To Know What World We Live In: The Son of Sam

Untermyer Park, Yonkers, New York, USA. Image Source: Atlas Obscura.

For the past several years, I have participated in the Hallowe'en Countdown blogathon. I won't this year, due to personal matters. But I will touch on topics this month which were intended for the countdown. The first such issue concerns David Berkowitz's Son of Sam murders in 1976 and 1977 in New York City. A case summary is here. I have previously blogged about this case, here.

The Temple of Love in Untermyer Gardens. Image Source: Untapped Cities.

In an April 1977 letter left by Berkowitz near one of his murder scenes, the killer referred to himself as the 'Son of Sam': "I am a monster. I am the 'Son of Sam.'" Berkowitz later claimed that 'Sam' was his former neighbour, Sam Carr, and that 'Son of Sam' referred to Carr's demon-possessed dog. Others have speculated that 'Sam' referred to the USA as 'Uncle Sam.' The police offered the possessed dog story to the public, even though a psychiatrist who assessed Berkowitz believed that the killer knew the dog story was bunk.

Thus, at the heart of this case, the name which Berkowitz adopted for himself remains a mystery.

I noticed a curious coincidence in the Persian poem, The Shahnameh (شاهنامه) or The Book of Kings. Written by the poet Ferdowsi, it is the national epic of Iran; it took over thirty years to compose and has almost one thousand chapters. While the poem was completed around 1010 CE, it refers to the much earlier history of the Persian Empire in mythical and quasi-historical terms, from the dawn of time up to the Arab Islamic conquest. You can read the work in English translation, here and here.

There is a section in The Shahnameh entitled, Zāl, the Son of Sam, about an albino child who is rejected by his father, a warrior named Sam:

"No human being of this earth
Could give to such a monster birth;
He must be of the Demon race,
Though human still in form and face."

The father abandons the child on a mountaintop to die, where the baby is raised by Simurgh, the "Shah of birds." You can read the tale of Sam and his son Zaal in English prose translation here and here. Zaal becomes a Persian king who lives for three hundred years and watches his personal dynasty fail and die.

The Simurgh: The Flight of the Simorgh (ca. 1590 CE). Painted at the Mughal Court of Akbar by the artist Basawan. Image Source: The Seringapatam Times.

When Berkowitz adopted 'Son of Sam' as his alter ego, he may have been referring to Sam and Zaal in The Shahnameh, or to a corrupted derivative thereof adopted by New York City's hippie cultists.

Berkowitz claimed that he worked with others and was affiliated with a cult named the Twenty-Two Disciples of Hell. He also said he was linked to the terrifying Process Church. Today, it is left to MSM outlets like VICE to dismiss the menace that this church posed, particularly because of its many celebrity connections and perhaps because this seemingly dead religious movement has an "ongoing mission." Even with its swastika emblems, the tone now is very much: 'nothing to see here, move along.'

I can see no obvious appropriations made by Satanists from The Shahnameh. But the connections may be there; there was a considerable amount of mythological cross-pollination in the ancient and medieval Middle East which has made its way into modern times by odd routes.

The Shahnameh's Satan character is called Ahriman and the dualities in the poem are known for providing the roots of Zoroastrianism. In 2017, the BBC called Zoroastrianism the "obscure religion that shaped the West" because it promoted monotheism, individualism, and individual choice regarding dualism between good and evil, with a fully formed Satan figure, who battles his heroic nemesis, Ahura Mazda:

"Even the idea of Satan is a fundamentally Zoroastrian one; in fact, the entire faith of Zoroastrianism is predicated on the struggle between God and the forces of goodness and light (represented by the Holy Spirit, Spenta Manyu) and Ahriman, who presides over the forces of darkness and evil. While man has to choose to which side he belongs, the religion teaches that ultimately, God will prevail, and even those condemned to hellfire will enjoy the blessings of Paradise (an Old Persian word).

How did Zoroastrian ideas find their way into the Abrahamic faiths and elsewhere? According to scholars, many of these concepts were introduced to the Jews of Babylon upon being liberated by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great. They trickled into mainstream Jewish thought, and figures like Beelzebub emerged.

And after Persia’s conquests of Greek lands during the heyday of the Achaemenid Empire, Greek philosophy took a different course. The Greeks had previously believed humans had little agency, and that their fates were at the mercy of their many gods, who often acted according to whim and fancy. After their acquaintance with Iranian religion and philosophy, however, they began to feel more as if they were the masters of their destinies, and that their decisions were in their own hands."

Image Source: Local Yonkers paper: The Herald Statesman (24 October 1979) via Encyclopedia Satanica.

The Son of Sam case has provided fertile ground for Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) conspiracy theories. These have been discredited by the MSM. Berkowitz himself claimed to be part of a Satanic cult in New York City, which favoured the Untermyer park in Yonkers. The gardens were developed from 1900 to 1939 by Samuel Untermyer (1858-1940), a prominent Jewish philanthropist, lawyer and Zionist. By the 1970s, the property had fallen into neglect and became the site of dark masses, which Berkowitz may have attended. From Untapped Cities:

"In the 1970s, strange and disturbing incidents were reported: torch flames, sinister chanting, and mutilated and skinned dogs. To this day, satanic whispers still linger on the estate, at least according to the Yonkers Ghost Investigators."

This combination of factors has attracted anti-Semites to the Son of Sam story. Blame falsely cast on Jewish people for high profile murders is not a new phenomenon. If anything, the ritual murder hoax indicates the existence of serious social anxieties, which have been projected by non-Jews onto Jews. I do not subscribe to anti-Semitism in any way, yet its very presence can be taken as one of a complex of symptoms of a broader malaise at hand. This type of troubling analysis is typified in the Son of Sam video below. As the video progresses, the racism becomes more pronounced.

Programmed To Kill/Satanic Cover-Up Part 40 (Satanism and Occult - David Berkowitz). Video Source: Youtube.

Despite these slurs, the question remains if the Son of Sam case concerned one crazed individual or a broader malaise. The video above is part of a red-pill-oriented series (the whole playlist is here), based on the book Programmed To Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder by alt-researcher, David McGowan. McGowan hypothesized that high profile murder cases did hint at deep systemic problems, as summarized by a quotation from Time magazine:

"Evil on this scale is impossible to comprehend. To know who murdered JonBenét Ramsey is to know what world we live in." - James R. Gaines, Time, 20 January 1997

The video series' hashtags list familiar concerns of alt-researchers:

"Investigation in Serial Killers, Assassins, Mass Murder, Spree Killers, Cults, MK-ULTRA, Project Monarch, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Military, Army, U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, CIA, Mossad, Black Ops, FBI, OSS (CIA), Special Forces, KGB, Intelligence Agencies, Global Conspiracy, Disinformation Agents, Satanic Ritual Abuse, False Flag, Psychological Warfare, Electronic Warfare, Satanic Networks, Occult, Satanism, Wicca, Black Magic, Alchemy, Witchcraft, Devil Worship, Magical Thinking and Secret Societies"

The main hypothesis of the video series is that famous killers were and are never individual actors:

"As Dave McGowan argues in Programmed to Kill, the standard profile of serial killers as lone nuts driven only by their inner demons is often wildly inaccurate. When the evidence from numerous high-profile cases is assembled, there are an astounding number of parallels that create a much different image of the serial killer. Many serial killings are in fact murders of political significance, used to protect criminal enterprises such as drug trafficking or sex rings. Even more disturbingly, there is often evidence of mind control programming by intelligence fronts: the military, prisons, mental hospitals, doctors, Satanic cults, etc. Such programming is used to condition these 'serial killers' to commit crimes they otherwise would not or confess to crimes they did not actually commit. The treatment of serial killers by law enforcement and the courts is filled with irregularities as a result. Before committing the crimes that brought them notoriety, many serial killers received extremely lenient treatment to the point of cover-up, evidently enjoying protection as a government asset. Once they were no longer needed, they were railroaded into taking the fall as a lone killer, prevented from maintaining their innocence or revealing accomplices."

Whether Berkowitz was a crazed lone wolf or a twisted pawn in a larger, sick game, perhaps his murderer's moniker might tell us. If there is any red flag here, it is that to this day, we do not know what the 'Son of Sam' really means, nor its actual origin.