A hunter in the Southern Arizona desert scrub comes across a remote site with rectangular pit a couple of feet wide, a couple of yards long, and several feet deep. Nearby is a circle of stones with the remnants of a bonfire and an area of ground cleared of brush and scuffed up. What has he stumbled upon?
Last week I talked about the teenagers dabbling in their interpretation of satanism and the destructive nature of their made-up rituals. When I moved to Arizona in 1989, I met a Pima County Deputy Sheriff, “Sam,” who was his department’s expert on ritualistic scenes.
In conversations with Sam, I learned that the type of destructive behavior I had observed at Plano Police Department in the mid-1980s was not common in Southern Arizona. Sam said that one of his biggest headaches came from ritual sites out in the desert, far removed from private property. He described scenes with what looked like freshly dug graves, bonfires, and circles of cleared and trampled dirt where dancing might have taken place.
Most often, one of these sites would be discovered by a hunter searching for game on government owned land. The hunter would panic and report that devil worshipers had dug a grave and were going to kill somebody, or already had even in the absence of a body.
Sam would go out and look at the site, then contact some of his pagan friends in the area and ask them about the site. Invariably, it had been the scene of the induction of a new member into a pagan coven.
Analogous to a baptism by immersion or “dunking” in water in a Christian church, some of the covens of pagans in the Southern Arizona held a ceremony in which the proselyte was “reborn” into the coven. The ceremony involved the person going down into the “grave,” then emerging into the new belief system.
There was nothing criminal or satanic about it and generally, Sam would ask the covens to simply fill in the holes and restore the landscape so some uninformed passerby would not be shocked in the mistaken belief that satanic murders were taking place.
