Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

At the Breakpoint, for the first time, the spirit speaks of the possessed in the third person, as a separate being. For the first time, the possessing spirit acts personally and speaks of “I” or “we,” usually interchangeably, and of “my” and “our” or “mine” and “ours.”

  Another very frequent sign that the Breakpoint has been reached is the appearance of what Father Conor called the Voice.

  The Voice is an inordinately disturbing and humanly distressing babel. The first few syllables seem to be those of some word pronounced slowly and thickly—somewhat like a tape recording played at a subnormal speed. You are just straining to pick up the word and a layer of cold fear has already gripped you—you know this sound is alien. But your concentration is shattered and frustrated by an immediate gamut of echoes, of tiny, prickly voices echoing each syllable, screaming it, whispering it, laughing it, sneering it, groaning it, following it. They all hit your ear, while the alien voice is going on unhurriedly to the next syllable, which you then try to catch, while guessing at the first one you lost. By then, the tiny, jabbing voices have caught up with that second syllable; and the voice has proceeded to the third syllable; and so on.

  If the exorcism is to proceed, the Voice must be silenced. It takes an enormous effort of will on the part of the exorcist, in direct confrontation with the alien will of evil, to silence the Voice. The priest must get himself under control and challenge the spirit first to silence and then to identify itself intelligibly.

  As in all things to do with Exorcism of Evil Spirit, the priest makes this challenge with his own will, but always in the name and by the authority of Jesus and his Church. To do so in his own name or by some fancied authority of his own would be to invite personal disaster. Merely human power unadorned and without aid cannot cope with the preternatural. (It is to be remembered that when we speak of the preternatural, we are not speaking about what are known as poltergeists.)

  Usually, at this point and as the Voice dies out, a tremendous pressure of an obscure kind affects the exorcist. This is the first and outermost edge of a direct and personal collision with the “will of the Kingdom,” the Clash.

  We all know from our personal experience that there can be no struggle of single personal wills without that felt and intuitive contact between two persons. There is a two-way communication that is as real as a conversation using words. The Clash is the heart of a special and dreadful communication, the nucleus of this singular battle of wills between exorcist and Evil Spirit.

  Painful as it will be for him, the priest must look for the Clash. He must provoke it. If he cannot lock wills with the evil thing and force that thing to lock its will in opposition to his own, then again the exorcist is defeated.

  The issue between the two, the exorcist and the possessing spirit, is simple. Will the totally antihuman invade and take over? Will it, noisome and merciless, seep over that narrow rim where the exorcist would hold his ground alone, and engulf him? Or will it, unwillingly, protestingly, under a duress greater than its single-track will, stop, identify itself, cede, retire, disappear, and be volatilized back into an unknown pit of being where no man wants to go ever?

  Even with all the pressure on him, and in fullest human agony, if the exorcist has got this far, he must press home. He has gained an advantage. He has already forced the evil spirit to come out on its own. If he has not been able to until now, he must finally force it to give its name. And then, some exorcists feel, the exorcist must pursue for as much information as he can. For in some peculiar way, as exorcists find, the more an evil spirit can be forced to reveal in the Clash and its aftermath, the surer and easier will be the Expulsion when that moment comes. To force as complete an identification as possible is perhaps a mark of domination of one will over another.

  It is of crucial interest to speculate about the violence provoked by Exorcism—the physical and mental struggles that are so extreme they can bring on death. Why would spirit battle so? Why not leave and waft off invisibly to someone or someplace else? For spirit itself seems to suffer in these battles.

  Time and again, in exorcism after exorcism, there occurs that curious thing to do with spirit and place, the strange puzzle mentioned previously in connection with the room chosen for the exorcism. When Jesus expelled the unclean spirits, those spirits showed concern for where they might go. In record after record, as well as in several exorcisms recounted in this book, the possessing spirits wail in lament and questioning pain: “Where shall we go?” “We too have to possess our habitation.” “Even the Anointed One gave us a place with the swine.” “Here…we can’t stay here any longer.”

  Evil Spirit, having found a home with a consenting host, does not appear to give up its place easily. It claws and fights and deceives and even risks killing its host before it will be expelled. How violent the struggle probably depends on many things; the intelligence of the spirit being dealt with and the degree of possession achieved over the victim are perhaps two one could speculate about.

  Whatever determines the actual pitch of violence, once the exorcist has forced the invading spirit to identify itself, and sustained the first wordless bout of the Clash, and then invoked its formal condemnation and expulsion by the Exorcism rite, the immediate result is generally a struggle tortuous beyond imagining, an open violence that leaves all subtlety behind.

  The person possessed is by now obviously aware in one way or another of what possessed him. Frequently he becomes a true battleground for much of the remainder of the exorcism, enduring unbelievable punishment and strain.

  It is sometimes possible for the exorcist to appeal directly to the possessed person, urging him to use some part of his own will still free of the spirit’s influence and control, and engage directly in the fight, aiding the exorcist. And at such moments no animal pinned helplessly to the ground struggles more pathetically against the drinking of its life’s blood by a voracious and superior cruelty. The very nauseous character of the possessed person’s appearance and behavior appears to be a sign of his desire for deliverance, a desperate sign of struggle, evidence of a revolt where once he had consented.

  Increasingly what had possessed him is being forced into the open, all the while protesting its victim’s revolt and its own expulsion. The violence of the contortions and the physical disfigurement of the possessed can reach a degree one would think he could not possibly withstand.

  The exorcist, too, comes in for full attack now. Once cornered, the evil spirit seems able to call on a superior intelligence, and will try to lure the exorcist on to a field boobytrapped and mined with situations from which no human can extricate himself.

  Any weakness in the religious faith that alone sustains the exorcist or any fatigue will allow the exorcist’s mind to be flooded with a terrible light he cannot fend off—a light that can burn the very roots of his reason and turn him emotionally into the most servile of slaves desperate to be liberated from all bodily life.

  These are only some of the dangers and traps that face every exorcist. His pain is physical, emotional, mental. He has to deal with what is eerie but not enthralling; with something askew, but intelligently so; with a quality that is upside down and inside out, but significantly so. The mordant traits of nightmare are there in full regalia, but this is no dream and permits him no thankful remission.

  He is attacked by a stench so powerful that many exorcists start vomiting uncontrollably. He is made to bear physical pain, and he feels anguish over his very soul. He is made to know he is touching the completely unclean, the totally unhuman.

  All sense may suddenly seem nonsense. Hopelessness is confirmed as the only hope. Death and cruelty and contempt are normal. Anything comely or beautiful is an illusion. Nothing, it seems, was ever right in the world of man. He is in an atmosphere more bizarre than Bedlam.

  If, in spite of his emotions and his imagination and his body—all trapped at once in pain and anguish—if, in spite of all this, the will of the exorcist holds in the Clash, what he does is t
o approach his final function in this situation as an authorized human witness for Jesus. By no power of his, on account of no privilege of his own, he calls finally on the evil spirit to desist, to be dispossessed, to depart and to leave the possessed person.

  And, if the exorcism is successful, this is what happens. The possession ends. All present become aware of a change around them. The sense of Presence is totally, suddenly absent. Sometimes there are receding voices or other noises, sometimes only dead silence. Sometimes the recently possessed may be at the end of his strength; sometimes he will wake up as from a dream, a nightmare, or a coma. Sometimes the former victim will remember much of what he has been through; sometimes he will remember nothing at all.

  Not so for the exorcists, during and after their grisly work. They carry nagging doubts and bitter conflicts untellable to family, friend, superior, or therapist. Their personal traumas lie beyond the reach of soothing words and deeper than the sweep of any consoling thoughts. They share their punishment with none but God. Even that has its peculiar sting of difficulty. For it is a sharing by faith and not by face-to-face communication.

  But only thus do these men, seemingly ordinary and commonplace in their lives, persevere through the days of quiet horror and the nights of sleepless watching they spend for years after as their price of success, and as abiding reminders that, once upon a time, another human being was made whole, because they willingly incurred the direct displeasure of living hatred.

  The following five case histories are true. The lives of the people involved are told on the basis of extensive interviews with all of the principals involved, with many of their friends and relatives, and with many others involved directly or indirectly in minor ways. All interviews have been independently checked for factual accuracy wherever possible. The exorcisms themselves are reproduced from the actual tapes made at the time and from the transcripts of those tapes. The exorcisms have necessarily been cut for reasons of length; all of the exorcisms recorded here lasted more than 12 hours.

  I have chosen these five cases from among a greater number known and available to me because, both singly and taken together, they are dramatic illustrations of the way in which personal and intelligent evil moves cunningly along the lines of contemporary fads and interests, and within the usual bounds of experience of ordinary men and women. No fourteenth- or fifteenth- or sixteenth-century case, for all its possible romantic appeal, would have any relevancy for us today. On the contrary, it would remain a simple matter for us to dismiss such cases as fables made up to suit the fears or fancies of “more ignorant” people of “less sophisticated” times.

  Each case presented here includes as an important element some basic attitude or attitudes popular in our own society. In the possessed person, it is pushed to a narrow and frightening extreme.

  In the first case, Zio’s Friend and the Smiler, the insistence is that there is no essential difference between good and evil, and ultimately no difference between being and nonbeing; that all values are subject only to one’s personal preferences.

  In Father Bones and Mister Natch, the compelling idea that was seized by Evil Spirit seemed to be that all mysteries can and are resolved in “natural” (i.e., rational or scientific or quantifiable) explanations; that there can be no relevance for the modern person in anything that cannot be rationally understood; and that there can be no truth important to man beyond what is rational.

  In The Virgin and the Girl-Fixer, the battle concerned some of the great, deep, and mysterious “givens” of our very nature and our society—in this case, gender and human love. The priest in this case said to me a few months before he died, in one of the most profound conversations of my life: “A bird doesn’t fly because it has wings. It has wings because it flies.” We will ignore that mysterious truth in its applications to our sexuality and our gender only at our great peril, I believe.

  In Uncle Ponto and the Mushroom-Souper, we have an example of what may be happening to many in our modern society—without their realizing it and without those around them taking cognizance of it. For it seems that there is an individualism, a purely personalistic interpretation of human life abroad today, which exceeds by far the bounds of what used to be known as selfishness and egotism. It has produced in thousands of people an aberrant and idiosyncratic behavior which is truly destructive.

  In The Rooster and the Tortoise, the fatal confusion (and in this case it was literally almost fatal) was between spirit and psyche; between those parts and attributes of ours that are quantifiable, and yet through which spirit most easily makes itself known. If everything we have taken to be of spirit can be made to seem a product merely of the human psyche, with no meaning or significance beyond its factualness, then love can be made to seem only a chemical interraction, and love’s paradigm is killed.

  In each case, one basic note of possession is confusion. Sex is confused with gender. Spirit is confused with psyche. Moral value is confused with absence of any value. Mystery is confused with untruth. And, in every case, rational argument is used, not to clarify, but as a trap, to foster confusion and to nurture it as a major weapon against the exorcist. Confusion, it would seem, is a prime weapon of evil.

  There is much more to be observed and said about the meaning of possession. Not everything can be covered in a single volume. But possession and Exorcism are not themselves mere fads with no interest beyond the bizarre and significantly frightening. They are tangible expressions of the reality which envelops the daily lives of ordinary people. No study of possession and Exorcism cases within the Christian optic would be adequate without a minimum of explanation—from the Christian point of view—about that reality: what takes place in possession, and how that degrading process develops in a particular individual. Such an explanation occupies the final section of this book.

  This study makes no attempt to answer the ultimate puzzle of possession: why this person rather than that person becomes the object of diabolic attack which can end in partial or perfect possession. The answer certainly does not lie in psychological probings, in heredity, or in social phenomena. A final answer will include, as prime ingredients, the personal free choice which each individual makes and the mystery of human predestination. About free choice we know the essentials: I can choose evil for no other reason or motive than that I choose evil. Some apparently do. About predestination we know little or nothing. The puzzle remains.

  All of the men and women involved in the five cases reported here are known to me personally; they have given their fullest cooperation on the condition that their identities and those of their families and friends not be revealed. Therefore, all names and places have been changed, and other possible pointers to identity have been obscured. Any similarity between the cases reported here and any others that may have occurred is unintentional and purely coincidental.

  The Cases

  Zio’s Friend and the Smiler

  Peter took one more breath of fresh air. He was reluctant to pull the open window shut against the uproar on 125th Street 15 stories below. It was the first time in history that a Roman Pope was driving through New York streets, and the very air was alive with excitement. The Pope’s motorcade had already passed over Willis Avenue Bridge into the Bronx on its way to Yankee Stadium. The crowds were still milling around. Some nuns scurried about like frenzied penguins blowing whistles and marshaling lines of white-clad schoolgirls. Hot-dog vendors shouted their prices. A dowdily dressed young woman and her child peddled plastic little popes to passersby. Two policemen were removing wooden barriers. A garbage truck snorted and honked its way through the traffic. Father Peter closed the window finally, drew the curtains together, and turned back toward the bed.

  The room was quiet again, except for the irregular breathing of twenty-six-year-old Marianne. She lay on a gray blanket thrown over the bare mattress. With her faded jeans, yellow body-shirt, auburn hair straggling over her forehead, the pallor of her cheeks, and the aging, off-white color of the walls
around her, she seemed part of a tragically washed-out pastel. Except for a funny twist to her mouth, her face had no expression.

  To Peter’s left, with their backs to the door, stood two bulky men. One: an ex-policeman and a friend of the family, a veteran of 32 years on the force, where, he thought, he had seen everything. He was about to find out that he hadn’t. Sixtyish, balding, clad in dungarees, his arms folded over his chest, his face was a picture of puzzlement. The other: the closest acquaintance of Marianne’s father, whom the children called uncle, was a bank manager and a grandfather in his midfifties, red-faced and jowled, in a blue suit, his arms hanging by his sides, eyes fixed on Marianne’s face with an expression of helpless fear. Both these men, athletic and muscular, had been asked to assist at the exorcism of Marianne K., to quell any physical violence or harm she might attempt. Marianne’s father, a wispy man with reddened eyes and drawn face, stood with the family doctor. He was praying silently. Peter always insisted on having a member of the family present at an exorcism. As if in contrast to the others, the young doctor, a psychiatrist, wore a concentrated, almost studious look as he checked the girl’s pulse.

  Peter’s colleague, Father James, a priest in his thirties, stood at the foot of the bed. Black-haired, full-faced, youthful, apprehensive, his black, white, and purple robes were a uniform for him. On Peter, with his tousled gray hair and hollow-cheeked look, the same colors melted into a veiled unity. James was dressed up ready to go. Peter, the campaigner, had been there.

  On a night table beside James two candles flickered. A crucifix rested between them. In one corner of the room there was a chest of drawers. “Should have had it removed before we started,” Peter thought. The chest, originally left there in order to hold a tape recorder, had become quite a nuisance. Probably would continue to be until the whole business was finished, Peter thought. But he knew better than to fiddle with any object in the room, once the exorcism had begun.