The Shared Origins of Reptilian & Ritual Abuse Conspiracy Theories
I recently saw somebody out there posting conspiracy theories about reptilian aliens, and I figured it was a good time to do a new post on the topic. But as I wrote this I realized I was also describing the history of ritual abuse conspiracy theories, so I guess this is a post that’s going to address both topics.
So, if you spend enough time in certain corners of the Internet, you will sooner or later come across conspiracy theories about a race of shapeshifting reptilian aliens that drink blood and control the world behind the scenes. Supposedly, these beings have been here since ancient times. Depending on who you ask, they may have even genetically engineered the human species.
There’s also been a huge resurgence in ritual abuse conspiracy theories lately, with lots of people claiming there’s all of these people out there performing horrible ritualistic tortures on people for the purpose of mind control. (This sometimes overlaps with reptilian conspiracy theories.)
Unfortunately, far too few people who come across this stuff actually do the research to find out where – and who – it all came from. They just take the claims at face value and don’t really question the conspiratorial narratives. So let’s take a look at the actual origins of this stuff.
To understand where this really comes from, we have to go back to the ancient northern Mediterranean and look at how ancient Greeks and Romans elites demonized worshipers of Dionysus. Elite classical Greeks perceived Dionysus as an uncouth, uncivilized god, and perceived his worshipers the same way. (Just look at the story of Orpheus, which ends with Orpheus ripped apart by maenads - female followers of Dionysus.) The rejection of Dionysus grew so strong that people began claiming he wasn’t even a real Greek god at all – they started claiming he’d been imported from Asia. (More information.)
The hatred and fear of Dionysus’s worshipers grew so strong that in Rome in 186 BCE, the cult of Bacchus (Bacchus being Dionysus’s Roman counterpart) was violently suppressed. (More information.) Two hundred years later, Livy wrote an account which claimed that a former slave had revealed that Bacchanalians had practiced the most scandalously immoral rituals one could possibly imagine. (You can read Livy’s account of the matter here – and I strongly recommend you do, because you can see how this lays the groundwork for many of today’s ritual abuse conspiracy theories.)
It wasn’t only Bacchanalians who were subjected to this kind of slander in the ancient world. In the second century BCE, Jews were believed to conduct human sacrifices in the forests – we know this because the Greek writer Apion wrote down such a claim. (More information.) I’ve never seen anyone make this connection before, but the similarity between tales of murderous maenads and the claims made by Apion suggests to me that claims of Jewish ritual murder were influenced by prior claims of Dionysian ritual murder. In other words – Greeks respun a narrative used to demonize an unwanted native element into a narrative to demonize an unwanted foreign element.
In any case, narratives of ritual abuse and murder would be respun again to demonize early Christians. In the second century, Roman Christians were accused of practicing cannibalism and sexual immortality. (More information.) In the third century, an Egyptian gnostic sect we know only by the name their enemies gave them (“Borborites”) would be accused of consuming semen and menstrual blood in their rituals. (More information.)
In the fifth century, Socrates Scholasticus wrote of an alleged (and almost certainly fictitious) incident where a group of rowdy Jews crucified and scourged a Christian boy. The tale which bears a strong resemblance to Apion’s earlier claims that Jews would ritually sacrifice Greeks in the forest, which as mentioned before, bears a strong resemblance to tales of murderous maenads.
These narratives would be weaponized against European Jews throughout the Middle Ages, with Jews blamed for the deaths and disappearances of children. (If you would like to see examples, I recommend Jewitches’ blood libel article.)
In the 14th century, these conspiracy theories would be respun by King Philip IV of France to demonize the Knights Templar. (More information.) Accusations of heresy and moral depravity gave the king pretense to murder them an seize their wealth.
In the early modern period, they would be respun the narratives that fueled the witch hunts. (I encourage you to take a look at my post where I write out a list of claims made by the people who pushed witch panic and promoted blood libel, and compare them to Livy’s account of the cult of Bacchus.)
As more people embraced democracy, rationality, and atheism throughout the early modern and modern periods, many who felt threatened (ie, those who favored monarchy and theocracy) respun conspiracy theories about Satan-worshiping Templars, Jews, and witches into conspiracy theories about Satanic secret societies. In the 18th century, conspiracy theories about Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati came into being.
In the 19th century, a Presbyterian minster named Alexander Hislop claimed that the Catholic Church was an evil human-sacrificing religion. He made up an elaborate narrative where he claimed that the Church was the modern form of an ancient Babylonian mystery cult formed shortly after the Great Flood. The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous, and if you’d like learn more about it I have a post here.
And because Jews never stopped being Europe’s favorite scapegoats and punching bags, both secret societies and the Catholic Church were eventually connected to them. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion claimed Jews were behind secret societies (while also promoting the myth of the international Jewish conspiracy.) And today, various Protestant, pagan, and New Age conspiracy theorists believe that the Catholic Church was created by the “globalists” or the “New World Order” – both dog whistle terms for Jews.
Thus we have over two thousand years’ worth of history showing us that conspiracy theories of ritual abuse (which inevitably included immoral sex, cannibalism, and murder) have been weaponized against various people.
In the 20th century, numerous people respun these conspiracy theories yet again. They formed the foundations of allegations of satanic ritual abuse and trauma-based mind control (the alleged art of using torture to give people dissociative identity disorder and create bespoke alters to perform whatever roles or tasks the programmer desires).
As with every other generation of ritual abuse allegations, no hard evidence was ever found to corroborate it. (I have some examples of what hard evidence might include in this post.) There was evidence of ordinary (if severe) abuse. There were things that superficially resembled evidence of satanic ritual abuse, such as candles and Halloween masks. But ultimately, these things did not prove that their owners were engaging in SRA or TBMC any more than owning a black cat or having a skin tag proved that one was practicing witchcraft.
Proponents continue to assert that the perpetrators simply hide or destroy all hard evidence. However, to claim that the conspirators are so competent that they’ve been able to hide or destroy everything for over half a century while somehow being unable to stop the bulk of the alleged victims who come out and start spilling all of their secrets is absurd.
In New Age and UFOlogist communities, the conspiracy was extended to outer space. In the first half of the 20th century, antisemitic propaganda dehumanized Jews by portraying them as demons and various animals, which included snakes. (Some examples: 1, 2, 3, 4.) In 1953, George Hunt Williamson published Other Tongues – Other Flesh. In Chapter 6, the book describes a race of aliens from Orion and informs us that they were the “serpent people” of old. The book says of them:
They prey on the unsuspecting; they are talkative; they astound intellects with their words of magnificence. While their wisdom may have merit, it is materialistic, and not of pure aspiration toward the Father. Later, it says The "Serpent People" of ancient legend are believed to have been Orion intelligences projected earthward.
I can’t say for certain who all was responsible for developing the myth of a global conspiracy orchestrated by reptilian aliens. I know multiple people played a role, including but not limited to Barbara Marciniak, Arthur David Horn, and David Icke. (Icke did not, as many believe, invent the idea. He was simply more brazen than most in proclaiming it.)
Today’s reptilian alien mythology has effectively come to include just about every far right conspiracy theory under the sun. Saying the quiet part out loud in The Biggest Secret (published in 1999) David Icke proclaimed that The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion described a genuine alien conspiracy:
The so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion were discovered in the last century and tell in incredible detail the events and methods of manipulation we have seen manifest in the 20th century. ... I don’t accept that the Protocols are ‘Jewish’ in the way people have come to understand that term. They are the work of the reptile-Aryans and made to appear ‘Jewish’ so that we lose the plot.
And make no mistake – although Icke tries to position himself as Not Antisemitic, he is most definitely antisemitic. He claims that Ashkenazi Jews aren’t actually real Jews because they aren’t genetically descended from “real” Jews:
What we call the Jewish race also originated in the Caucasus region and not, as claimed, in Israel. Jewish historical and anthropological sources have shown that only a few of the people known as Jewish have any genetic connection to Israel. In the 8th century a people called the Khazars living in the Caucasus Mountains and southern Russia had a mass conversion to the Jewish religion. Later when that empire folded, these same people made their way north over a long period of time to settle in other parts of Russia, Lithuania and Estonia. From there they entered Western Europe and eventually the United States. The Rothschild family is one of these bloodlines.
For the moment, we’ll set aside the fact that the Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry has been discredited, and that only conspiracy theorists believe in it. The very idea that your true ethnicity is determined by your genetics (as opposed to the culture you belong to and participate in) is a western European idea meant to enforce racialism and justify genocide. Policies such as the one drop rule, blood quantum, and the Mischling test, have all been used to these ends.
Judaism does not use whiteness’s rules to decide who is and isn’t Jewish. Someone who converts to Judaism is a Jew, whether they are white, Black, East Asian, Native American, or anything. It is inherently antisemitic for a gentile like David Icke to act as if he can decree the rules on who is and isn’t Jewish.
The Protocols, of course, have been thoroughly exposed as a hoax. Passages within the text have been identified as coming from Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu), an anti-Napoleon satire by Maurice Joly. There’s a side-by-side comparison of some of the similarities between the texts on Wikipedia.
(If you have not done so already, I strongly recommend that you read my post summing up the type of content in The Protocols.)
Reptilian alien mythology has also incorporated various forms of blood libel. Barbara Marciniak, supposedly channeling Pleiadian entities in the late 1980's, claimed that they quite literally feed on fear. Her claim was cited and repeated by Arthur David Horn in Humanity’s Extraterrestrial Origins (published in 1994).
Icke also quoted a woman named Christine Fitzgerald, who claimed that the royal family are reptiles that feed on fear. (Fitzgerald claimed she was a close friend of Princess Diana, but of course no one has been able to confirm this.)
David Icke also wrote:
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, which together make up the ‘Jewish’ Torah, were all written by the Levites or under their supervision during or after their period in Babylon. This bunch of human sacrificing, blood drinking fanatics and black magicians, who you would not trust to tell you the time, compiled the law which Jewish people to this day are supposed to follow. Likewise many Christian fanatics quote this stuff as the word of God! It is not the word of God, it is the word of the Levites under the direction of the reptile full-bloods and crossbreeds of the Babylonian Brotherhood.
These are literally old antisemitic ritual abuse conspiracy theories in a new guise. (The idea that Judaism itself an evil creation isn’t new, either – this one goes all the way back to early Christianity. Marcionism is an example of this.)
As to why they drink blood and hold these evil rituals, Icke writes:
The reptilians and their crossbreeds drink blood because they are drinking the person’s life-force and because they need it to exist in this dimension. They will often shape-shift into reptilians when drinking human blood and eating human flesh, I am told by those who have seen this happen. Blood drinking is in their genes and an Elite high priestess or ‘Mother Goddess’ in the hierarchy, who performed rituals for the Brotherhood at the highest level, told me that without human blood the reptilians cannot hold human form in this dimension. Her name is Arizona Wilder, formerly Jennifer Ann Greene. Interestingly, she said that the reptilians had been pursuing the Aryan peoples around the universe, because the blood of the white race was particularly important to them for some reason and the blond- haired, blue-eyed genetic stream was the one they wanted more than any other. ... Satanism is based on the manipulation of energy and consciousness. These deeply sick rituals create an energy field, a vibrational frequency, which connects the consciousness of the participants to the reptilians and other consciousness of the lower fourth dimension. This is the dimensional field, also known as the lower astral to many people, which resonates to the frequency of low vibrational emotions like fear, guilt, hate and so on. When a ritual focuses these emotions, as Satanism does, a powerful connection is made with the lower fourth dimension, the reptilians. These are some of the ‘demons’ which these rituals have been designed to summon since this whole sad story began thousands of years ago. This is when so much possession takes place and the reptilians take over the initiate’s physical body. The leading Satanists are full-blood reptilians cloaked in a human form.
Icke informs us that Arizona Wilder had been introduced to him by a friend who’d been “deprogramming” her shortly before the book was sent off to print. At some point after writing the book he filmed an interview with her, titled Revelations of a Mother Goddess. Wilder claimed (and likely believed herself to be) a survivor of SRA/TBMC. Her claims are very similar to material found in the works of Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler. She claimed she was a generational satanist born into the Illuminati, programmed by Josef Mengele (whom she knew as Dr. Green or Greenbaum) for a high-profile role (allegedly she was programmed to be one of three “mother goddesses”), and spent time among numerous high-profile people. She alluded to emerald programming and ribbon programming, and claimed she had Janus programming. She described a number of the usual alleged tortures, which I won’t go into here for the sake of those who might be affected by descriptions of torture. I will suffice it to say that it’s the kind of stuff conspiracy theorists typically use to evoke shock and outrage in credulous audiences. The main difference between her and others like her is that she asserts that the elite are actually shapeshifting space lizards.
Now, the entire concept of “deprogramming” as understood by people who believe in SRA/TBMC conspiracy theories is total malarkey. Nearly anything could be interpreted as a symptom of SRA and/or TBMC, including symptoms that could be explained by trauma sustained from ordinary (if severe) abuse, non-abusive traumatic events, autism, ADHD, OCD, psychosis, allergies, and various chronic conditions. Certain interests and preferences (such as being interested in the occult or liking to wear black) could be interpreted as evidence of SRA/TBMC as well. (Here are some examples, if you’d like to see for yourself: 1, 2, 3, 4. Content warning for potentially upsetting/triggering content. If you do read them, note how many of these things are symptoms of autism!)
Plenty of material promoting this kind of stuff was available to the public. Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who had treated Michelle Smith, became a kind of celebrity expert after the publication of Michelle Remembers in 1978. (Pazder coined the term “satanic ritual abuse.”) His professional credentials helped him legitimize what we can now easily recognize as a new spin on ancient conspiracy theories in the eyes of doctors and law enforcement. The 1988 book The Courage to Heal irresponsibly told people that if they felt like something happened, then it probably happened. People made websites that promoted this kind of stuff as early as the 1990s (some examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and made communities for those who claimed to be survivors. Oprah promoted alleged ritual abuse survivors on her show (1, 2), and Geraldo Rivera promoted the myth.
(All of this means that claims that people "remembered" SRA without ever hearing about it from someone else cannot be taken seriously. It was simply too widely-publicized.)
Essentially, people could fairly easily come across material that could convince them they’d survived SRA/TBMC, and numerous therapists would assume SRA/TBMC was responsible for their clients’ problems, and people without any sort of medical training whatsoever might take it upon themselves to “help” someone try and remember the memories they’d allegedly repressed.
Hypnosis and guided imagery techniques were popular tools, but they weren’t strictly necessary. The main thing was getting the patient to imagine up a scenario that aligned with the conspiracy theories, then reassure them that it must be real because they’d never make up anything so horrible. Dreams and random thoughts would be treated as recovered memories, and patients would be instructed to ignore any sense of doubt and not to worry about anything that might suggest that the “memory” wasn’t actually factual. (If you’d like to learn more about how people were treated, you can read this post.)
In other words, these people were misled through bad epistemology. They were taught to think unicorns rather than horses when they saw hoofprints, and were taught that things they thought of in their minds (providing they aligned with what the therapist/deprogrammer wanted to hear) should be valued over actual empirical evidence. Simply put, it’s a form of manipulation and brainwashing. Arizona Wilder, it seems, was another victim of this quackery.
Those who believe in SRA/TBMC conspiracy theories without the space lizards often think of themselves as smarter and more rational than those who do. And yet, they accept the same fundamental ideas and assumptions as legitimate. And if anything, they’re actually worse than the people who believe in reptilians because their takes these hoary old myths are more plausible to the average person, and therefore more likely to do harm.
In parting, I will leave you with the only passage from Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder that actually matters - this text written by Chris Healey, a police officer who investigated allegations of SRA in the UK:
People have been named, but it's not been possible to identify them. Usually the name cannot be traced, the address does not exist, or the phone number is wrong. I've been looking for 15 years, and I've tried very hard to find proof. I've dug up fields, set up cameras, and looked down wells where bones were supposed to have been thrown, and I've found nothing that can be independently linked to the allegations.
Or in other words... it just doesn't exist.
