Thus, a “person” of unbalanced “personality” is one in whom that complex of acts and actions lacks the ordinarily observed and socially acceptable type, tension, and frequency. Of course, there is no room in our minds for any consideration of bodiless personal spirits if we accept this modern terminology as correct and all-inclusive. For “person” and “personality,” in this terminology, are material, fractionated, dimensional, measurable, and finally perishable.
The classical Christian thought and belief about “person” and “personality” is very different. And it echoes the natural persuasion of most men and women.
“Person” in Christian thought is a spirit. As a spirit, it is imperishable and indestructible. It can will and think. It is freely responsible for what it thinks and wills and does. And it is capable of self-awareness. In Christian thought, “personality” is another word for the total individuality of the person. The diminution or reduction of this internal and self-aware center of responsibility of the self to a tidy bundle of arbitrary divisions—something called “thinking” and something called “willing” and something else called “acting,” etc. etc.—is itself insanity. For these concepts of “person” and “personality” are applied to God and to bodiless spirits as well as to humans.
In our human condition the individual and personal spirit is destined to exercise its willing and thinking and all its power by means of psychophysical activity, rarely by passing that quantifiable arena.
The evil spirits in question are not personal in that sense. Being bodiless, their individual identities do not depend on a bodily identity. Christian teaching is that they think, will, act, and are self-aware and exercise their power purely, simply, and directly without the use of the psychophysical.
Experiences with evil spirits in exorcisms bear this out. In virtually every exorcism, at a crucial point, the possessing spirit will refer to itself interchangeably as “I” and “we,” and as easily refer to “my” and “our.” “I’m taking him.” “We are as strong as death.” “Fool! We’re all the same.” “There’s only one of us.” All this was hurled at Michael Strong by the one spirit at Puh Chi in Nanking—“I,” “me,” “all,” “one,” “us.” Individuality in any human or even remotely bodily sense is not operative here.
The fact that the spirits described in the exorcisms of this book finally responded to names (“Girl-Fixer,” “Smiler,” “Tortoise,” etc.) is no indication of separate identity. They are names assumed apparently in view of the means or the strategy used by the spirit as it possessed the person in question. When Father Mark pressed Ponto’s “superior” for its name, the response was “We are all of the Kingdom.” “No man can know the name.” When Mark insisted, the spirit replied: “Multus, Magnum, Gross, Grosser, Grossest. Several times. Seventy-seven legions.” The names they give are clearly ad hoc names and, for all we know, may change for the same spirit in relation to different victims. What the exorcist is after in pushing for such names is not personal identity, but a name the spirit will respond to. “In Jesus’ name, what name will you obey?” was Mark’s crucial question in this regard.
Nevertheless, the behavior of spirits, in endless variations, in exorcism after exorcism, does suggest some coagulating common identity of a kind that leaves evil spirits distinct in their personalities while unified and, indeed, one in their responsibilities and intentions.
Somehow closely linked to this identity of spirits and contributing to it is the obvious gradation of intelligence that one observes in different possessing spirits. Jamsie’s “familiar,” Uncle Ponto, for example, was clearly of a lesser intelligence than Tortoise, who possessed Carl, or then Smiler who held Marianne captive. Ponto’s gimmicks never went beyond the grotesquely comic. He never showed the subtlety of Smiler or the sophistication of Tortoise. Each of these used clever arguments and intricate games to further their purposes and in general displayed a penetration of mind absent in Ponto.
Yet, while Ponto was deferential in the extreme in front of his “superiors,” Girl-Fixer, who possessed Richard/Rita, and Mr. Natch, who possessed the two priests, David and Yves, also showed a marked deference to “superiors.”
At one point in the exorcism of Marianne, when Smiler was losing the battle, Father Peter began to feel the change in level of intelligence of his enemy, as “another” (to use our human terminology of separateness) spirit came to Smiler’s aid in the final attack on Peter.
Father Gerald felt the opposite in his exorcism of Richard/Rita. As it became clearer that Gerald was going to be successful and that the end of the battle was near, Gerald felt that some strand of evil had faded and that he was suddenly dealing with a lesser intelligence.
In this most intimate of all confrontations, with mind pitted directly against mind, will against will, a sudden shift in the intelligence of one’s adversary is unmistakable—more so than in a confrontation so unsubtle that words are needed.
This difference of spirits from one another on the basis of intelligence seems to culminate in the servile, almost wooden allegiance of all to “the Lord of All Knowledge,” as Tortoise called him. “Those who accepted, those who accept the Claimant, have his will,” Uncle Ponto’s superior, Multus, told Father Mark. “Only the will. The will of the Kingdom. The will of the will of the will of the will of the will.”
This servility and allegiance to Lucifer among evil spirits is matched in constancy and overshadowed in intensity only by their craven fear of and hatred for Jesus, freely and undisguisedly displayed at any mention of his name or at the sight of objects and people associated with Jesus.
A possessing spirit of whatever skill and intelligence will pronounce the name of its leader repeatedly, and the sense one has is of obedience, fear, and recognition of a superiority that will not be questioned. But no evil spirit seems able to bring itself to pronounce the name of Jesus. “The Other,” he will be called, or “The Latter,” or “That Person,” or “The Unmentionable,” or any of a whole dark litany of such names.
Nor will an evil spirit hear the name of Jesus without protesting. Knowledge of this fact can be a principal weapon for the exorcist, for the evil spirit will often be forced to answer questions or tell its “name” out of an obvious desire not to have to hear again the phrase of total faith, “In the name of Jesus,” from the lips of the exorcist.
The curious quality of unity, almost a coagulation, which one sometimes feels can be glimpsed in these areas of personality and intelligence of evil spirits, also gives us an interesting perspective on another constant among spirits—their attachment to place.
Again, it is clear from experience that possessing spirits are intent on finding a “home” (as Ponto put it simplistically) in the possessed person. But it is not a question of one lonely and homeless spirit. For the possessing spirit, the “home” or person belongs to all the “family” of that spirit—the coagulated mob of evil spirits, headed and governed by the shadowy leader, “The Claimant.” It is a macabre version of “Mi casa, su casa” hospitality, and was mirrored long ago on the lips of Jesus when he told of “the unclean spirit which has possessed a man and then goes out of him, walks about the desert looking for a resting place, and finds none; and it says: ‘I will go back to my own dwelling from which I came out.’ And it comes back…and brings in seven more other spirits more wicked than itself to bear it company; and together they enter in and settle down there.” Seven is the biblical formula for any multitude.
We will always have intense intellectual difficulty understanding how we can talk of personality or intelligence when there is no physical brain, or of hearing a voice when there is no throat to produce that voice, or of seeing a flying plate when there is no hand to throw it and sustain it in midair. But these are problems that will be doubly perplexing so long as the modern mind-set holds sway with its insistence on the materiality of all that exists.
All in all, for example, it is very bothersome that we cannot speak of these spirits as having gender, se
xuality, or individuality like that of human beings. Individuality alone is a terrible problem for the computer society. Identity for us is always linked to physical separateness. If we say there are 217 million Americans, we mean 217 separate and therefore distinct bodies.
But, from all we know, it seems obvious that trying to number or count spirits on the basis of physical separateness is not going to get us very far. And our denying that spirits exist because they literally will not “stand up and be counted” does not seem to impress them.
Even when we get past all those difficulties and can begin to think about the identities of these bodiless creatures, there is another problem. We tend to think all the bizarre and violent happenings that occur at exorcisms are somehow the evil spirit. In our understandable fascination with the screams and the flying objects, with the smells, the tearing wallpaper, and the banging doors, our tendency is to mistake those events for the spirit itself. That is a little like mistaking the baseball for the pitcher.
Better clues to the identity of individual spirits seem to be based and rooted in the strongest quality we can discern among them: that curious and undulating hierarchy of intelligence and power of will that links even the lowest “familiar” to Lucifer himself.
Because of these different powers of intelligence and will among spirits, their activities are different. They remain unified, as we said, in their responsibilities and their intentions. They remain always subordinate to “the will of the will of the will of the will of the will.” But their activities—the way they go about what they do—seems directly related to their differing levels of intelligence and the differing force of their single-focused wills.
In the mere five cases reported in this book such difference in activity is borne out dramatically; in each case there is a feel for the subtlety or lack of it, the degree of predatory intelligence being challenged, and the degree of irresistibility of the will that struggles in contention with the exorcist.
Paul of Tarsus was referring to this kind of differentiation when he used the concepts and terminology of Alexandrine Gnostics and theosophers, and spoke of “powers,” “principalities,” “thrones,” “dominations,” and again when he used such biblical terms as “cherubim” and “seraphim.”
All of this information, elaborated by painful experience, detailed and extended through years of offering themselves as hostage for the possessed, is of prime interest and value to the exorcists. But the most important fact about evil spirits is that none of their faculties or powers is divine. Evil spirits are forever excluded from God’s life and the vision of God’s truth.
Their knowledge and foresight, then, are based only on what they can know by their native intelligence. They are not, in effect, supernatural, but merely preternatural beings.
In traditional usage, “supernatural” means divine: of God. The supernatural is therefore totally separate from, superior to, and in no way dependent upon what is created—what is “natural” in that sense.
Only God is supernatural in his very being. He can act with supernatural power upon all “natural” (that is, created) things and beings. He can communicate his supernatural life and power to what is created, thus elevating it. But the distinction always remains between what is created and what is supernatural.
Supernatural power can affect all that is at the disposal of the preternatural; but one essential difference between the supernatural and the world of evil spirits is that supernatural power can bypass all natural modes of operation. The supernatural can act directly on spirit. It need not pass via the senses, or through the internal powers of imagination, mind, and will in order to reach the soul of a human being.
Only God and those who share in his supernatural power can do this.
Preternatural power is superior to human power in its abilities. That is, evil spirits, by virtue of preternatural power, are not bound by laws of physical nature and of matter that govern all our human exercise of power in the physical and psychic orders. But they do appear to be bound by other laws of nature (because they, too, were created) beyond which they cannot exercise any power at all.
We do not know all that preternatural power can effect, but we do know some of its abilities and some of its limits.
By virtue of preternatural power, evil spirits can manipulate psychic phenomena and produce psychic states. That is to say, psychic powers are at their disposal. Psychic powers (telekinesis, telepathy, astral travel, bilocation, second sight, etc.) do not themselves become preternatural (any more than that baseball becomes the pitcher), much less supernatural.
Evil spirits, then, are able to produce fascinating effects in our human fields of perception and behavior. They may not be and probably are not responsible for all psychic phenomena, but they have not only mastery of this sort of behavior but the ability to pique the human imagination with a wondrous gamut of enticements. Carl, who almost lost his sanity and his life in his struggle on this very battlefield, wrote in his letter to his former students that he had never, in fact, mastered astral travel or bilocation, “but only their illusion.” And he was aware they were illusion—but so eager and so fascinated was he that he would not admit that awareness beyond the faintest far focus of his mind.
The point is that Evil Spirit can titillate and entice us through our senses and imagination with images of psychic wonders as easily as images of sex or gold. Whatever will work. But Evil Spirit can produce nothing in us that was not already there, actually or potentially.
God, for example, can “give” us grace, which is not ours of ourselves. Evil Spirit can only act upon what it finds and only within the limits of its knowledge.
For instance, preternatural power does not enable evil spirits to control or interfere directly with the moral behavior of human beings. They may be able to produce a pile of gold dollars at will by any of a number of psychic means, but they could not thereby force a person to accept them. They cannot interfere with our freedom to choose or reject, because that freedom is granted and guaranteed by the divine.
The inferiority of the preternatural power of evil spirits compared to the supernatural power of Jesus is clear and definite in many of its effects. There is an opaqueness that impedes and even stops Evil Spirit—its ability to act and its ability to know—everywhere that Jesus and his supernatural power extend, where the choice has been for Jesus and where the supernatural reigns, where the supernatural invests objects, places, and people.
The power of symbols of the supernatural (a crucifix, for example) to protect good and repel or control evil is such an effect. Objects used in and closely associated with worship (holy water), exorcists, any person in a state of supernatural grace (an exorcist’s assistant who has been absolved of his sins), even houses, countrysides, whole areas, are protected in their essence from the freewheeling activity of Evil Spirit. This limitation of the preternatural and so of Evil Spirit extends to another important sphere as well, for it means that the reach of knowledge of Evil Spirit is severely limited. An evil spirit cannot, for example, foresee and therefore forestall the intent of an exorcist who is acting in the name and with the authority of Jesus.
When Father Gerald stepped out from behind the protection of Jesus to confront Girl-Fixer in his own name, he was immediately and horribly attacked, physically and emotionally. But for all the blood and pain and horror, that was no victory for Girl-Fixer. The spirit could not reach Gerald’s mind or his soul. Gerald’s will held firm. All the efforts of Girl-Fixer had been precisely to affect Gerald’s mind, his will, and so ultimately his soul—where the spirit had not the power to reach directly. Girl-Fixer failed; and having failed, he stood at bay. Richard/Rita was ultimately freed to make his choice between good and evil.
Evil spirits have the power to know without reasoning, to remember what is available to their knowledge from eternity, and to use that knowledge to influence, cajole, frighten, and otherwise affect the minds and hearts of men and women so that they desert the plan of God and score
another victory of rebellion against good. Their knowledge concerns every occasion where a choice is made against the supernatural. When spirits shout the sins of the people present during an exorcism, they are reaching as far as their natural power can take them.
Finally, those who are selected for possession may accede to possession and then quickly recant; or be deeply enmeshed and be freed only at great pain and risk; or be fully—perfectly—possessed. It remains completely unclear, however, why one person and not another is chosen for such direct and single-minded attack.
Ponto said to Jamsie as they drove along a highway near San Francisco, “All those homes up there…there’s no welcome for me up there in spite of their boozing and bitching and despair.”
But why not? Did that mean that those people too had been “invited,” as Jamsie had and Carl and Marianne and David and Yves and Richard/Rita? And had they, whatever their smaller choices for evil, refused the gross invitation? Is everyone a possible target? Are only some “selected” for “invitation”? There is no way to be sure.
Human Spirit and Jesus
Evil Spirit aims at attacking and destroying the humanness of each human being. This humanness is neither a physical nor a psychophysical condition. It is a spiritual capacity possessed by each man and woman and child.
Only because of this capacity in spirit are we able to believe in God and to attain unending happiness in our after-death condition. Only because of this capacity can we perceive beauty and truth in this human universe. And, perceiving it thus, we may reproduce it in our actions and our products. Diabolic possession negates this capacity.
Hostage to the Devil Page 55