Kern County ritual-abuse prosecutions: dozens convicted, most convictions later overturned

Kenaz Filan is the pen name of another of the most prominent authors on Vodou in America. In a 2016 essay published under that name, Filan announced his own turn to the far right, in his own words: 'Why would an initiate in Haitian Vodou support folkish Heathens? Why would an author on African Diaspora traditions associate with racists and anti-Semites?... Not long after Annamaria's birth I realized I had no Vodou books on the back burner and little desire to write more on the topic. There were plenty of Haitians out there ready and willing to take on non-Haitian students. Aspiring Vodouisants needed me like the 1950s needed Pat Boone..... Many of the Alternative Right's foot soldiers get their cues from 4chan's Politically Incorrect board: Kek and Shlomo 'Happy Merchant' Shekelberg got their start where Pepe took his first redpill. Much Alternative Right discussion is loudly, even gleefully, racist and anti-Semitic. The Daily Stormer describes itself as 'the World's #1 Alternative Right and Pro-Genocide Website'... By 2023 the majority of American babies will be non-White: by 2042 there will be more non-White than White Americans. We must now redefine ourselves as part of a multicultural mosaic. But any effort to identify as White and to promote White interests is immediately dismissed as 'racism.'... And so I found my political views drifting toward the Alternative Right.'

Bertiaux's own published Voudon Gnostic Workbook contains the following first-person passage, in which the narrator describes an encounter that moves from eroticism toward the reader's 'sacrificial death.' It is reproduced here so readers can judge the text for themselves: 'While you were bathing, I decided to join you, and, making another drink for each of us, came to the bathroom. It was there that I noticed the particular suitability of your body for the deeper aspects of my research. As I slowly began to mesmerize you in an erotic sense, I realized that you were more suitable for another and more profound type of consciousness. You seemed to be so full of a basic energy, and I wanted to bring out that energy more and more. As I held you very close, I slowly began to test your skin for where I might be invited to make entry. My lips and tongue began to explore, seeking that secret space where my teeth might make the first magickal mark. It was obvious that this was a type of erotic exercise to you, but to me it went beyond eros; it was approaching more the question of your sacrificial death. Your total surrender to this ideal was necessary. Not that I was any kind of vampire, for my lineage is more hot-blooded, more violent, more destructive and chaotic. I really wanted to strangle you. I really wanted to squeeze the breath of life from you. I wanted to grab your throat and press it inwardly to its limits. I had you on the floor and you seemed to be aware of what was happening. You seemed to realize that there was something more than just sexuality at work. Your instinct could read my mind, and you realized that I was trying to harm you. Your nakedness beneath the hairs of my body began a vain struggle. I really wanted you to struggle. I wanted to show you that there wasn't any escape from what was to happen. From what must happen. I wanted you to try and fight back, and perhaps you wanted to also, but you did not appear to be able to.' Bertiaux, now nearly 90, remains widely revered within the occult community, and this passage sits in a foundational text of that tradition.

Walter Breen — numismatist, husband of author Marion Zimmer Bradley, and a fixture of the pagan-adjacent fandom milieu of the era: 'Breen was initially convicted of child molestation or lewd behavior in Atlantic City in 1954... Breen was again arrested on child molestation charges in 1990. He accepted a plea bargain... A year later, he was charged with eight felony counts of child molestation involving a 13-year-old boy... he was sentenced to 10 years in prison' and 'died in prison in Chino, California, on April 27, 1993.' Per the record of the ensuing civil litigation, Bradley herself 'was aware of her husband's behavior and chose not to report him.' Her daughter Moira Greyland later 'accused Bradley of sexual abuse from the ages of 3 to 12'. Note the tiers: Breen's convictions are court fact; Bradley's knowledge is established in her own testimony of record; Greyland's accusation against Bradley herself was published in 2014 and was never adjudicated — Bradley died in 1999.

Doctrine-encoded abuse in print, and a community's repudiation of it: Gavin and Yvonne Frost's 1972 'Witch's Bible' drew decades of condemnation over 'the book's contents, specifically those pages describing the sexual initiation of children.' Per the Pagan press itself: 'It was considered highly controversial from the day it was released... and has been openly rejected by many ever since. Protests over that content have erupted as recently as this past spring.' Note: no criminal case was ever brought over the text; this entry documents published doctrine and the community's own sustained rejection of it — the same documentary category as David Berg's directives above.