THE SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE PANIC AS RELIGIOUS-STUDIESDATA DAVID F RANKFURTER Summary Rumors and alleged memories of Satanic cult activity swept through the U.S. and U.K. during the 1980s and 1990s, confounding scholars of religion, as well as jurists and psychologists, with their combination of tantalizing ritual scenes and dubious forensic evidence. This essay discusses the work done on these Satanic cult claims since the early 1990s in a variety of academic elds; and it critiques some of the scholarly responses from the eld of Religious Studies in particular. From the 1980s through the 1990s panic spread through the United States and United Kingdom about widespread Satanic cults, engag- ing in sexual abuse, infant sacrice, perverse ceremonies, and mind- control. The cults — I use the term in its mythically negative rather than scientic sense — were believed to be well-organized, intergenera- tional, permeating police forces and government, and dedicated only to the promulgation of evil. Those who saw themselves in the front line of combat against these insidious groups were psychotherapists and child-welfare advocates, standing alone in their convictions in the credibility of the “victims” while receiving — they claimed — bizarre threats from the cults. Out of this vanguard of cult-abuse profession- als arose a new diagnostic/criminological category: “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (hereafter: SRA) (Sakheim and Devine 1992; Sinason 1994; Rose 1996; Noblitt and Perskin 2000; ra-info 2002). By the mid-1990s, the number of people accused (and often convicted) of SRA — daycare workers and parents, mostly in America and England — numbered in the hundreds. The subject of Satanic cults, rituals of evil, and blood sacrices should invite the interest of students and historians of religion. How- ever, the encounter of such a diverse discipline as Religious Studies with the kinds of data that the panics offered has led to widely diver- © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden (2003) NUMEN, Vol. 50 Also available online – www.brill.nl