Durban - Earlier this week, a Western Cape resident reportedly told his lawyer that he killed a 13-year-old boy as part of occult killings.
IOL reported that Daniel Smit, arrested for the murder of Jerobiojin van Wyk, alleged that he practised occult killings since childhood.
Smit allegedly murdered Van Wyk and dumped his remains in a sewer on his property.
Smit has been charged with murder, kidnapping, assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and defeating the ends of justice.
Smit’s lawyer, Santie Human, said her client had confessed to her. Human also said Smit was introduced to a cult at a very young age, when he learnt how to dispose of a body.
Weighing in on the murder and Smit's apparent 'confession', Reverend Tristan Kapp of the South African Satanic Church, said Smit's statement threatened to mask the true nature of a South African murder crime, through the stigma of alternative minority religious perspectives.
Kapp explained that ‘Occultism’ derives from the Latin noun Occultus, which refers to “hidden, secret or inaccessible (knowledge)”. He said the idea that acquaints Occultism, as well as Satanism, to dark and gruesome misdeeds is but one example of a regurgitated conspiracy theory, owing its origins to the moral panic during the late 1980-90s.
"Today, it is still infamously characterised as the ‘Satanic Panic-era’, during which anyone who wore black, listened to heavy metal music, had tattoos and piercings, among other things, were summarily labelled as Satanic. Although, today, they are no longer considered as such. Why? Because they were never ‘Satanic’ to begin with," he said.
Kapp said this narrative was, and in this case still is, abused as a multi-purpose excuse to firstly, as with the Krugersdorp Devilsdorp murders, divert attention from the utopic notion that elite and seemingly exemplary individuals in society whom you will most likely also see in church every Sunday, are capable of such moral atrocities.
Kapp said by subsequently framing an external, voiceless enigma: as a result, it created the impression that those who are truly guilty can escape taking responsibility and accountability for their actions. Similar to the way South African Cricket captain Hansie Cronjé, did back in 2000 during a Cricket tournament between England, South Africa and Zimbabwe.
"After which he blamed the devil for making him take a $8,200 bribery to fix the match - yet, how does the saying go? 'If you look for the Devil behind every bush, you will find him'.
“As an academic, friendly Satanist, writer and secular counsellor, busy with my Doctorate specialising in hidden knowledge within ancient religious traditions, I realised that I could not sit by idly while individuals offered alternative religious orientations - my field of expertise - along with those who subscribe to them as a scapegoat to feed her own media agenda," Kapp said.
He said he believed that a lawyer who constructs the defence of a case on the basis of stigma and superstition, instead of logically sound factual evidence - in his opinion - extremely unprofessional and unethical, defaming alternative religions with the harmful stigma when we enjoy equal freedom and protection under the South African constitution.
IOL