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Spiritual Warfare
Jan. 31st, 2011 10:21 amSo...like I discussed with intertribal, I've been re-watching Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, moving towards making a post comparing and contrasting both films. I've also been re-reading Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil and reading Matt Baglio's The Rite, the book the film purports to be based on. It's Judy Kiss time in my brain, for sure!
At any rate: All this made me want to re-post Chapter Two of my novel-in-progress Last Things, which happens to be about both possession and Antichrist(s). It takes the form of a lecture, and goes like this:
“Some Notes on the Difficult Subject of Demoniac Possession, at the Celebration of Christ’s Millennium”--presented to the Freihoeven ParaPsych Institute by Fr. Akinwale Oja, S.J., March 23, 2000
I will preface this speech by saying that tonight, I do not intend either to debate the existence of demons, try to qualify exactly what supernatural creatures may (or may not) fall within the rubric of that terminology, or explain the obvious envy and hatred these otherwise intangible beings seem to share for all human life. Even amongst acknowledged experts, whether they have gained their expertise inside or outside the Catholic Church, there remains little agreement on where demons come from, or why they do what they do—-not even upon what methods are most effectively used to evict them from whatever unfortunate victims they may choose (hopefully temporarily) to occupy.
(All kudos to William Peter Blatty aside, for example, I am fairly certain most of you are probably unaware that the theory which brands all demons Fallen angels--whether veterans of the Schism in Heaven following Lucifer's rebellion, former “gods” displaced by the rise of Monotheism, or disembodied members of those traitorous Watchers God sent to guide humanity after the expulsion from Eden, who chose to breed gigantic Nephilim children on us instead--is merely one of many Christian legends, rather than accepted Church doctrine. This is just one of a multitude of etymological distractions with which any aspiring exorcist must wrestle, preconceived notions which must be discarded to take the purely practical steps our charge and craft necessitate.)
In Mark 5, Matthew 8 and Luke 8, Jesus Christ is observed to have cured a man suffering “with an unclean spirit[, who had] been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked aside by him, and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” Most Christians take this to be the first legitimate instance of Christ’s power to cast out demons, a power the Church and its representatives are likewise assumed to be able to make manifest even today.
Historically, we see that obsession predates possession as a concept. In obsession, the devil is presumed to “besiege” or “sit without”—ob-sedere, in Latin—the body of the afflicted person. In possession, the devil besets the person from within his or her own body, truly inhabiting the victim. Both are considered states of mind in which the victim cannot be held responsible for what he or she says or does. Since virtuous people are supposedly immune to possession, early Christian saints only suffered obsession. Theorists observed that attacks seemed to be strongest when victims were alone, destitute or depressed; in fact, what would later become the general Christian theories of demonology were first developed in the Egyptian deserts by hermits who all had exactly these same characteristics. The Life of St. Hilary (390 A. D. ), for example, tells how “his temptations were numerous… often when he lay down did naked women appear to him.” And St. Athanasius, around the same time, describes how the devil attacked St. Anthony, “imitating a woman’s gestures to beguile him.”
Since then, however, victims from all walks of life have suffered the unbelievable soul-pain of demoniac possession—nuns, priests and respected lay-people very definitely included. Unlike the induced trances of modern spiritualist mediums, or the tribal witch doctors in my own homeland of Nigeria, involuntary possession is often described as resembling epilepsy or hysteria, at least in its external manifestations. Typically, these include:
A) Writhing and contortions of the face and body which cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions,
B) Allotriophagy or vomiting of unusual objects, perhaps to induce mental illness and thoughts of suicide, and;
C) An involuntary change of voice to “deep and gruff”—what the Japanese call haragai, or “belly language”.
By the 1500s, most experts agreed that the Devil could only possess Christians with outside help, and that generally witches were to be blamed for causing the victim to fall into a deep enough state of sin that any familiar demon might easily gain access to their body. Supposedly, the link between witches and apples—as per the Grimm Brothers’ “Snow White”—rose from witches’ practice of tempting stray children or wayward young people with this symbolically significant fruit, inside which would lurk devils who would then be unsuspectedly consumed. This may be why, in 1585 (according to demonologist Henri Boguet), frightened passersby pushed an apple that gave out “a great and confused noise” into the river at Annency, in Savoy, France. Says Boguet: “It cannot be doubted that this apple was full of devils, and that a witch had been foiled in an attempt to give it to someone.”
It is this sort of unfortunate historical alliance between exorcists and witch-hunters which has tainted so many of the time’s more interesting cases by association, reducing them to anecdotes which crossbreed innate ridiculousness with truly horrific incompetence. Take the case, in 1583, of a sixteen-year-old Viennese girl who suffered from cramps. After eight weeks of exorcism, Jesuits claimed to have expelled twelve thousand, six hundred and fifty-two living demons, which the girl’s grandmother supposedly kept as flies in glass jars.
This seventy-year-old woman was later tortured into confessing to having intercourse with the Devil in the shape of a ball of thread, dragged at a horse’s tail to the place of execution, and burned alive. The Jesuits, I am sad to say, lauded the sentence, urging local judges to intensify their quota of witchcraft trials.
Nevertheless, two things remain agreed upon, then as now: That human beings may—often through no fault of their own—become possessed by the Devil or various demons, and that Christ’s power to cast out such entities may be channelled through the Church. But just as the Devil may only occupy a human being’s body with God’s permission, the Church can only wield this power through the same divine mercy and boon. And perhaps these facts explain why, in such a terrible battle, it is the exorcist rather than the possessed who is most at risk of defeat and damnation.
Meanwhile, a treatise written in Rouen in 1644, provoked by disorders at a convent in Louviers (eighteen nuns possessed, one priest accused and burned alive), suggested eleven possible indications of true possession:
1. To think oneself possessed.
2. To live a wicked life.
3. To live outside the rules of society.
4. To be persistently ill, falling into a heavy sleep and vomiting toads, serpents, worms, iron, stones, nails, pins, etc., which may also be illusions caused by witches and not inevitably signs of possession.
5. To blaspheme.
6. To make a pact with the Devil.
7. To be troubled with spirits.
8. To show a frightening and horrible countenance.
9. To be tired of living.
10. To be uncontrollable and violent.
11. To make sounds and movements like an animal.
Any one of the above rather flimsy precursors was seen as enough to alert the priest to look further, checking for the surest signs of demonaic possession: Revealing secret and hidden information; speaking or comprehending strange languages; displaying phenomenal strength and extraordinary bodily movements; reacting to sacred objects.
To the 21st-century mind, the Rouen Suggestif cannot possibly be viewed as anything but a catalogue of ridiculous superstition. To even the most rationalist thinkers of the age, however, these concepts were as incontestible as any of the million scientific discoveries we now take for granted: Darwin’s theory of evolution, Mendel’s observations on genetics, the role and composition of human DNA. Here I will read from Richard Baxter’s description of the case of Catherine Gualter, fifteen years old, possessed at Louvain in 1571—
“She voided a living eel by stool. It lay as dead in the excrements at first, but put into water revived. When it was dead, and laid up to keep, it vanished away… After this she vomited innumerable stones, some like walnuts, like pieces broken out of old walls and with some of the lime on them.”
Baxter, a Protestant (who in general adopted Luther’s recommendation to cure possession by prayer alone, “since Almighty God knows when the devil ought to depart”), later added this amazing caveat: “That she was cured by the priest’s means does not render the story incredible, though there be many deceits.”
So for myself, like every other exorcist, I can only attest to the observed and catalogued truth of my own experience. I can tell you that I was present last year at the exorcism of a thirteen-year-old girl (whose name I cannot disclose, by her parents’ request), assisting Father Cillian Frye in fighting the demon on her behalf. That during the course of this exorcism, I saw my friend and mentor broken down psychologically, in such a thorough and dreadful manner that he later lost his faith and gave up his calling; and that though the demon did eventually depart from this same girl, she was never fully healed of her wounds… that they endure in her, both the physical and the incorporeal, to this very day.
Yet perhaps, this innate limitation of our frail human “victory” over inhuman forces was only to be expected. We were good men, both of us—or tried our best to be, at any rate. But neither of us, after all, is the living Son of God.
Thanking you once more for your time and kind attention, I wish you good night and bless you all, in God the Father’s most holy name.
Ah, Fr. Wale...I'd watch an exorcist movie about you! After I wrote one, obviously.;)
At any rate: All this made me want to re-post Chapter Two of my novel-in-progress Last Things, which happens to be about both possession and Antichrist(s). It takes the form of a lecture, and goes like this:
“Some Notes on the Difficult Subject of Demoniac Possession, at the Celebration of Christ’s Millennium”--presented to the Freihoeven ParaPsych Institute by Fr. Akinwale Oja, S.J., March 23, 2000
I will preface this speech by saying that tonight, I do not intend either to debate the existence of demons, try to qualify exactly what supernatural creatures may (or may not) fall within the rubric of that terminology, or explain the obvious envy and hatred these otherwise intangible beings seem to share for all human life. Even amongst acknowledged experts, whether they have gained their expertise inside or outside the Catholic Church, there remains little agreement on where demons come from, or why they do what they do—-not even upon what methods are most effectively used to evict them from whatever unfortunate victims they may choose (hopefully temporarily) to occupy.
(All kudos to William Peter Blatty aside, for example, I am fairly certain most of you are probably unaware that the theory which brands all demons Fallen angels--whether veterans of the Schism in Heaven following Lucifer's rebellion, former “gods” displaced by the rise of Monotheism, or disembodied members of those traitorous Watchers God sent to guide humanity after the expulsion from Eden, who chose to breed gigantic Nephilim children on us instead--is merely one of many Christian legends, rather than accepted Church doctrine. This is just one of a multitude of etymological distractions with which any aspiring exorcist must wrestle, preconceived notions which must be discarded to take the purely practical steps our charge and craft necessitate.)
In Mark 5, Matthew 8 and Luke 8, Jesus Christ is observed to have cured a man suffering “with an unclean spirit[, who had] been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked aside by him, and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” Most Christians take this to be the first legitimate instance of Christ’s power to cast out demons, a power the Church and its representatives are likewise assumed to be able to make manifest even today.
Historically, we see that obsession predates possession as a concept. In obsession, the devil is presumed to “besiege” or “sit without”—ob-sedere, in Latin—the body of the afflicted person. In possession, the devil besets the person from within his or her own body, truly inhabiting the victim. Both are considered states of mind in which the victim cannot be held responsible for what he or she says or does. Since virtuous people are supposedly immune to possession, early Christian saints only suffered obsession. Theorists observed that attacks seemed to be strongest when victims were alone, destitute or depressed; in fact, what would later become the general Christian theories of demonology were first developed in the Egyptian deserts by hermits who all had exactly these same characteristics. The Life of St. Hilary (390 A. D. ), for example, tells how “his temptations were numerous… often when he lay down did naked women appear to him.” And St. Athanasius, around the same time, describes how the devil attacked St. Anthony, “imitating a woman’s gestures to beguile him.”
Since then, however, victims from all walks of life have suffered the unbelievable soul-pain of demoniac possession—nuns, priests and respected lay-people very definitely included. Unlike the induced trances of modern spiritualist mediums, or the tribal witch doctors in my own homeland of Nigeria, involuntary possession is often described as resembling epilepsy or hysteria, at least in its external manifestations. Typically, these include:
A) Writhing and contortions of the face and body which cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions,
B) Allotriophagy or vomiting of unusual objects, perhaps to induce mental illness and thoughts of suicide, and;
C) An involuntary change of voice to “deep and gruff”—what the Japanese call haragai, or “belly language”.
By the 1500s, most experts agreed that the Devil could only possess Christians with outside help, and that generally witches were to be blamed for causing the victim to fall into a deep enough state of sin that any familiar demon might easily gain access to their body. Supposedly, the link between witches and apples—as per the Grimm Brothers’ “Snow White”—rose from witches’ practice of tempting stray children or wayward young people with this symbolically significant fruit, inside which would lurk devils who would then be unsuspectedly consumed. This may be why, in 1585 (according to demonologist Henri Boguet), frightened passersby pushed an apple that gave out “a great and confused noise” into the river at Annency, in Savoy, France. Says Boguet: “It cannot be doubted that this apple was full of devils, and that a witch had been foiled in an attempt to give it to someone.”
It is this sort of unfortunate historical alliance between exorcists and witch-hunters which has tainted so many of the time’s more interesting cases by association, reducing them to anecdotes which crossbreed innate ridiculousness with truly horrific incompetence. Take the case, in 1583, of a sixteen-year-old Viennese girl who suffered from cramps. After eight weeks of exorcism, Jesuits claimed to have expelled twelve thousand, six hundred and fifty-two living demons, which the girl’s grandmother supposedly kept as flies in glass jars.
This seventy-year-old woman was later tortured into confessing to having intercourse with the Devil in the shape of a ball of thread, dragged at a horse’s tail to the place of execution, and burned alive. The Jesuits, I am sad to say, lauded the sentence, urging local judges to intensify their quota of witchcraft trials.
Nevertheless, two things remain agreed upon, then as now: That human beings may—often through no fault of their own—become possessed by the Devil or various demons, and that Christ’s power to cast out such entities may be channelled through the Church. But just as the Devil may only occupy a human being’s body with God’s permission, the Church can only wield this power through the same divine mercy and boon. And perhaps these facts explain why, in such a terrible battle, it is the exorcist rather than the possessed who is most at risk of defeat and damnation.
Meanwhile, a treatise written in Rouen in 1644, provoked by disorders at a convent in Louviers (eighteen nuns possessed, one priest accused and burned alive), suggested eleven possible indications of true possession:
1. To think oneself possessed.
2. To live a wicked life.
3. To live outside the rules of society.
4. To be persistently ill, falling into a heavy sleep and vomiting toads, serpents, worms, iron, stones, nails, pins, etc., which may also be illusions caused by witches and not inevitably signs of possession.
5. To blaspheme.
6. To make a pact with the Devil.
7. To be troubled with spirits.
8. To show a frightening and horrible countenance.
9. To be tired of living.
10. To be uncontrollable and violent.
11. To make sounds and movements like an animal.
Any one of the above rather flimsy precursors was seen as enough to alert the priest to look further, checking for the surest signs of demonaic possession: Revealing secret and hidden information; speaking or comprehending strange languages; displaying phenomenal strength and extraordinary bodily movements; reacting to sacred objects.
To the 21st-century mind, the Rouen Suggestif cannot possibly be viewed as anything but a catalogue of ridiculous superstition. To even the most rationalist thinkers of the age, however, these concepts were as incontestible as any of the million scientific discoveries we now take for granted: Darwin’s theory of evolution, Mendel’s observations on genetics, the role and composition of human DNA. Here I will read from Richard Baxter’s description of the case of Catherine Gualter, fifteen years old, possessed at Louvain in 1571—
“She voided a living eel by stool. It lay as dead in the excrements at first, but put into water revived. When it was dead, and laid up to keep, it vanished away… After this she vomited innumerable stones, some like walnuts, like pieces broken out of old walls and with some of the lime on them.”
Baxter, a Protestant (who in general adopted Luther’s recommendation to cure possession by prayer alone, “since Almighty God knows when the devil ought to depart”), later added this amazing caveat: “That she was cured by the priest’s means does not render the story incredible, though there be many deceits.”
So for myself, like every other exorcist, I can only attest to the observed and catalogued truth of my own experience. I can tell you that I was present last year at the exorcism of a thirteen-year-old girl (whose name I cannot disclose, by her parents’ request), assisting Father Cillian Frye in fighting the demon on her behalf. That during the course of this exorcism, I saw my friend and mentor broken down psychologically, in such a thorough and dreadful manner that he later lost his faith and gave up his calling; and that though the demon did eventually depart from this same girl, she was never fully healed of her wounds… that they endure in her, both the physical and the incorporeal, to this very day.
Yet perhaps, this innate limitation of our frail human “victory” over inhuman forces was only to be expected. We were good men, both of us—or tried our best to be, at any rate. But neither of us, after all, is the living Son of God.
Thanking you once more for your time and kind attention, I wish you good night and bless you all, in God the Father’s most holy name.
Ah, Fr. Wale...I'd watch an exorcist movie about you! After I wrote one, obviously.;)
