Other Altars: Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder [first edition]

255 Pages plus 17 pages of Notes, References, and a List of Prosecutions. A used as new book with no defects noted and with interior text pages that are near flawless. Blood sacrifice in the name of spiritual belief is as old as humankind. Its been called by thousands of names, in thousands of languages, over thousands of years. Bound to humanity's search for spiritual knowledge and deeper meaning is our grim legacy of ritual murder. Much of religion's history has been written in blood and punctuated by the screams of the dying--dying animals, men, women, children. Today, the label ritual abuse is commonly applied to behaviors involving multioffender, multirnotive sexual abuse, torture, programmed mind control, blood sacrifice, infanticide, or cannibalism, combined with symbols and artifacts of spiritual belief. Ritual abuse, a far from precise term, is subject to increasing discussion and dispute. Call it a frightening reality, a mystery, a rumor-panic, media hype, or a socially constructed group fantasy, ritual abuse goes beyond the acts that the nouns ritual and abuse denote. Ritual abuse, as a complex set of behaviors, remains ill-defined-a subject without consensus. Ritual abuse, as a description, has become a nom de guerre, a symbolic term or pseudonym, neither fully describing the often criminal phenomenon itself nor the sometimes religious context in which it occurs. Our language needs a new word that is clinically accurate to replace ritual abuse -- a word that emphasizes the actual nature of the abuse, rather than its religious, ritualistic overtones. Ritual sacrifice is not an ancient, forgotten cultural custom. This book delves into the origins, nature, and contemporary use of such trauma-structured dissociation, a long overlooked psychological phenomenon.