house whose previous occupants had died of plague was still infected or not, one rented some children to live in it for several weeks to see if
they died--rather like the use of canaries in mines to detect poisonous gas. When one was impotent, depressed or had venereal disease, doctors
prescribed having intercourse with a child. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, men who were brought into Old Bailey for having raped young
girls were let go because "they believed that they were curing themselves of venereal disease." Raping virgins was particularly effective for
impotence and depression; as one medical book put it, "Breaking a maiden's seal is one of the best antidotes for one's ills. Cudgeling her
unceasingly, until she swoons away, is a might remedy for man's depression. It cures all impotence." And, of course, whenever a parent had a
disease, they always had their children handy to absorb the poison. Thus British doctors in the nineteenth century regularly found when visiting men
who had venereal disease that their children also had the same disease--on their mouths, anuses or genitals...