Satanic Panic

This scene of a man-in-the-moon with thirteen stars might strike a vague familiarity with you. And perhaps if you were alive in the United States during the 1980s, it might evoke a sinister connotation. And if that’s the case, you were tangentially affected by the “Satanic Panic” of that decade.

Dungeons and Dragons, various rock musical groups, and the corporation Proctor and Gamble were all part of this paranoid soup, in which rumors abounded that demons and devils and Satan were stealthily and hideously infesting ordinary American culture (and especially young people). The Proctor and Gamble thing is one of the weirder ones in an admittedly strange conglomerate of accusations.

This logo was made in 1930, but it was in the 1980s that rumors that the company owners had sold their souls to the devil began. A man named Jim Peters, a musical director at the Zion Christian Life Center at St Paul, Minnesota, was one of those making the claims. Newspapers also reported allegations that, once ignited, were difficult to quell. Eventually Proctor and Gamble won a lawsuit against the company Amway, whose distributors were found sending out recorded messages that PG&E profits were going to the coffers of the Church of Satan.

The links to Satan could be seen, so went the accusations, in the iconic image of the man in the moon. The beard curled into the number 6, and the number of curls (and somehow other connecting patterns) all added up to the number 666. It didn’t, of course, and even the Church of Satan denied the connection, but the company was so hard hit that they ended the image for several decades, only re-instating it in 2013, after the defamation lawsuit had been won.