
Coming out of the washroom, the woman grabbed my wrist as I turned to close the door to my bedroom to drown out the noise of the prayer meeting in the living room, just steps away. “Whose shampoo is this”, she asks, menacingly. “Err, mine?” I responded unsurely. In truth the Pantene shampoo she was holding was the one I used to wash my three dogs, dog shampoos and accoutrements having not yet taken hold in Dubai at that time. I decided, in that moment, not to tell this lady, whom I had never formally met and who continued to stare wide eyed at me with a look I couldn’t decipher. “Don’t you know this is the devil’s shampoo”, she retorted, as I wriggled loose from her grip and shut the door, mumbling something about getting back to my studies. But the Balfour Declaration and the pressures of the next day’s social studies test couldn’t keep my mind from ruminating on the woman, with her r frumpy denim dungaree dress and long, untamed strawberry blonde hair made frizzier in the 88% humidity. She and her family had just joined our church, coming all the way from a rural town in middle America, I had heard her say earlier. When the meeting was over, I exited my room to pick at whatever was left of the dessert tray that was often served when I saw the American woman linger by the front door, still clutching the shampoo bottle, with its ingredients side facing a few stragglers. “The mark of the devil” she said. “You see the six points of the arrow. That is how you know.”
It was the early 2000s, in a Middle East reeling from the fall of the Twin Towers and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. And now, our small church had to deal with an even greater evil: Satan in our soaps. Since the American woman mentioned it, we began to see the symbol everywhere and on every kind of household item. Floor cleaner, dish soap, detergent, even moisturizer and petroleum jelly. “That is how he enters your home” she would go on to say. “Through products with the six points”. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to get away from the six points and the “mark of the beast”.
The mark, it turned out, was nothing more than the recycling symbol. Having neither infrastructure, a government nor populace invested in renewable energy or sustainability of any sort, this concept evaded us and the church at large. The six points on the two arrows were in fact nothing more than a reminder from Proctor and Gamble, the world’s largest multinational corporation and maker of household cleaners, to recycle the container. “But there are eight points”, I said to one of the ladies’ daughters. “My parents say those are Satan’s horns”, she replied as she went back to playing Twister on the floor.

The "six points" symbol aka the recycling logo
It turned out, much like the Lucky Charms and Kraft Dinner we’d get at a hefty discount thanks to color bleeds and damaged boxes, we couldn’t even get Satanic Panic right. Satanic Panic swept the U.S. and Canada in the 80s and 90s, and many people got swept along with it. Characterized by widespread and baseless fear of alleged Satanic ritual abuse, particularly in daycares and schools, the panic was fueled by sensational media coverage, claims of organized Satanic cults and given credence by high profile psychologists like the Victoria-based Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith. The panic highlighted occurances of false memories and the dangers of leading questioning techniques used by investigators. In time, it became clear that the fears were unfounded, but that didn’t stop churches from accusing companies like Proctor and Gamble, whose actual logo featured a bearded face of a man embedded into the moon, surrounded by thirteen stars originally meant to symbolize America’s first thirteen colonies. But peddlers of the panic drew invisible connections in the image - the curls in the beard and hair of the moon man resembled the number six in three sequences, they claimed. This, combined with the thirteen stars contributed to the belief that the logo symbolized 666, or the mark of the beast referenced in the biblical book of Revelations.

The original P&G logo
Though North America had seen the heights of Satanic Panic before the millennium, it came to the middle east the way everything seemed to, stale and too late. Early enough though, to rip from me the most unifying experience in the early 2000s - the wizarding heraldry of Harry Potter. “Too late”, the American harbinger would say. “If you let your kids read those books, the books that promote Satan and witchcraft, it will be too late for them”. The books, like Fairy dish soap before it, soon awaited its inevitable fate in a landfill at the bottom of the municipal garbage cans and were replaced with a thick volume of the suitably-Christian, thinly veiled biblical retellings of Tolkien and Lewis.
Halloween met with a similar fate. Any pleas to attend parties, don a costume, engage in trick or treating or any form of celebration were met with a rebuking bible verse and a coercion to refocus yourself on the freedom in Christ and not the ‘bondage to the evil one” as books of that time repeatedly stated. “Halloween is the birthday of the devil!”, the pastor of our small church would shout into the cavernous hall they rented. “When you raise your children to celebrate Halloween, to read books about witchcraft…you are teaching them to be worshippers of the dark one”, he’d bellow, still wearing the uniform t-shirt of his day job as an electronics salesman.
But I didn’t learn about the Devil through Halloween or Harry Potter. I learned about the Devil through terrifying Christian books like Neil T. Anderson’s The Seduction of Our Children, harrowing taped sermons by John Hagee (like this one) and jarring bootleg VHSes like Hell’s Bells. I learned about the Devil the same way I learned about religion: through the church. The bible is chock full of verses like Luke 10:19 - “Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you” and yet, I spent more time hearing about “defeating Satan” than I ever did about loving my neighbor.
Believing in Satan is one thing, but fuelling a culture war against any deviation from the Judeo-Christian world we live in is another. As a child, it felt isolating to miss out on the Harry Potter craze, to turn down Halloween party invites, and to rely on Bible verses as my only framework for what was “right” or “wrong.” As an adult, I let myself be blinded by a monochrome view of the world—a rigid black-and-white of “good” and “bad.” It cost me experiences, relationships, and, most of all, years of ignoring my own voice, too preoccupied with what a pastor might think.
I now see clearly what evil truly is—and what it isn’t. It isn’t the smoke and mirrors the church used to justify shutting us off from the world. Evil is letting yourself be corrupted by hate. It’s allowing life’s trials to harden your heart against your neighbour. It’s closing doors to immigrants fleeing war, turning away from the unhoused because they don’t fit some ideal of a “good neighbour,” listening to the internet’s false prophets, who echo the control once wielded by the church before Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. Real evil lives in the everyday, in the subtleties of how we treat each other. The Devil is a straw man argument, but harm is done in acts as seemingly insignificant as a single stalk of straw.
The American woman and her family left swiftly, retreating from the world they’d judged and abandoned, but they left us to flounder in the suds of their Satanic panic. The fear of the otherworldly clung to me for nearly 20 years. Even now, I catch myself dividing the world into “good” and “bad,” using the same rigid yardstick that once told me dressing up for a costume party was wrong. But then I remember: the true evils aren’t conjured or imagined. They’re right here—the evils of over-consumption, unchecked capitalism, pollution, poverty, hopelessness - these are the battles worth my energy.
-M. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Like, share or leave a comment below to let me know what you think.
Comentarios