When Lucifer Came to Sweden: Satanic Panic, Conspiracism and the Swedish Reception of Leo Taxil at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Facts
- Contact person:
- Johan Nilsson
- Financer:
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- The Crafoord Foundation
- Responsible at MaU:
- Manon Hedenborg White
- Project members at MaU:
- Time frame:
- 01 September 2026 - 31 August 2029
- Faculty/department:
- Research subject:
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- Religious Studies
- History of Religions
About the project
The project investigates how and why conspiracy theories and accusations of Satanism are disseminated, adapted, and employed through a qualitative study of allegations of devil worship, Luciferianism, and Satanism in the Swedish daily press during the period 1892-1914. During the early 1890s, stories about devil worshippers spread in the Swedish press in the wake of several high-profile publications in France authored under the pseudonym Léo Taxil. In the media, groups that were variously described as Satanists and Luciferians were portrayed as a secret, worldwide sect exercising a dangerous influence on society. Taxil himself exposed his publications as a fraud only a few years later. Despite the fact that the hoax became known in Sweden, stories about Satanists continued to gain traction in Swedish public discourse, and Swedish writers continued, even after the Taxil hoax had been exposed, to invoke alleged Satanic conspiracies in their polemics against contemporary religious movements and social trends.
A fertile ground for conspiracies
A starting point for the project is that religious and social tensions create fertile ground for the spread of conspiracy theories and accusations of Satanism, and that Swedish news reporting on alleged Satanists should be understood in light of conflicts concerning the role of religion in society at the turn of the twentieth century.
Through a qualitative textual analysis of approximately fifty relevant newspaper articles, the project contributes empirical and theoretical knowledge in three areas:
- Accusations of Satanism, which, despite lacking empirical support, have achieved widespread circulation on several occasions during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with later accusations drawing ideational inspiration from the narratives examined in the project.
- The role of religion in the dissemination of conspiracy theories.
- Conflicts and polemics in Sweden's development toward religious pluralism.