By: David Bloomberg
Re: Selling Satan


From: Tad Cook 
To: MIT.EDU!witchhunt (witchhunt)


I just finished reading SELLING SATAN by Mike Hertenstein & John
Trott (1993, Cornerstone, Chicago, IL) and I wanted to post a note
recommending this book.  I'm not sure, but I may have first heard of
it on this forum some time back.

Its about evangelist Mike Warnke, who wrote a book in the 1970s
called The Satan Seller and built a lucrative mass-media ministry
based upon lurid tales of his alleged former life as a satanist.

Hertenstein and Trott are a couple of evangelist journalists who
came out of the charismatic Jesus movement of the early 1970s and
did what no other journalists had done before with Warnke's claims;
they did some digging, talked to people who knew him during the
period when he allegedly was a satanist, and discovered that just
about everything that Warnke claimed about himself was a lie.

What is so important about Warnke was that it was his claims which
fueled a lot of the satanic panics and rumors over the past decade.

Another related book that I highly recommend is SATANIC PANIC by
Jeffrey Victor.

If I recall correctly from Victor's book, he has traced a number
of satanic panics to Warnke's appearances on network television.


tad@ssc.com | Tad Cook | Seattle, WA | Ham Radio: KT7H | The general root of
superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and
commit to memory the one, and pass over the other-Sir Francis Bacon 1561-1626