The word “exorcism” is derived from the Greek word exorkizein, meaning “to bind by oath.” But in practice, exorcism is not about exerting control over spirits so much as banishing unwanted spirits from people, places, or things. For many people today, the idea of possession and exorcism is defined by William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist (1973). Regan MacNeil’s possession by the demon Pazuzu in that film was based on a spectacular case that began in Maryland in 1949. However, this sort of possession in which a demoniac (known as an “en‑ergumen” in Christian literature) exhibits an alternate personality and manifests supernatural abilities is not typical of the types of situations in which exorcists intervene. If we look across cultures, there is almost no phenomenon, whether it be a behavior, an illness, a strange experience, or an act of nature that has not been attributed to spirits and treated using exorcism.
Joseph
Laycock, an associate professor of religious studies in the Department of
Philosophy at Texas State University, joins the Big Ideas TXST podcast to
discuss religious freedom, new religious movements, and the fascinating,
pan-cultural phenomenon of exorcism.
Marthe Brossier, a provincial demoniac, had caused a stir in Orléans and Cléry before being brought to Paris in 1599. Her sponsors, probably members of the zealous Capuchin order, timed her arrival for just before Easter, when Lenten devotions among the Catholic faithful were nearing their climax. Furious at Henri IV’s edict of toleration for his Protestant subjects, the Capuchins saw in Marthe a propaganda opportunity: a woman’s body overrun by devils was a perfect symbol for a body politic infested with heresy. Henri, for his part, accused the Capuchins of ‘carrying muskets on their habits’ and hungering for religious war.
Happily, the demon that had possessed Brossier was of the Capuchin way of thinking. Questioned during Brossier’s public appearances, it claimed that the Huguenots were of the devil’s party (Protestants might have reflected that the devil was the father of slanders). These appearances were dramatic affairs, with the exorcist-impresario interrogating the spirit at length. Endowed with the supernatural knowledge of fallen angels, Brossier did not limit herself to anti-Huguenot invective, answering questions from the crowd about the whereabouts of parents’ souls or lost husbands, as well as pronouncing on hidden sins – especially those of any vocal doubters.
It is perhaps perverse to be struck most of all by the publicness and theatricality of such demons. In the wake of The Exorcist, we tend to think of demonic possession as a private affliction, with remedies – religious or psychiatric – also applied behind closed doors. Thirty years before Brossier’s demoniac career began, another possessed woman, Nicole Obry, was exorcised on a scaffold at Laon; contemporary pamphlets reported an audience of twenty thousand. Building a stage requires money and time, and a calculation that the investment can be recouped. How did audiences approach these spectacles? Some might have understood them as akin to the shows put on by itinerant entertainers or the sermons given by mendicant preachers, others as a sign that the last days were approaching, or had already arrived. Some hoped witnessing a supernatural event might grant them religious certainty, confirming their faith amid the turbulence of the Reformation. The events must have been familiar enough that the usual pattern of an exorcism would be known, but still strange enough to attract a crowd.
Brossier came closer than any previous demoniac to political power and the forces vying for it: the king, the diplomats of the Church, the aristocracy, the demagogues and the crowd. Fear of contagious mass enthusiasm meant that her time in Paris was spent in increasingly restricted spaces – private chapels and prison cells – where prelates and doctors pricked her with pins or tried to exorcise her. The king’s physician, Marescot, mocked her apparent ability to turn her possession on and off at will, and the flimsy proofs offered by her defenders. Stinking fumigants – the most famous recipes in exorcists’ handbooks included hefty doses of asafoetida – were burned under her nostrils. She was forced to lick the floor as a sign of submission to the exorcist. Her body became a vehicle for a power struggle between groups of powerful men. The doctors eventually gave their verdict, though some dissented: ‘Nihil a Daemone: Multa ficta: A morbo pauca.’ As the Englished pamphlet put it: ‘Nothing of the Deuill: Many things counterfeited: and a few things of sicknesse.’
Brossier’s story features in The Penguin Book of Exorcisms, which gathers 37 accounts from ancient Assyria to the 21st-century United States. In his introduction, Joseph Laycock remarks on the common incidence of exorcism across cultures: it is nearly as ubiquitous as the belief in spirits itself. The phenomena addressed by exorcism vary, and so do the means by which it is attempted. Sometimes possession is closely linked to physical illness, sometimes to spiritual malady or social delinquency. Not all cases involve the degrading physical treatment to which Brossier was subjected; other exorcists inveigle, bargain with or bribe their demon antagonists. Some simply ask them what they want. The anthology ranges far wider than the stereotype of the Catholic priest waving a crucifix at a vomiting teenage contortionist: it also includes Protestant accounts of deliverance, mischievous fox spirits from China and Japan, and a fascinating semi-improvised exorcism performed by a Vodou priestess (Vodou treats possession as a predictable and often positive spiritual phenomenon). The Christian tradition predominates, but Laycock doesn’t include the extemporised charismatic exorcisms that are increasingly popular today in the US and the global South. His texts are almost all witness accounts, though there is a quotation from one of the oldest Catholic prayers of exorcism – ‘I conjure thee, thou old Serpent!’ – on the cover.
Few of Laycock’s witnesses are entirely sure what they’re seeing; sceptics as well as believers abound. Exorcism has many theatrical qualities, which are sometimes explicitly embraced in non-Christian examples: illusion is the domain of spirits. Among Christians (as Stephen Greenblatt has observed) these qualities are more problematic. Mimetic art – especially theatre – has troubled many Western thinkers, Christian or otherwise. Christianity is founded on a series of truth claims – the gospel, the saving act, the Church’s access to supernatural knowledge – and mixing these claims into a theatrical display is a precarious business. In its golden age, exorcism was a ritual with all the trappings of theatre, but what was happening was taken to be real in a way theatre was not. Exorcists were eager to produce bodily signs, as if to shake off the taint of rhetoric: bloody crosses on the forehead, names of saints marked on the hand, contortion, levitation, the vomiting of pins. But it’s hard to abjure the theatrical by means of a coup de théâtre, however realistic – a fact many Protestant sceptics seized on with delight.
We know little about the motives of demoniacs. Almost no first-hand accounts of the experience of possession exist. The actions and utterances of possessed women – the most famous cases all involve women, though men and children suffer possession too – survive only through the reports of confessors, exorcists, political sponsors or pamphlet controversialists. None is disinterested. The absence of direct testimony is unsurprising: these women’s prominence depends on their effacement. Nobody was interested in Brossier until the devil spoke through her. Feminism has found a powerful symbol in the witch – though not always on solid grounds. Few if any women thought of themselves as witches, though that didn’t prevent them from being named and murdered as such. Demoniacs, who did exist, are less easily reclaimed, perhaps because of the air of deceit that hangs around them. They are ambiguous women, sometimes sincere, sometimes fraudulent, often abused.
We know more about Brossier than most. A letter survives from one of her neighbours imploring the bishop of Paris not to trust her. The unmarried daughter of a family fallen on hard times, her demoniac fits had started as an exercise in mimicry, after a spate of possessions and a witchcraft trial in a nearby town. She had studied pamphlets about Nicole Obry’s exorcism three decades earlier, perhaps attracted by an engraving showing thousands gathered around her scaffold, with tiny black flying devils lurking in the cathedral vaults. Brossier had form: she had once tried to escape to a convent; another time she cropped her hair short and tried to run away dressed in her father’s clothes. Much of her story could be drawn from a particularly bleak farce. In Paris a cunning bishop arrived to test her, opening a heavy tome and chanting at her in Latin. Brossier writhed in devilish pain at what she believed to be sacred words: ‘Arma virumque cano ...’ But the bishop was merely reciting the incipit of the Aeneid. ‘Multa ficta.’
Brossier may have been a fraud, but what led her down this path? Did she – consciously or otherwise – weigh up the choice between life as an unmarried daughter and the celebrity that might come, however risky, from being possessed? Was her possession ever genuine on a subjective level, even if she did repeat it later out of economic necessity? Each of her three attempts to escape her ordinary life alienated her from her body in some way: the prospective vow of chastity as a nun, disguising herself as a boy, and then giving her body over as a vehicle for struggle with the devil. Might she have tried to find some autonomy in this final act, only to find herself robbed of it, as men argued over what her body meant, degrading and torturing her to prove their point? Her silence supplies few answers. Humiliation in Paris did not, it seems, deter her. She and her father did not return home: she can be found performing as an itinerant demoniac in Milan in 1600, perhaps a more congenial atmosphere than France. After that, she vanishes from the record.
Christianity cannot leave exorcism behind. Jesus practised it, and in each of the synoptic gospels he commissions his disciples to do the same – the historian Peter Brown suggests it was the ‘most highly rated activity’ of the early Church. The ancient Mediterranean was populated by wandering holy men and charismatic healers, for whom exorcism was something between medicine and miracle. Church leaders who are inclined to a more cerebral, spiritualised and abstract faith often treat exorcistic revivals as atavistic, uncomfortable with the gauche literalism of lay passions and fearful of the abuses that can be perpetrated under its rubric.
The major Christian denominations exercise pastoral prudence when presented with a claim of possession. Bishops are supposed to exhaust psychiatric and scientific routes before authorising exorcism. In small charismatic churches ‘deliverance’ exorcisms take place – addressing, among other things, ‘demonic’ homosexuality. Numbers are hard to come by, and subject to inflation. Despite the general hostility of the episcopate, exorcists have occasionally found champions: the eccentric Zambian archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, a Catholic, conducted mass exorcisms, though it was his dereliction from priestly celibacy that led to his being defrocked. Unequivocal papal support for exorcism has been rare since Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903), an enthusiast for cocaine-infused tonic wine and 19th-century QAnon-style hoaxes, who believed that France – possibly all of Europe – was in the grip of a Satanist cabal.
The ancient texts in Laycock’s anthology suggest that early Christians inhabited a highly animate cosmos, like their pagan contemporaries. Spirits were everywhere, but found in particular concentration in wastelands and deserts, where they ensnared monks and ascetics. The multitudinous daimones of late antiquity, which could be encountered in a variety of dispositions, became in Christian teaching more exclusively hostile. ‘Their business is the ruin of man,’ Tertullian declared. They hang around like ‘a blight in the breeze’. There is an obvious analogy between a saint subduing demons in the wilderness and the evangelistic work of an early Christian. Evangelism entailed an epistemic war against pagans: not only were they idolatrous and sinful, they were also deceived about the nature of their gods and their role in the world. Martin of Tours, a charismatic healer and exorcist, insisted on identifying the demons he exorcised as Jupiter or Mercury – the latter, he said, was a source of frequent and special annoyance.
Exorcism does present certain theological problems. Some are of mostly antiquarian interest: how material are spirits, and how do they affect the world? Can more than one spirit occupy a body at the same time – and where does the soul of a demoniac go? Prelates worried about the exorcist’s aura of spiritual power, since the effectiveness of the rituals was thought in some degree to depend – unlike the Mass – on the sincerity and fervour of the person administering them. Personal charisma is a dangerous thing. And there was a whiff of sulphur around exorcists, a fear that the dividing line between exorcism and a more illicit form of contact with spirits might be rather fine and easily crossed. This taint attached to certain clerics well into the 20th century. In 1928, the Tory diarist Chips Channon visited Montague Summers, a dubious churchman who had published an English translation of the Roman rite of exorcism. Summers enticed Channon upstairs to his private chapel, full of ‘blatant images’, where he spanked him over an altar with his slipper (red, with a large buckle).
Erasmus’s wry tale of a would-be exorcist gulled by pranksters is a key to this anthology’s account of the long tradition of scepticism about exorcism. A self-important but credulous parish priest is tricked into performing an exorcism by tall tales of an unlaid ghost and buried treasure; there are mysterious lights, wailing and even a letter from the gratefully exorcised soul in purgatory. The tale also provides rare evidence of the way exorcism was conducted before its standardisation by the Church in the early 17th century: the first thing Erasmus’s exorcist does, like any self-respecting necromancer, is to draw a magic circle on the ground and enhance it with protective amulets. This detail affords a glimpse of the clerical underground and its traffic in magical manuscripts, some of which would have been of particular interest to ambiguous spiritual specialists like exorcists.
Christian theology teaches the omnipotence of God and the ultimate vanity of the devil’s boasts, but the world implied by exorcism can seem barren of divine grace. If the name of God is enough to cast out demons, why the high-stakes drama of exorcistic ritual? Why do demons often sneer at exorcists? Why, when they depart, do they so frequently return? Scholars who treat exorcism as a public performance of religious scripts see in all this a dramatic, public affirmation of the reality of evil and damnation. Others see demons as proof of a bleaker, more Manichaean world, with divine omnipotence in local abeyance.
Histories of exorcism often try to explain the apparently anomalous survival of the practice into the Age of Reason. Sarah Ferber, the author of the finest study of Brossier and other early modern French demoniacs, cites the use of an exorcism manual in a legal case from 1993; Brian Levack’s cultural history of exorcism, The Devil Within (2013), derived from his experience of fostering a child survivor of exorcistic abuse. High-profile outbreaks of possession tend to occur at moments of cultural turbulence, and it is tempting to imagine that a demonic voice utters unpalatable truths or expresses forbidden thoughts. Levack shows that the possessed rarely deviate from their confessional scripts: Catholics are possessed by spirits which recognise the Church’s claim to spiritual power and Protestants as heresiarch colleagues, and vice versa. Some of the most compelling cases in the Penguin anthology are drawn from the colonial period and concern moments when the religious arm of imperialism found itself in conflict with indigenous, animist beliefs. A young woman exorcised near Durban in 1906 performed feats of levitation that Laycock suggests might be considered ‘truly extraordinary’. Though a pupil at a Christian school, she seems to have retained a familial belief in spirits, as well as a pragmatic belief in the possibility of making agreements with them, which horrified her exorcists. Her symptoms matched those of early modern demoniacs; one of her exorcists, describing the ‘weird fire’ in her eyes, among other more obviously dramatic signs, wrote of his time in her company that ‘There you learn to believe.’
Ferber and Levack caution modern readers against the search for a rational psychiatric truth that will ‘explain’ exorcism. Historical explanation and significance can be found in the traffic between exorcist and demoniac, in the content of her speech, the reaction of spiritual and temporal authorities and the response of the crowd; transhistorical psychiatric diagnoses can blot these out. If we are inclined to invoke mental disorder, then (as Ferber suggests) the men who forced Marthe Brossier to lick the floor might also require diagnosis. It is modern vanity to imagine that medicine discovered the connection between psychic distress and possession only after Freud. Early modern physicians were perfectly capable of understanding spirits not only as the cause of malady but as being specially attracted to a tormented psyche. ‘Cerebrum melancholicum est sedes daemonum’: ‘The melancholic brain is a chair of estate for the Devil.’
Since Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons was published in 1997, scholarship on early modern demonology has been more interested in the internal coherence of belief systems than in questions of reality. This is a historically scrupulous approach, immensely enlightening yet somehow unsatisfying. Possession turns on truth-claims that are made through the body of the demoniac, and are so dramatic that nearly everybody in the vicinity has a stake in what is ‘really’ going on. It would be strange if the only person not to wonder about their veracity were the modern reader.
The meaning drawn from exorcism depends on which kind of case is given the spotlight. A pious fraud like Brossier foregrounds questions of truth and motive, or the political machinations of her sponsors. Other cases seem more straightforwardly to be a matter of hucksters preying on wounded seekers of spiritual reassurance, while subjectively ‘genuine’ cases are better understood as part of a more general history of altered states of consciousness. Colonial stories seem especially relevant to us today, conveying a sense of things lost in the violent collision between imperialism and indigeneity. Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952), an account of the mass possession at Loudun in the 17th century, was perfectly tailored to postwar anxiety: it features the moral derangement of crowds, violent idealism manipulated by political cynics, the demons given life by sexual repression, and – perhaps the only aspect that dates it – the hope that reason, psychoanalytic or otherwise, might dispel or at least domesticate these terrors.
The Devils of Loudun was adapted as a play, an opera and a notorious film. Jeanne des Anges, the convent prioress, has a posthumous reputation as an erratic, easily manipulated hysteric. Her real career is more interesting, and more ambiguous: after her exorcism she acquired a reputation as a holy woman in whose body the devil had been conquered. She had been visited by a personal angel and transported into ecstasy. Called on to verify other potential ecstatics, she would often raise doubts about their sanctity, perhaps with an eye on her own market share. In such cases possession appears as just one point on a continuum of extreme spiritual experiences that an individual might undergo in the span of a lifetime.
Those who do not value a good night’s sleep can listen to recordings of Anneliese Michel, a Bavarian teenager exorcised repeatedly in 1975-76. Michel spoke in the voices of Judas, Cain, Nero, Hitler, a renegade priest called Fleischmann. As Monica Black has documented in A Demon-Haunted Land (2020), exorcisms and accusations of witchcraft were common in a postwar Germany struggling to account for the evil of apparently normal friends or neighbours. Michel was intensely pious, intensely vulnerable, intensely disturbed; she came to believe that her possession was a form of expiatory suffering for the sins of others. The recordings were made by one of the two priests exorcising her, and became public when they were put on trial with Michel’s parents for negligent homicide. She had died from malnutrition after her last exorcism. She weighed thirty kilograms and the ligaments in her knees had ruptured as the result of repeated genuflection. Asked in 2005 if she regretted requesting the exorcism, Michel’s mother said no: God had told them to do it, and her daughter had died atoning for others’ sins. The devil speaks in many tongues, the exorcism books say.
The Penguin Book of Exorcisms edited by Joseph P. Laycock.
Penguin, 336 pp., £12.99, September 2021, 978 0 14 313547 0
Thou Old Serpent! By James Butler. The London Review of Books, March 10, 2022.
The idea
of possession and exorcism is, in many ways, ridiculous. Surely all those
demons and spirits belong to the collective imagination of less enlightened
times—to the mud and dungeons of Dark Age paranoia?
Perhaps so. But why does the idea of exorcism linger so insistently, along with all those other quasi-religious superstitions including Halloween, traditionally the day of remembrance for souls yet to reach heaven? It seems we have an instinctive cultural sense that spirits are kind of hanging around somewhere. Is it so surprising that one or two of them should turn out to be a bit nasty?
Or maybe it’s the fault of one particular film. As Joseph P Laycock, the editor of a deeply unsettling new volume of accounts describing exorcisms throughout history, explains: “In the modern US, exorcism was once extraordinarily rare.” However, “All of this changed after 1973, when The Exorcist created a massive demand for exorcisms. Evangelicals and Pentecostals were already positioned to cater to this new market.” Other, more recent cultural phenomena have also piqued the appetite for exorcism. One Catholic priest has argued that “more exorcisms were needed than ever before, because cultural trends such as yoga and the Harry Potter franchise were leaving millions vulnerable to demonic influence.”
If modern theologians see the devil in yoga, this collection makes clear that ancient civilisations saw “the beast” as a much more immediate presence. A 2,600-year-old excerpt from the library of Ashurbanipal, which contains thousands of ancient Assyrian tablets, recalls how: “The Evil Devil prowleth in the City/ [It hath no rest] from slaughtering men./ They smite the hero/ They lay low the maiden/ The little ones like a leek they tear in pieces.” In this case, this evil spirit was banished by making a dough effigy of the possessed, with the model or the man (the instructions are ambiguous) then doused with water. The run-off was collected and sprinkled in the “broad places/ That the evil influence which hath brought low his strength/ May be carried away.”
The Romans practised exorcism, and a 2nd-century story by Lucian of Samosata recalled a spirit “of a dark smoky complexion” leaving an afflicted patient. There are also accounts here from Josephus of a 1st-century Jewish exorcism, as well as exorcisms in the Islamic world. In a story taken from the Hadith, Muhammad himself cures a boy by blowing in his mouth and instructing the spirit to “go away.” In Japanese folklore, spirits in the shape of a fox can sometimes possess a victim, and in Tibet, demons are banished by luring them into a stone, which is then smashed.
However, these accounts feel restrained alongside the gory exorcisms of the Christian world. “Juliana,” by the 9th-century poet Cynewulf, describes how the title character, said to have been martyred for her faith in the early 4th century, interrogates a devil about its victims. “I wrought it that their bodies spurted blood,” says the demon, “and they suddenly gave forth their life through an outpouring of the veins.”
A 16th-century report from Somerset, a hotbed of possession, tells how a devil took hold of a woman, “contorted her into a hoop and rolled her round the house.” In that account, the victim “was so sore tormented that she foamed at the mouth, and was shaken with such force that the Bed and Chamber did shake and move in most strange sort.”
Then in 1634 came the possession of Loudin, when an entire convent fell under the devil’s influence, leading to one of the most famous mass exorcisms in history. It went on for so long and in such a public manner that Loudin’s possessed nuns became something of a tourist attraction. The problems began with the arrival of a priest named Urbain Grandier, described as “handsome, highly-educated, and a charismatic preacher.” Grandier was also known to have written a treatise on why “priestly vows of celibacy cannot be honoured.”
Soon after his arrival in Loudin, 17 nuns began experiencing “disturbances.” Jeanne des Anges “described sexual fantasies about Grandier, which she attributed to his sorcery.” Other nuns “uttered cries so horrible and so loud that nothing like it was ever heard before,” and the stuff they came out with “would have astonished the inmates of the lowest brothel in the country.” Meanwhile, the Mother Superior “was carried off her feet and remained suspended in the air at the height of 24 inches.”
The possessed were thoroughly exorcised, with the account remarking that “it seems the regimen of thrashing and contortions during daily exorcisms made them quite fit.” The nuns at least managed to get something out of their system. As for Grandier, he was arrested, tortured and burnt as a sorcerer.
As the accounts come closer to the present day, they become increasingly disturbing. A South African exorcism conducted in 1906 is a hideous maelstrom of fighting, throttling, levitation, screaming, expanding heads, limbs stretching and cracking “as if they were about to break.” Oddest of all is the “uncanny glow in the eyes of the possessed.” An exorcism from 1928, in Iowa, is described in similarly graphic terms, including convulsions, barking, and “an infernal stench.” That account, which includes a deeply unsettling Q&A with the demon itself, particularly influenced William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist.
Perhaps so. But why does the idea of exorcism linger so insistently, along with all those other quasi-religious superstitions including Halloween, traditionally the day of remembrance for souls yet to reach heaven? It seems we have an instinctive cultural sense that spirits are kind of hanging around somewhere. Is it so surprising that one or two of them should turn out to be a bit nasty?
Or maybe it’s the fault of one particular film. As Joseph P Laycock, the editor of a deeply unsettling new volume of accounts describing exorcisms throughout history, explains: “In the modern US, exorcism was once extraordinarily rare.” However, “All of this changed after 1973, when The Exorcist created a massive demand for exorcisms. Evangelicals and Pentecostals were already positioned to cater to this new market.” Other, more recent cultural phenomena have also piqued the appetite for exorcism. One Catholic priest has argued that “more exorcisms were needed than ever before, because cultural trends such as yoga and the Harry Potter franchise were leaving millions vulnerable to demonic influence.”
If modern theologians see the devil in yoga, this collection makes clear that ancient civilisations saw “the beast” as a much more immediate presence. A 2,600-year-old excerpt from the library of Ashurbanipal, which contains thousands of ancient Assyrian tablets, recalls how: “The Evil Devil prowleth in the City/ [It hath no rest] from slaughtering men./ They smite the hero/ They lay low the maiden/ The little ones like a leek they tear in pieces.” In this case, this evil spirit was banished by making a dough effigy of the possessed, with the model or the man (the instructions are ambiguous) then doused with water. The run-off was collected and sprinkled in the “broad places/ That the evil influence which hath brought low his strength/ May be carried away.”
The Romans practised exorcism, and a 2nd-century story by Lucian of Samosata recalled a spirit “of a dark smoky complexion” leaving an afflicted patient. There are also accounts here from Josephus of a 1st-century Jewish exorcism, as well as exorcisms in the Islamic world. In a story taken from the Hadith, Muhammad himself cures a boy by blowing in his mouth and instructing the spirit to “go away.” In Japanese folklore, spirits in the shape of a fox can sometimes possess a victim, and in Tibet, demons are banished by luring them into a stone, which is then smashed.
However, these accounts feel restrained alongside the gory exorcisms of the Christian world. “Juliana,” by the 9th-century poet Cynewulf, describes how the title character, said to have been martyred for her faith in the early 4th century, interrogates a devil about its victims. “I wrought it that their bodies spurted blood,” says the demon, “and they suddenly gave forth their life through an outpouring of the veins.”
A 16th-century report from Somerset, a hotbed of possession, tells how a devil took hold of a woman, “contorted her into a hoop and rolled her round the house.” In that account, the victim “was so sore tormented that she foamed at the mouth, and was shaken with such force that the Bed and Chamber did shake and move in most strange sort.”
Then in 1634 came the possession of Loudin, when an entire convent fell under the devil’s influence, leading to one of the most famous mass exorcisms in history. It went on for so long and in such a public manner that Loudin’s possessed nuns became something of a tourist attraction. The problems began with the arrival of a priest named Urbain Grandier, described as “handsome, highly-educated, and a charismatic preacher.” Grandier was also known to have written a treatise on why “priestly vows of celibacy cannot be honoured.”
Soon after his arrival in Loudin, 17 nuns began experiencing “disturbances.” Jeanne des Anges “described sexual fantasies about Grandier, which she attributed to his sorcery.” Other nuns “uttered cries so horrible and so loud that nothing like it was ever heard before,” and the stuff they came out with “would have astonished the inmates of the lowest brothel in the country.” Meanwhile, the Mother Superior “was carried off her feet and remained suspended in the air at the height of 24 inches.”
The possessed were thoroughly exorcised, with the account remarking that “it seems the regimen of thrashing and contortions during daily exorcisms made them quite fit.” The nuns at least managed to get something out of their system. As for Grandier, he was arrested, tortured and burnt as a sorcerer.
As the accounts come closer to the present day, they become increasingly disturbing. A South African exorcism conducted in 1906 is a hideous maelstrom of fighting, throttling, levitation, screaming, expanding heads, limbs stretching and cracking “as if they were about to break.” Oddest of all is the “uncanny glow in the eyes of the possessed.” An exorcism from 1928, in Iowa, is described in similarly graphic terms, including convulsions, barking, and “an infernal stench.” That account, which includes a deeply unsettling Q&A with the demon itself, particularly influenced William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist.
What drove all these strange events? That most exorcisms involve women suggests a procedure used by the powerful to purify society at the expense of the weak. Stories of exorcism, Laycock writes, often aim “to establish the authority of a religious figure or institution, or else to associate a rival religion or controversial social practice with the demonic.”
It’s hard to argue with that rather dry, post-Enlightenment opinion. But it ignores our lingering and very real attachment to the idea of spirits and the question of why, every year, many thousands of otherwise rational people dress up as ghouls and ghosts and go walking in the streets to demand favours from their neighbours, threatening trickery if they are not appeased. What, you might ask, possesses them to do that?
Due to an editing error, the original version of this article described Cynewulf as a 19th-century poet. The text has been corrected
The insatiable human appetite for exorcism. By Jay Elwes. Prospect Magazine, October 28, 2021.
The
practice of using religious rites to free a person from supposed demonic
possession stretches back thousands of years and spans many belief systems. But
when you hear the word exorcism, you probably think of the Roman Catholic
ritual popularized by the 1973 film The Exorcist. In America, the practice had
largely been relegated to the fringes of superstition until the movie brought
it back into the spotlight, creating a surge in demand that hasn’t abated.
The Catholic Church once sought to distance itself from the controversial practice. But in recent years, it has tentatively embraced it, with Pope Francis calling exorcism “a delicate and necessary ministry.” To accommodate rising demands for the service, the Vatican now offers a week-long training seminar. We’re not sure exactly what attending priests get for their roughly $370 course fee, but Catholic.org outlines a formal exorcism rite for the curious.
The practice of expelling demons from the afflicted stretches far beyond the confines of the Catholic Church. It has been widely co-opted by Pentecostal churches and Evangelicals, who often refer to exorcism as “deliverance ministry.” Protestant missionaries have driven the practice’s growing popularity in developing nations, fueling a surge in popularity in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean.
In America, the practice is as popular as it’s ever been, maybe because a rise in exorcisms is often linked to social or political upheaval. In 2020, priests in Oregon and California performed mass exorcisms after racial justice protests. Ironically, the growing popularity of exorcism has also been linked to the decline in church attendance, which, as an American priest told the BBC in 2018, might be driving a rise in superstitious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, exorcism has a dark side that has nothing to do with demons. It often deprives people with mental illness or addiction of medical treatment. Victims have been beaten, starved, submerged in water, gassed, and burned at the hands of exorcists. In 1976, 23-year-old Anna Elisabeth Michel of Bavaria died of malnutrition and dehydration after an 11-month attempted exorcism. According to Joseph P. Laycock, author of The Penguin Book of Exorcisms, “those killed in this manner are nearly always children or young women.”
Regardless of whether you view exorcism as a spiritual service or exploitation, the practice has a fascinating, unsettling history, and it’s left an indelible mark on pop culture. Here are six historical exorcisms that are every bit as chilling as anything Hollywood can produce.
1. The New Mexico Colony Exorcisms // 1764
In January 1764, a Spanish missionary named Juan Toledo wrote a letter to the governor of New Mexico describing a series of exorcisms he had performed in the settlement, which was then a Spanish colony.
The troubles started in November 1763, with a local woman named María Trujillo. According to Toledo’s letter, Trujillo was “given to great sadness of an extreme nature” after giving birth, and “could not be amused by the diversions of the fiesta.” Such behavior would be recognized today as signs of post-partum depression, but to Toledo, it pointed to demonic possession. She “remained in her state of melancholy” until mid-December, when she fainted after prayers, awakened, and proceeded to “exhaust herself with unnatural strength.” Toledo performed an exorcism on December 18.
Other residents also exhibited signs that Toledo interpreted as symptoms of possession. A young woman named Francisca Barela heard pig noises where she could see no pigs and experienced assorted shudders, tingling sensations, seizures, and an overwhelming sense of dread she couldn’t explain. Barela was taken to the local mission for help, and according to Toledo, the sight of him caused the young woman to become violent, turn gray, and mimic “the sound of pigs, cows, horned and spotted owls, and other animals.” Toledo exorcised her, too, and during the ritual Barela supposedly insulted him, attacked his lineage, howled, and hurled a shoe at somebody. All told, Toledo performed exorcisms on five women and one man before he finally decided the outbreak of possession, which he blamed on witchcraft, had ended.
2. The Exorcism of George Lukins // 1788
Sometime around Christmas 1769, a tailor named George Lukins was “mumming” in his Somerset, England, village of Yatton. The old folk tradition would have seen Lukins and his friends going door-to-door to perform a Christmas-themed play, but their rounds were interrupted when Lukins experienced what he later called a “divine slap” that left him unable to walk home under his own power. (Others identified the offending force as potent beer handed out by one of the troupe’s hosts.) Shortly afterward, Lukins began experiencing “fits” that made him unable to work, leaving him dependent on financial support from his fellow parishioners. The parish sent Lukins to a hospital in 1775, but the doctors claimed he was incurable and sent him back [PDF]. Lukins insisted he was bewitched and blamed several local women for his condition, which, according to witnesses, included convulsions, singing hunting songs in strange voices, and “blasphem[ing] in a manner too dreadful to be expressed.”
Lukins seemed to improve for a while, but his condition returned in 1787. This time, Lukins claimed possession rather than bewitchment. He declared that he was being menaced by seven devils and therefore needed seven ministers to get rid of them. Rev. Joseph Easterbrook, vicar of Bristol’s Temple Church, agreed to help. When Easterbrook’s fellow Anglican priests declined to participate, Easterbrook recruited six Methodists to fill out the roster. The two-hour exorcism was performed on Friday, June 13, 1788. Instead of using a formal ritual, the priests improvised; in The Penguin Book of Exorcisms, Laycock writes that they “prayed, sang hymns, and ordered the demons out in the name of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.”
Whatever was plaguing Lukins, the exorcism seemed to have worked. He became a cause célèbre in Enlightenment-era Bristol, whose citizens were divided over whether Lukins, who became known as “the Yatton Demoniac,” was possessed, deranged, or simply an effective conman.
3. The Exorcism of Clara Germana Tele // 1906
According to accounts recorded in a pamphlet called Are There Devils Today?, the exorcism of a young Zulu girl named Clara Germana Tele (her name was altered to “Cele” in some sources) is among the most dramatic ever reported. The presiding priest, Rev. Erasmus Hoerner, claimed Tele levitated several feet in the air, walked up a wall, displayed telepathic abilities, and understood a multitude of languages. The account gets even more nightmarish, with some witnesses claiming Tele could extend her limbs and neck “to incredible lengths.”
During the ritual, Hoerner was assisted by another priest, several nuns, and “eight large, strong girls” who were tasked with restraining Tele. Hoerner claims all eight were lifted into the air with Tele as she levitated. The priest decided to handcuff the girl, but he says it took them three hours to accomplish the task as Tele choked, punched, and bit anyone who came close enough. The exorcism was finally declared a success around 9:30 on the morning of September 13, 1906. Just to be sure it took, Hoerner exorcised her again that evening. She happily cooperated, though another exorcism was performed the following year when her symptoms seemed to return. That exorcism was considered successful, but Tele’s recovery was short-lived. She died of consumption just six years later.
4. The Exorcism of Emma Schmidt // 1928
The 1928 exorcism of a 46-year-old woman in an Earling, Iowa, convent is one of the best-known cases in America. Some accounts refer to the woman pseudonymously as “Anna Ecklund,” but her real name is thought to be Emma Schmidt. A Capuchin monk named Theophilus Riesinger reportedly conducted the ritual over the course of 23 days.
The case was detailed in a 1935 German pamphlet called Begone, Satan! A Soul-Stirring Account of Diabolical Possession, and profiled in a 1936 issue of Time magazine. Some of the more spectacular allegations will be familiar to anyone who’s seen The Exorcist: Schmidt supposedly levitated, was tied to a bed, and, according to one of Riesinger’s associates, vomited “quantities that were humanly speaking impossible to lodge in a normal being.” The popular account gets increasingly far-fetched—when the exorcism began, Schmidt reportedly flew off the bed, “landed high above the door of the room and clung to the wall with catlike grips.”
The Catholic Church once sought to distance itself from the controversial practice. But in recent years, it has tentatively embraced it, with Pope Francis calling exorcism “a delicate and necessary ministry.” To accommodate rising demands for the service, the Vatican now offers a week-long training seminar. We’re not sure exactly what attending priests get for their roughly $370 course fee, but Catholic.org outlines a formal exorcism rite for the curious.
The practice of expelling demons from the afflicted stretches far beyond the confines of the Catholic Church. It has been widely co-opted by Pentecostal churches and Evangelicals, who often refer to exorcism as “deliverance ministry.” Protestant missionaries have driven the practice’s growing popularity in developing nations, fueling a surge in popularity in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean.
In America, the practice is as popular as it’s ever been, maybe because a rise in exorcisms is often linked to social or political upheaval. In 2020, priests in Oregon and California performed mass exorcisms after racial justice protests. Ironically, the growing popularity of exorcism has also been linked to the decline in church attendance, which, as an American priest told the BBC in 2018, might be driving a rise in superstitious beliefs and practices.
Unfortunately, exorcism has a dark side that has nothing to do with demons. It often deprives people with mental illness or addiction of medical treatment. Victims have been beaten, starved, submerged in water, gassed, and burned at the hands of exorcists. In 1976, 23-year-old Anna Elisabeth Michel of Bavaria died of malnutrition and dehydration after an 11-month attempted exorcism. According to Joseph P. Laycock, author of The Penguin Book of Exorcisms, “those killed in this manner are nearly always children or young women.”
Regardless of whether you view exorcism as a spiritual service or exploitation, the practice has a fascinating, unsettling history, and it’s left an indelible mark on pop culture. Here are six historical exorcisms that are every bit as chilling as anything Hollywood can produce.
1. The New Mexico Colony Exorcisms // 1764
In January 1764, a Spanish missionary named Juan Toledo wrote a letter to the governor of New Mexico describing a series of exorcisms he had performed in the settlement, which was then a Spanish colony.
The troubles started in November 1763, with a local woman named María Trujillo. According to Toledo’s letter, Trujillo was “given to great sadness of an extreme nature” after giving birth, and “could not be amused by the diversions of the fiesta.” Such behavior would be recognized today as signs of post-partum depression, but to Toledo, it pointed to demonic possession. She “remained in her state of melancholy” until mid-December, when she fainted after prayers, awakened, and proceeded to “exhaust herself with unnatural strength.” Toledo performed an exorcism on December 18.
Other residents also exhibited signs that Toledo interpreted as symptoms of possession. A young woman named Francisca Barela heard pig noises where she could see no pigs and experienced assorted shudders, tingling sensations, seizures, and an overwhelming sense of dread she couldn’t explain. Barela was taken to the local mission for help, and according to Toledo, the sight of him caused the young woman to become violent, turn gray, and mimic “the sound of pigs, cows, horned and spotted owls, and other animals.” Toledo exorcised her, too, and during the ritual Barela supposedly insulted him, attacked his lineage, howled, and hurled a shoe at somebody. All told, Toledo performed exorcisms on five women and one man before he finally decided the outbreak of possession, which he blamed on witchcraft, had ended.
2. The Exorcism of George Lukins // 1788
Sometime around Christmas 1769, a tailor named George Lukins was “mumming” in his Somerset, England, village of Yatton. The old folk tradition would have seen Lukins and his friends going door-to-door to perform a Christmas-themed play, but their rounds were interrupted when Lukins experienced what he later called a “divine slap” that left him unable to walk home under his own power. (Others identified the offending force as potent beer handed out by one of the troupe’s hosts.) Shortly afterward, Lukins began experiencing “fits” that made him unable to work, leaving him dependent on financial support from his fellow parishioners. The parish sent Lukins to a hospital in 1775, but the doctors claimed he was incurable and sent him back [PDF]. Lukins insisted he was bewitched and blamed several local women for his condition, which, according to witnesses, included convulsions, singing hunting songs in strange voices, and “blasphem[ing] in a manner too dreadful to be expressed.”
Lukins seemed to improve for a while, but his condition returned in 1787. This time, Lukins claimed possession rather than bewitchment. He declared that he was being menaced by seven devils and therefore needed seven ministers to get rid of them. Rev. Joseph Easterbrook, vicar of Bristol’s Temple Church, agreed to help. When Easterbrook’s fellow Anglican priests declined to participate, Easterbrook recruited six Methodists to fill out the roster. The two-hour exorcism was performed on Friday, June 13, 1788. Instead of using a formal ritual, the priests improvised; in The Penguin Book of Exorcisms, Laycock writes that they “prayed, sang hymns, and ordered the demons out in the name of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.”
Whatever was plaguing Lukins, the exorcism seemed to have worked. He became a cause célèbre in Enlightenment-era Bristol, whose citizens were divided over whether Lukins, who became known as “the Yatton Demoniac,” was possessed, deranged, or simply an effective conman.
3. The Exorcism of Clara Germana Tele // 1906
According to accounts recorded in a pamphlet called Are There Devils Today?, the exorcism of a young Zulu girl named Clara Germana Tele (her name was altered to “Cele” in some sources) is among the most dramatic ever reported. The presiding priest, Rev. Erasmus Hoerner, claimed Tele levitated several feet in the air, walked up a wall, displayed telepathic abilities, and understood a multitude of languages. The account gets even more nightmarish, with some witnesses claiming Tele could extend her limbs and neck “to incredible lengths.”
During the ritual, Hoerner was assisted by another priest, several nuns, and “eight large, strong girls” who were tasked with restraining Tele. Hoerner claims all eight were lifted into the air with Tele as she levitated. The priest decided to handcuff the girl, but he says it took them three hours to accomplish the task as Tele choked, punched, and bit anyone who came close enough. The exorcism was finally declared a success around 9:30 on the morning of September 13, 1906. Just to be sure it took, Hoerner exorcised her again that evening. She happily cooperated, though another exorcism was performed the following year when her symptoms seemed to return. That exorcism was considered successful, but Tele’s recovery was short-lived. She died of consumption just six years later.
4. The Exorcism of Emma Schmidt // 1928
The 1928 exorcism of a 46-year-old woman in an Earling, Iowa, convent is one of the best-known cases in America. Some accounts refer to the woman pseudonymously as “Anna Ecklund,” but her real name is thought to be Emma Schmidt. A Capuchin monk named Theophilus Riesinger reportedly conducted the ritual over the course of 23 days.
The case was detailed in a 1935 German pamphlet called Begone, Satan! A Soul-Stirring Account of Diabolical Possession, and profiled in a 1936 issue of Time magazine. Some of the more spectacular allegations will be familiar to anyone who’s seen The Exorcist: Schmidt supposedly levitated, was tied to a bed, and, according to one of Riesinger’s associates, vomited “quantities that were humanly speaking impossible to lodge in a normal being.” The popular account gets increasingly far-fetched—when the exorcism began, Schmidt reportedly flew off the bed, “landed high above the door of the room and clung to the wall with catlike grips.”
One unique thing about the Earling Exorcism, as it has become known, is the nature of the entities that supposedly possessed Schmidt. Besides the requisite demons, the tormenting spirits were said to include Schmidt’s dead father and his child-murdering lover. Through Schmidt, the father allegedly “confessed” to making unwanted sexual advances toward his daughter, leading some to wonder if abuse was at the root of her torments.
Schmidt was declared demon-free on December 23, 1928, but there’s a strange postscript to the story. As it turns out, the 1928 exorcism was neither the first time Riesinger attempted to rid Schmidt of demons, nor the last. Riesinger first exorcised Schmidt in New York City in 1908. The two reportedly became close, and the priest exorcised her several more times over the following years, with Schmidt traveling to whatever state Riesinger found himself in.
5. The Exorcism of Roland Doe // 1949
In 1949, Jesuit priests spent weeks working to free a 14-year-old Maryland boy pseudonymously known as Roland Doe from alleged demonic possession. Newspaper coverage of the case would eventually inspire William Peter Blatty to write his blockbuster 1971 novel The Exorcist.
The Doe family first began hearing strange sounds in January 1949. They assumed the scratching noises coming from their walls and ceiling were the work of rats, but exterminators couldn’t find any evidence of infestation. The family soon claimed to experience other frightening phenomena, including unexplained footsteps, furniture and dishes moving of their own volition, and the violent shaking of their teenage son’s bed. The activity seemed to center on Roland, even following him when he stayed with neighbors. It seems the boy’s aunt, who had been a spiritualist, had died recently, and they wondered if she was haunting them. The family appealed to a Washington, D.C.-based Lutheran minister, who advised them to see a Catholic priest. Father E. Albert Hughes unsuccessfully attempted to exorcise Roland; the boy allegedly broke off a piece of mattress spring and attacked the priest with it, slashing his arm.
Roland and his mother eventually left their home and traveled to St. Louis to visit relatives, hoping to escape whatever was troubling them. While they were in Missouri, several Jesuit priests, including Father William Bowdern, Father Walter Halloran, and Rev. William Van Roo, attempted to free the boy from the demon that supposedly possessed him. Throughout the ritual, the priests claimed to see words and images appear on the boy’s body in the form of spontaneous scratches. At one point, Roland broke Halloran’s nose. The exorcism continued night after night—Roland seemed normal during the day—until April 18, 1949, when Roland abruptly appeared to be cured. He went on to lead a quiet life, free of whatever condition led to the infamous exorcism.
6. The Exorcism of Gina // 1991
On April 4, 1991, an estimated 29 million people tuned in to ABC’s popular news show 20/20 to watch the exorcism of a 16-year-old girl identified only as Gina. A pair of Catholic priests presided over the ritual, which took place at a Florida convent and allegedly lasted for six hours. (The footage was edited to fit the show’s time slot.) One priest was referred to simply as “Father A”; the other was Rev. James J. LeBar, who had appeared on the controversial 1988 Geraldo Rivera special Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground and authored a 1989 book called Cults, Sects, and the New Age. LeBar had supposedly conducted a six-month investigation and determined that Gina, who had been hospitalized for psychotic episodes in the past, was possessed.
It was one of the most-watched episodes in the show’s history. It wasn’t exactly The Exorcist—although LeBar later claimed that Gina might have levitated to the ceiling if she hadn’t been tied down—but what unfolded was certainly disturbing. Gina growled, thrashed against her restraints, cursed the priests, and spoke in tongues. Father A and LeBar determined she was being tormented by not one demonic force, but several. By the end of the ordeal, two of the entities, Zion and Minga, had supposedly been cast out and Gina seemed to feel better. She was soon rehospitalized and treated with antipsychotic medications rather than holy water. The following year, LeBar was appointed chief exorcist of the archdiocese of New York.
6 Chilling Historical Exorcisms. By April Snellings. Mental Floss, October 27, 2021
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