Lazarus Long said:
The truth is that primitive people have some very nasty rituals, this includes primitive white people. For all of the "one with nature" celtic stuff, the bottom like is that you had tons of torture and murder being committed by pre-christian religions. Some of the sites are pretty disturbing, and once in a while they do shows on this kind of thing but few people put all the pieces together. As time went on, these beliefs never really disappeared, and you had people doing nasty things in secret because it was tradition. To a Christian anything not frm god is from Satan, so these people were Satanists even if they did not specifically worship the devil. Given that Christianity wrecked these cultures and drove them underground, these people trying to invoke their own religion against it probably didn't help matters (and the darker the magic, the nastier the requirements as well). This is of course to say nothing of actual, bona-fide Satanists, which of course themselves developed as a knee-jerk opposition to Christian domination. I think it was one of those "strange but true" real-life supernatural shows when I was a kid, but apparently there have been Satanic lairs uncovered in places like Paris. One of them had like hundreds of baby skulls set into the walls around the alter, and is probably the inspiration for tales that Satanists are still abducting and killing babies today. You look at some of that stuff and it's pretty easy to see where the whole school of "The Witch Hunters were right" dark-fantasy fiction comes from, especially when it's set decades, or centuries before things like what happened in Salem.
You're mostly right, and it wouldn't suprise me if the witchhunts were the same old politicized religon bullshit to push worldly agendas, much like the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of today. The only thing I take issue to is the baby killing Satanist thing. They never existed. They're a convenient boogeyman for all the conspiracy loving, "Real, True Christian" slacktivists that like pretending they're holy warriors fighting the armies of darkness from their sofas while never having to lift a finger to feed the hungry, shelter the poor, heal the sick, etc. Basically claiming to be #1 Jesus follower, without hearing or doing anything Jesus taught us to do.
About Paris, I believe you're referring to the catacombs beneath the city. They are indeed full of human bones set into the walls, but those are adult bones. Monks, infact- countless monks gave their remains to be used in the "decoration" of their undergound cathedrals. It's kinda weird.
