Product Description

Judith Spencer recounts the harrowing true story of Joseph Warren--a small-town businessman from a prominent family who led a sinister double life as the leader of a satanic cult. Through contact with family members, including Warren's daughter, and firsthand accounts from survivors of his cult, Spencer reveals the unimaginable occurrences of this terrifying underworld and sheds light on the mysteries of the satanic cult phenomenon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1221215 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Intended as a hard-hitting exposé of secret cult practices in America, Satan's High Priest attempts to straddle a fine line between fiction and journalism--a line best left to the likes of skilled tightrope walkers such as Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe. The book doesn't really succeed at either, though the story of Joseph Warren's sadistic rise and fall as the "Great One" of a Southern cult is somewhat morbidly fascinating when read as a story that "could happen anywhere."

Warren, in his role as high priest to the unnamed coven, delights in rapes and murders, bestiality and necrophilia, and happily involves his entire circle of acquaintances in the small town of Lathrop (the state remains unidentified) in his "shows." To describe the atrocities of this multigenerational death cult, Judith Spencer places men like Warren and his father, Dexter, in their proper perspectives as outwardly normal, well-respected men of commerce. Warren and his brother, Linc, inherit their father's mortuary and dry-goods businesses, and while many of their customers are fellow cult members, life goes on as normal outside the pentagram; Spencer attempts to depict men who would casually gossip as they buy nails or coffee or a pair of boots, after having raped and ritually sacrificed children the night before. The problem for Spencer is that none of this particularly makes sense. She describes dozens of murders, yet offers no particulars or dates or corroborating evidence. Lathrop and Joseph Warren exist in a sort of deep concealing fog, impossible to pin down. Still, despite any doubts as to the book's veracity, it works as a somewhat elevated example of supermarket-tabloid-variety shock journalism. --Tjames Madison

Customer Reviews

The best book so far on satanic cults.
SATAN'S HIGH PRIEST
BY
JUDITH SPENCER

If you only purchase one book this year,
choose this one. Spencer carefully
and artfully turns her pen into a scapel as
she lays bare the secret horror in
the tiny town of "Lathrop." The details
of ritual abuse become apallingly real,
and the reader begins to understand how
satanic cults have flourished for
generations.

The book brackets the time frame of WWII
and focuses on the life of Joseph
Warren, an insescure man who was ritually
abused at the hands of his father, whose
role as High Priest he usurps. The reader
is shown vividly how this cult uses their
own children to satiate perverse needs.
Through dissociation, which Ms. Spencer
carefully explains, the children are made to
feel special while enduring atrocities,
often at the hands of their own parents.

Judith Spencer has courageously provided us
with the information we need to help put an
end to this evil, and to open our minds
and our hearts to the thousands of cult
defectors who, against all odds, choose
light over the darkness.

Robin Hall
August 1997
cavideo@pacific.net

Superb Exploration into the Psychology of Perpetrators
This book is an objective and unemotional biography of a man who leads a satanic cult. It delves expertly and gracefully into the psychology of perpetrators.

It gives a balanced view of an unthinkable lifestyle and explains the day-to-day routines of the greatest monsters of our time.

This book is a genuine eye-opener, and very accurate, according to my own experience as a survivor of satanic ritual abuse.

Perpetrators and protectors of perpetrators (and there are many) will undoubtedly be alarmed at the exposure-value of this fine piece. It takes the mystery out of the lives of the practitioners of the black arts, and reveals them for the sad, destructive, harmful vermin that they are.

New slant on ancient issue of ritual abuse.
Judith Spencer's first book on ritual abuse made me afraid, but Satan's High Priest made me cry. This insightful, new book tells the story of occult crime from the viewpoint of the perpetrator. Joseph Warren, operates the local mortuary and the mercantile as well, so he's exceptionally well situated to succeed his father as high priest of the local satanic cult. As we watch his rise to power, the broadening of his sphere of influence and his masterful control over his subjects, both human and demonic, we see a man driven to flee awareness of his own traumatic past, an awareness that could lead to his own healing. Joe Warren never chooses awareness, but he does lose his power to a bigger player, and the latter days of Warren's life are ruled by fear -- the natural fruit of his labors for evil. Then, just when things look darkest, adults Joe abused and trained to do evil as children begin to remember and reach out for help as they embrace the awareness Joe never had. One of them is Joe's own da