by Matt Baglio
The practice of discerning spirits has a long history in the Christian tradition. For the mystics, such as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, it was a way to understand the impulses of the soul, which, he claimed, were influenced by either good angels (who desired the soul to be filled with “faith, hope, love and all interior joy that invites and attracts to what is heavenly”) or by demons (who strive to impede our spiritual advancement with temptations of sin and desperation). And while it may sound simple, it's not, because in their cunning, demons often disguise their attacks, sometimes even appearing as “angels of light.” The best way to differentiate between them, said Saint Ignatius, is to look at the end result of the action. If the message will lead to selfishness, hate, violence, and such, then its origin is Satan and should be resisted; however, if the end result is for good, then the source is God.
The Ritual gives three signs that indicate the possible presence of a demon: abnormal strength, the ability to speak or understand a previously unknown language, and the knowledge of hidden things. Yet even when these things are present, the Ritual still cautions the exorcist about proceeding. “These signs can offer some indication, but since [they] are not necessarily [caused by the Devil], attention should be paid to other factors, especially in the realm of the moral and the spiritual, which can in a different way be evidence of diabolic intrusion.” The most common of these is an aversion to the sacred—for example, the inability to pray or say the name of Jesus or Mary, to go to mass, or to receive communion. And when the two are put together (the signs and the aversion to the sacred), an exorcist may suspect he is dealing with a possession.
People seek exorcists for several reasons. The person (or someone who knows the person) simply attributes various problems to the intervention of the Devil. “When a person comes, there are many, many people who say, ‘Father, I have the demon inside me, give me an exorcism!’ Usually they don't need it,” says Father Carmine. “Generally, they are people who are a little unbalanced or maybe scared by some books or a movie. This is a very delicate issue. You have to divulge but without being judgmental.”
By far, say exorcists, the vast majority of people who come to see them fit into this category, and they spend much of their time convincing people that nothing is wrong with them. Unfortunately, this is not always easy. Many exorcists lament the damage done by well-meaning but overzealous people who convince others that they are possessed when this is really not the case. One exorcist from a diocese in the Midwest was visited by a parishioner convinced that her daughter's problems were caused by an evil spirit. She'd gone to see a “ghost whisperer” who told the woman that indeed her daughter was suffering from a curse that could be removed for $1,000. Upon hearing that there was an exorcist in the diocese, the woman took her daughter to see the priest. After an initial interview, the exorcist uncovered a history of mental illness in the family, so he advised the woman to take her daughter to a psychiatrist, telling her that it was highly unlikely that her daughter was suffering from a demonic attack. The mother, however, was unconvinced and returned to the ghost whisperer and paid to have the curse removed.
Numerous mental illnesses can also be mistaken for demonic possession. For this reason, exorcists should insist on a full psychiatric evaluation before proceeding. More often than not, the person has already seen several doctors without relief. Based on this failure of medical intervention, if a demonic presence is suspected, the exorcist might believe he has grounds to proceed. Typically, though, an exorcist will have a team of individuals (a psychiatrist, psychologist, and perhaps a neurologist) whom he trusts to help him with discernment. Not just any psychiatrist will do, however; collaboration is possible only when the medical or psychiatric expert is open to the possibility of demonic possession or obsession. Their being Catholic (or Christian) is also a plus.
Dr. Richard Gallagher is an academic psychiatrist in the New York area who has worked with exorcists in the discernment process. A devout Catholic, Dr. Gallagher believes in demonic possession, which doesn't mean that he seeks it out. “The role of the psychiatrist is to make sure that these phenomena don't have a natural explanation before jumping to a preternatural or supernatural one. There are many individuals for one reason or another in life that become psychotic briefly; they are delusional, they may well hallucinate and they are prone to think that God, the Devil, a spirit, aliens, are communicating with them and they really believe it.”
Over the past fifteen years, Dr. Gallagher has identified a handful of cases that he claims have shown clear signs of demonic possession. In one such case, he was working with a demonized person who was clairvoyant. One night while Dr. Gallagher was at home with his wife, his cats suddenly went crazy and began tearing at each other. The following day, when he went to see the patient, she asked if he liked the joke she played on his cats the night before.
“I am an experienced psychiatrist,” says Dr. Gallagher. “Obviously I have seen multiple personality disorders, but these cases never include the paranormal.” Instead, claims Dr. Gallagher, instances of demonic possession are more straightforward than cases involving mental illness. For instance, a person who has a “severe personality disorder” and who simply thinks that he has evil inside him won't typically have his voice completely change or experience total amnesia after a session, he says. “In fact, it is indicative of the full possession syndrome that the individual affected never remembers what the demon says while it is speaking during an exorcism.” And if it is a case of just an overactive imagination, according to Dr. Gallagher, an experienced psychiatrist should be able to tell the difference. “If you have the paranormal there is no way you can believe that it is not coming from somewhere. Even if you don't believe in the Devil, you have to say that there is some explanation beyond the natural here.”
People also come to see an exorcist because they are thirsting for attention (the fakers), a category also known as pseudo-possession. Exorcists say the difference between pseudo-possession and the real thing is fairly obvious. People who are faking generally will depict the evil spirit in the most banal and superficial of ways, while in a real possession, the evil spirit will correspond to the Devil as he is known in the New Testament.
Some exorcists have also devised little tricks to help them weed out the pseudo-possessions. Exorcists will use regular water instead of holy water, or even read Latin prose out of a text instead of reciting a prayer to see whether the person responds. Since in either case a demon should not react because the objects are not sacred, if the person does say, for example, “That water is burning me!” then the exorcist knows the possession is fake.
Only in extremely rare instances, say exorcists, is a person indeed suffering from some form of demonic attack.
“THE FIRST THING THE EXORCIST MUST DO,” says Father Carmine, “is to listen to the person.” The person almost always suffers from some degree of oppressive guilt or despair, so it's necessary “to comfort the person and cheer him up, which you do by giving a little homily about the faith.”
During the first interview, the priest will usually ask victims about their lives and when their problems started. The exorcist may suspect possession if it comes out that the person was dabbling in the occult or had visited magicians or card readers.
Any physical symptoms are carefully examined. “I can draw conclusions from a certain behavior that makes me suspicious,” explains Father Carmine. “For instance, when someone doesn't want to enter my office, when they have a look of hate, or when they don't look at my face—little attitudes that with experience make me think, Ouch, ouch, ouch …”
People don't usually attribute their problems to a demon. Instead, they typically go to several doctors and come away with a number of diagnoses. Somehow, often at the prodding of a friend or loved one, they end up on the doorstep of an exorcist. “This is one characteristic of a true possession; people seldom think they are possessed but attribute their problems to some other cause,” asserts Father Bamonte.
Two areas most commonly affected by evil influences are the head and stomach, resulting in terrible pains accompanied by the desire to vomit. Victims may also feel intense pain in other parts of their body, such as the kidneys or joints. The pain will then migrate, perhaps affecting their arm or neck the following day. Medicine has no effect whatsoever. According to Father Amorth, “one of the determining factors in the recognition of diabolic possession is the inefficacy of medicines, while blessings prove very efficacious.” The person may also experience temporary numbness, or excessive hair loss.
Beyond these physical symptoms, any manner of strange phenomena can accompany a possession. In addition to the intense aversion to the sacred, victims may have terrible nightmares, “so terrible that they don't even want to go to sleep,” says Father Carmine. Hearing voices and seeing visions, or having urges to commit terrible acts such as murder or suicide, are common afflictions. They may have sudden mood changes, often feeling a deep depression. They believe they can also sense evil in people or know other people's sins.
The presence of foul odors is another indicator, including the smell of sulfur filling the room. During one exorcism while Father Carmine was still apprenticing, the stench of rotting garbage became so strong that he had to leave the room. Yet another indicator is the temperature in the room dropping.
During the interview, if the exorcist suspects something, he may conduct a simple blessing, such as, “Let's pray that the Holy Spirit can come upon us to guide us through this process.” Father Bamonte likes to ask the person to praise Jesus Christ: “Let's get on our knees and praise the glory of Jesus Christ” or “the Blessed Mother.” If there is a demon present, it will almost always refuse to do so, he says. An exorcist may also pray surreptitiously in his mind while he listens to the victim's story.
In order to determine whether a girl was possessed, Father Nanni once said a prayer in his mind in French. The second he did this, even though the girl was sitting about ten feet away and with her back to him, her head spun around and her eyes rolled up, revealing the whites. Looking directly at him, she sneered in Italian, “It is useless that you pray in that language because we know them all.”
In conjunction with the other symptoms, if the exorcist sees a negative reaction to a blessing or mental prayer during the interview process, he usually has enough evidence of possession to begin an exorcism.
Since some demons are stronger than others, meaning they can resist a simple prayer, some exorcists claim that the only way to unmask the demon is by performing an exorcism. Because of the suggestive nature of exorcism, however, the majority of exorcists frown upon the practice of using the rite itself as a diagnostic tool. “That is not the purpose of the Ritual,” says Father Dermine. “Most demons will manifest with a simple prayer. There is no need to pray the whole Ritual.”
In the most difficult cases, say exorcists, the person may be suffering from both mental illness and demonic possession, or the demon may be masking his presence by creating symptoms that mimic mental illness. This is especially true in cases of obsession, in which the demon attacks the victim's mind. Father Bamonte writes, “There are cases in which [obsession] has an exclusively pathological origin; other cases in which the origin is due to an extraordinary action of the demon; and still others where the extraordinary action of the demon amplifies, in an abnormal manner, little obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors that can be normal when they happen only once in a while, are quick, and most of all controllable, but that become all of a sudden invasive, insistent, and continuous under this action, heavily disturbing the psyche of the person.”
A good rule of thumb, say exorcists, is that if the cause is natural, then the patient's condition will not improve dramatically with prayer. If the cause is demonic, however, a person's condition should improve after an exorcism. Since the difference between what is natural and what is demonic is such a delicate distinction, most exorcists continue to have the victim seek the help of a doctor even while undergoing an exorcism.
FOR MANY PEOPLE, of course, the idea that a person can become possessed by a demon is beyond ridiculous. Instead, a whole host of mental illnesses as well as other “natural” psychological motivators including “goal-oriented behavior” are seen as explanations of the symptoms.
Schizophrenia is typically associated with hearing voices, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations and paranoid delusions. Sometimes people imagine their TV is speaking to them, or a UFO is transmitting signals to them. A person brought up in a strict religious environment might easily characterize these “voices” as demonic.
Likewise, when suffering from somatization disorder (what used to be called hysteria), people will typically manifest various physical ailments—such as nausea, depression, even hearing loss—with no identifiable physical cause. The subconscious can convince the conscious brain that there is some kind of disability when there isn't.
People with bipolar disease can suffer from paranoid delusions or their moods can fluctuate, sometimes violently.
Those with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) feel tormented by obsessive thoughts or compulsions that compel them to act in ways they know may be irrational.
Historically, epilepsy, which in Greek means “to seize and carry off,” has been associated with spirit possession, as has Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome, a disease characterized by uncontrollable tics, movements, or speech. We now know it to be a neurological disorder caused by abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Similarly, migraines are thought to be responsible for some of the visual auras and auditory hallucinations that may have caused accusations of possession or beatific visions in the past.
Disassociation is perhaps the most common way in which a person might feel “possessed.” In simple terms, disassociation refers to a variety of behaviors that stem from “a lack of integration of psychological processes that normally should be integrated.” These behaviors can run the gamut from “zoning out” while driving the car, to feelings of being located outside the physical body, such as in out-of-body experiences.
“Basically, what it really comes down to is our conscious experiences as an act of construction,” says Dr. Barry L. Beyerstein, a professor of psychology and a member of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at Simon Fraser University. “It doesn't just happen. Our sensory processes scan the world around us, and in order to make sense out of it, the brain has to assimilate it into a model of reality. And as we grow up we get so good at doing this that we don't even realize that we're constructing this, because it really is a state of the brain where we're trying to put together a feeling of being in a three-dimensional world.”
The problem emerges when this “system” breaks down. “Ordinarily this is all so seamless that everything jives with everything else; but every once in a while (thanks to a number of things such as weird migraine states or exhaustion or mental disorders like schizophrenia), the ability of the brain to make a coherent model of the world can be disrupted. And when that happens, people are apt to feel as if something odd is going on, i.e., some external entity must have usurped control of their thoughts or actions.” At the heart of the issue, says Dr. Beyerstein, is the fact that most of us underestimate just how much of our own behavior is dependent on these “non-conscious mechanisms.”
Originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Dr. Beyerstein received his Ph.D. in experimental and biological psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s. “[This field of study] is sort of an interface between neuroscience, which studies the physiology and anatomy and chemistry and electrophysiology of the brain, and psychology,” applying this toward discovering how the brain produces consciousness. Dr. Beyerstein is also on the board of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), a sort of skeptical think tank created to debunk stories about the paranormal (ESP, UFOs, ghosts, and spirit possession).
“I've yet to see anything that contradicts any well-established law of science or dents my belief that the mind
is equal to a state of the brain in ways that I would dearly love to understand,” he says with a good-natured chuckle. However, Dr. Beyerstein is quick to point out that this doesn't negate the reality of these experiences. “We're not saying that people aren't having these experiences, just that the onus of proof is on the claimant, and that they should have evidence that can't be explained by prosaic means.”
Many scientists think that Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)— what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)—offers the best explanation for demonic possession. DID is characterized by an individual claiming to have one or more “alters” that control behavior, with distinct voices and different names, personality characteristics, even handwriting. Memory and other aspects of the person's consciousness are said to be split among the different personalities that occur spontaneously. However, the disease is fairly controversial, and psychotherapists are divided on how to treat it.
DID can be diagnosed in one of two ways. One approach, which has come to be known as the traditional disease view, theorizes that DID “is an etiologically distinct condition that is best conceptualized as a defensive response to childhood trauma, particularly sexual and physical abuse.”