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Frankfurter's book, Evil Incarnate, is a scholarly, interdisciplinary work grounded in meticulous research. Moving through history and across cultures, the author meditates on mankind's darkest imaginings about the nature of Otherness. Entwining religious studies, cultural studies and psychoanalysis, Frankfurter articulates the recurrent myth of ‘evil incarnate’. This is a fictive theatre of demonic practices, through which the Other infiltrates our goodness. The author suggests that, in moments of social crisis, collective vision tends to conjure the Other's religious practices as a series of ritual inversions, perversions and monstrosities. This is a projective percept, in which the violation of our taboos is attributed to the Other.
This phenomenon changes throughout history, and, yet, it retains certain motifs. It imagines the Other as formalizing malignant spiritual rituals: orgies, incest, bloodletting and cannibalism; the sacrifice of our children on the altar of Satan. In the myth of ‘evil incarnate’, such practices refuse to stay at the margins. They insinuate themselves into ‘us’ through invisible, and unholy predations. Once a culture is convinced that there is a demonic presence, mass panics and persecutions ensue. In the process, ‘evidence’ is produced by performative role taking. ‘Evidence’ is ‘found’ by self-anointed exorcist-priests, who gain power and social stature through their unique capacity to detect unseen ‘evil’. ‘Evidence’ is confessed under torture; it is proffered by ‘victims’ in the sway of mass hysteria. It is entered as fact into histories, ethnographies and religious texts. Then these texts legitimize the next ‘discovery’ of demonic presence.
Frankfurter's thesis is sustained by exhaustive references to the medieval witch hunts and the Jewish blood libel. But his particular focus is the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) panic that occurred in the United States in the 1990s. His persuasive argument is that SRA accusations were only the most rece